Patriarch Mcguire and the Spread of the African Orthodox Church To Africa

Abstract

Church (AOC) in the United States and Africa. It was originally formed in the United States in 1921 by West Indians with linkages to Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). Through the medium of the UNIA's official organ, The Negro World, information on the AOC was disseminated to Africa. In 1924, William Daniel Alexander, a black South African former Anglican clergyman and member of the schismatic indigenous African Church, petitioned the AOC to open a branch of the AOC in South Africa.' Alexander eventually became the Church's first bishop in Africa and in the 1930s he travelled to Kenya and Uganda where he ordained several priests and established further branches. The AOC, therefore, was an early display of successful ties fashioned between Blacks of the diaspora and Africa. The AOC of Africa was seeded by an Afro-American nationalist movement led by West Indians. The AOC of the United States was created through the energies of George Alexander McGuire. McGuire, born on 26 March 1886 in Antigua in the British West Indies, went through a religious sojourn during which he was baptised an Anglican, educated by Moravians and became pastor of a Moravian congregation in St. Croix in the Virgin Islands. He migrated to the United States in 1893 where he first worked for the African Methodist Episcopal Church. In 1895 he became an ordained minister in the Protestant