Mvume Dandala
South African politician
Mvumelwano Mvume Dandala (born 26 October 1951 as Mvumelwano Umdandalaza) is a former presiding bishop of the Methodist Church of Southern Africa and a former head of the All Africa Conference of Churches. He was the presidential candidate of the COPE in the 2009 South African general elections.
Background
Mvume was born on 26 October 1951, the son of the Reverend Killion Dandala, a Methodist minister in the small village of Dandalaville (named after his great-grandfather), in Mount Ayliff in South Africa's Eastern Cape, the last born of four children.
He was a pupil at Ndamase High School, near Umtata before attending the Federal Theological Seminary in Alice where he became the local chairman of the South African Students' Organisation (SASO) where he was involved in the exploration of black and liberation theology and in developing programmes to assist communities with basic amenities such as dams, schools and clinics.
1980s
He has an MA in Theology from the University of Cambridge.
He became a minister of the Methodist Church of southern Africa (MCSA) in Empangeni, KwaZulu-Natal in 1978, a post he held until 1982.
From 1983 to 1985 he was Superintendent Minister of the North Circuit of the Methodist Church in Port Elizabeth, at the time the largest Circuit of the MCSA. In Port Elizabeth he participated in reconciliation ministries among warring political factions. In July 1985 when South Africa declared a state of emergency he was detained without trial.
From 1986 to 1991 he was General Mission Secretary of the MCSA. At the Missions department, Mvume was instrumental in launching the Malihambe Missions, what was at the time a dangerous policy of sending black and white ministers to work in pairs.
1990s
He was superintendent minister of the Central Methodist Mission from 1992 to 1996, during which he convened the Institute for Evangelism both for the Southern African Methodist Churches and later a Pan African Institute for Evangelism for the Methodist churches in Africa held in Nairobi 1994.
“Mvume Dandala” enters the record as south African politician. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Mvume, Dandala and South can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 15, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q1956266. VIAF identifies the subject as 56179207. The Library of Congress control number is no92022926. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1951, 2009, 1978 and 1982.
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This entry incorporates text from “Mvume Dandala” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.