Political education in a food pantry: child perspectives on the liturgy and agape of Rev. Mangedwa Nyathi in Detroit (USA)

Abstract

ABSTRACT As a South African exile and anti-apartheid activist in Detroit, Michigan (USA), Rev. Mangedwa Nyathi founded the Hartford Memorial Baptist Church Agape Center, feeding people all over the city during the worst and hardest parts of the 1980s. The theological underpinnings of the food pantry operated as a practical political education in Black liberation. Rev. Nyathi played a profound influence on the author as a child bringing anti-apartheid politics as agape into the life of other clergy members, the author’s parents, and the entire congregation. The Agape Center shaped the author’s anticolonial consciousness by reframing economic justice activism in Detroit within a global context of resistance. This article remembers the work of the Agape Center food pantry, its origins in the political economy and social history of the Hartford Memorial Baptist Church – based on child perspective reminiscences and autobiography. It argues that the anti-apartheid movement in Detroit was peopled by everyday people, children and adults, who were survivors of brutalising levels of racialised economic violence and its attendant colonial ideologies.