While there were some aspects of Nuer ‘tradition’ or ‘culture’ that Messianics in Gambella proudly endorsed and celebrated as biblically authentic, others were rejected as ‘pagan’ or satanic. In this chapter, I turn to the relationship between Messianic Judaism and ‘Nuer customary law’, to explain these dynamics. The chapter traces the process through which the spiritual significance of cattle declined, under the influence of the secular state, and instead, under born-again Christian doctrines, the individual human (body and soul) emerged as the prime means of communicating with God. Cattle in its desacralised form, however, was still used by Messianics for bridewealth payments, and they insisted that their marriage practices were not only the most loyal to Nuer ‘tradition’ but also biblically authentic. The chapter offers new insights on the endurance of pre-Christian practices among African born-again Christians, showing how old ‘customs’ may be deemed relevant and meaningful even under a radically new regime of spiritual mediation.

References to Ignatius Sancho’s wife, children, and family life are interweaved throughout his letters. Sancho often wrote to his friends, briefly updating them on his family’s well-being and activities. When these brief references are collated and analyzed, an underrepresented perspective of Sancho’s family as a middling Black family emerges, where the Sanchos each embody the ideal representation of husbands, fathers, wives, mothers, and children. These references to the Sancho family in the Letters help make the Sancho family one of eighteenth-century London’s most well-documented Black families. More importantly, the family’s representation in the Letters answers essential questions about how the Black family were perceived in society and the role class, race, and gender play in shaping childhood, parental relationships, and family life. This chapter details the representations of Blackness, fatherhood, motherhood, and childhood observed in the Sancho family.

Ignatius Sancho is the subject of a fabulous 1768 portrait by Thomas Gainsborough now in the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. He has also been associated with images by Hogarth, and copies of his business card for his Westminster shop, sometimes attributed to Hogarth, are held in the V&A and the British Museum. This chapter explores Sancho’s relationship to eighteenth-century London’s visual culture not only through images by Gainsborough and Hogarth, but also through Sancho’s own rhetorical style, and the networks and relationships with artist correspondents that emerge through his letters, arguing that Sancho emerges as an agent as well as a subject in eighteenth-century British visual culture.

This chapter ties together the arguments of the book and sketches out their broader implications. It addresses, in particular, three issues. The first is what Messianic claims regarding divine indexicality and authority may tell us about political culture and local perceptions of secular government authority in the South Sudan-Ethiopia borderlands. The second is whether the Messianic preoccupation with truth and self-awareness is a distinctively ‘modern’ disposition or an attitude that is historically and culturally informed and therefore also speaks to local notions of spiritual mediation. Finally, the chapter returns to Christian Zionism and Africa’s Messianic frontier and sketches out some of the ways in which the case of Gambella’s Messianic Jews may be indicative of processes and trends evident among African born-again Christians more broadly.

Ignatius Sancho’s correspondents spanned the British Empire, from India to the Caribbean and North America. One of the earliest reviewers of the posthumous publication of Sancho’s Letters in 1782 remarked that “Sancho may be styled—what is very uncommon for men of his complexion, A man of letters. His commerce with the Muses was supported amid the trivial and momentary interruptions of a shop.” The publication of Sancho’s correspondence revealed him to also be a lettered man. The contents and style of his writings demonstrate that he was truly a man of letters in every sense of the phrase. The demographic, geographic, and social diversity of Sancho’s correspondents ultimately substantiates the observation he made to Margaret Cocksedge on July 31, 1775: “I have lived with the great—and been favoured by beauty.”

Sancho’s Letters begins with an extensive list of “Subscribers Names,” crediting 1,181 individuals who financed the book as a source of funds for Sancho’s widow and children. This chapter examines that list and the process of publishing “by subscription,” highlighting Sancho’s differences from other 1782 subscription publications and the later Black British authors Olaudah Equiano and Ottobah Cugoano. In Sancho’s list, the variety of honorifics associated with each name reveal that the book’s supporters came from a broad spectrum of social ranks – and that a strikingly high percentage of them were women. Several specific individuals are discussed to illustrate the motives of Sancho’s subscribers: patronage and clout; friendship and philanthropy; and abolitionist politics. Despite the later embrace of Sancho’s book by abolitionists, this chapter contends that its subscriber list is more strongly shaped by a sentimental literary milieu and the social ties of the book’s editor.

This chapter deals with Nuer Protestant hymnody and explains how and why various Nuer Christian groups came to adopt different musical styles and aesthetics. The chapter sketches the history of Nuer hymnody, starting from the colonial period and the work of missionaries, through the development of a large corpus of hymns by Nuer Protestants, to the Pentecostalisation of Nuer church music in recent decades. It then discusses the ways in which Adventists and Messianics responded to the latter process with their own sonic practices and compositions. The chapter shows how different musical styles were grounded in different understandings of the ways in which the divine is made present and different views of the sensibilities and dispositions a born-again must cultivate. It also argues, however, that these styles and aesthetics constantly evolved and were the subject of ongoing conversations and debates that, like Bible Study and Christian literacy, were central to the endless project of born-again subjectivation.

Ignatius Sancho is largely known for a collection of his letters that were published by his friend after his death. Less well known is the fact that he holds the distinction of being the first published Black composer in Britain known to historians. In contrast to most of his letters, Sancho chose to write and publish at least one book of vocal music and four books of instrumental music over a period of thirteen years. In exploring the meanings of music in Sancho’s life through both production and consumption, this chapter argues that no one aspect of Sancho’s identity can be understood apart from his work in music. Music for Sancho was many things, including a personal avocation, a means of profit, and a vehicle for communicating his political opinions and honoring his friends and family. First and foremost, however, it was a sociable practice and a communal experience.

While Sancho discussed slavery in his letters decades before British opposition to that institution coalesced and became institutionally codified, he undeniably took a firmly anti-slavery and anti-racist stance in his manuscript correspondence. He used his familiar letters to critique and oppose slavery as a practice and an institution as well as to reject and undermine the validity of emerging concepts of “race” in an effort to oppose their effects in the world. Three core strategies emerge: first, satirizing and critiquing the metaphorical mapping of moral character onto skin color in the service of white supremacy; second, reappropriating and resignifying animal metaphors and racial tropes to undermine their efficacy in subjugating humans and non-humans alike within a slaving society; and third, recovering self-determination and agency for Black subjects by asserting ownership over his own body through the manual labor of writing.