Manche Masemola

Life and Ministry

Manche Masemola was born about AD 1913 into a traditionalist Pedi (Northern Sotho) family at GaMasemola in the Sekhukhune district of the northern Transvaal, the daughter of Magolwane and Mabule Masemola, who were Pedi animists strongly resistant to the Christianity preached at the nearby Anglican mission of the Community of the Resurrection at Marishane. From late AD 1926 she and her cousin Lucia began secretly attending the catechism classes of Father Augustine Moeka of the Community of the Resurrection, walking the seven miles to Marishane twice a week to learn the Christian doctrine, the Pedi Lord's Prayer, and the first questions of the Anglican catechism. She told her cousin that she was preparing to be baptized and that she expected to be baptized in her own blood — a saying that her family treated as adolescent extravagance but which she repeated steadily through the year of her catechumenate.

Circumstances of Death

Manche's parents responded to the catechism with escalating violence — repeated beatings, hiding of her clothes, and consultation with a Pedi traditional healer who pronounced that the girl was bewitched by the white men's religion. On 4 February AD 1928, after she returned from a final catechism class at Marishane, her father and mother took her into the bush beyond the village to perform a traditional cleansing ritual; the ritual ended in a beating with a knobkerrie, and Manche was killed on the ground beneath an emthuthuse (granite kopje) about a mile from the family homestead. Her body was buried in the bush at the place of killing, unmarked. She was approximately fifteen years old, an unbaptized catechumen, and she had been baptized — as she had foretold — in her own blood.

Legacy

Manche Masemola was added to the Anglican calendar in AD 1975, and her grave at Marishane is now a major pilgrimage site for the Anglican Province of Southern Africa. Her mother, who had been one of her killers, became a Christian in old age and was baptized by Augustine Moeka at the grave of her daughter in AD 1969. Manche is one of the ten twentieth-century martyrs whose statues stand over the west door of Westminster Abbey, unveiled in AD 1998. Her witness is that the catechumen who never received the water of baptism received the baptism of blood that the Church Fathers had already named — and that the gospel preached by the white missionaries took root in the very ground that opposed it, claiming the mother through the daughter's blood.