These papers provide case studies of twentieth-century Friends' response to colonialism and the HIV/AIDS crisis.
Davidson Don Tengo Jabavu (1885 - 1959) is not nowadays a well-known figure of the South African anti-Apartheid struggle, but in the first half of the C20th he was an important voice of the dispossessed; a strong critic of colonial and segregationalist policies. He was active as a Quaker and also as a Methodist lay-preacher, but was very critical of the role of missionaries in a colonial culture.
Jabavu travelled widely, in Britain, the USA and Africa, and engaged with proponents of liberation and civil rights, including Bayard Rustin. He also travelled to India to learn more about Gandhian non-violent resistance, later a tool of the South African struggle.
This paper focusses on Jabavu’s participation in two international conferences: the International Missionary Conference in Jerusalem in 1928, and the World Gathering of Friends in 1937, and discusses his contribution as an early exponent of liberation theology, and also to the literature of decolonisation.
More than four decades after the AIDS crisis began, the history of Quaker responses to the HIV/AIDS crisis remains largely untold within American religious historiography. Similarly, the history of the first Quaker ceremonies of commitment for same-sex couples and Quaker advocacy for marriage equality is underrepresented in academic work about 20th century Quakerism. This paper responds to this lacuna by sharing highlights from an extensive body of research conducted by two researchers who have examined how Quakers grappled with both AIDS and marriage equality, often simultaneously, showing how these were not parallel crises but deeply intertwined struggles within the same congregations and across the many branches of Quakerism in North America. Additionally, by centering local congregational discernment rather than denominational pronouncements, this paper emphasizes how ordinary people transformed inherited theology through lived experience.