This dissertation explores the history of the American Zulu Mission (AZM), the South African unit of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, from its founding until the end of the Progressive era. Its perspective integrates the Board’s goal of developing strong, ultimately independent churches into the mission’s broader agenda of building and protecting Christian communities that emphasized religious practice, articulated through personal and communal behavior, as well as belief. It also situates the AZM at the intersection of its relationships with the Board, Natal’s white settlers, and, most importantly, African Christians and potential converts.

This approach offers an alternative and a complement to those focused on the relationship between foreign missions and imperialism. It emphasizes the missionaries’ role as social reformers, both through their connections with the American foreign mission movement and the broader currents of which it was a part, and through their attempts to re-form the lives of their converts in accordance with their understanding of Christian behavior. I argue that, although conventional in their American context, once in Africa they initially became radical proponents of social change. Throughout the study period they encouraged Africans to live according to their ideals, drawing on the strategies of successive American reform movements including abolitionism, temperance, and Progressivism. However, their agency was gradually constrained by the assumptions of their evolving relationships with the African Christian and settler communities, ultimately limiting their impact.

The study traces the AZM’s progress from its establishment of mission stations where it intended religious practice to suffuse labor, commerce, and family life, through its ultimate shift into urban areas and accession to African Christian demands for autonomy in the churches. It challenges the argument that the mission’s long tenure in South Africa and unwillingness to grant independence to the churches represented a failure on its part, instead emphasizing the subordination of the Board’s agenda to the mission’s own persistent program of social reform. Where the American Board envisioned a constellation of independent Reformed Protestant churches, the mission understood its task as the creation of a world in which that vision could be carried out.