Anglican Diocese of Kimberley and Kuruman

The Diocese of Kimberley and Kuruman is a diocese in the Anglican Church of Southern Africa, and encompasses the area around Kimberley and Kuruman and overlaps the Northern Cape Province and North West Province of South Africa. It is presided over by the Bishop of Kimberley and Kuruman, currently Ossie Swartz. The seat of the Bishop of Kimberley and Kuruman is at St Cyprian's Cathedral, Kimberley. There have so far been 12 bishops of the See, though one of these served for two different periods of time.

The Anglican presence on the Diamond Fields and in Kimberley’s hinterland, from the early 1870s, was at first administered from Bloemfontein, initially under Allan Webb, the oldest parish here being St Mary's, Barkly West. By the early 1890s, however, there was a feeling in some quarters that the Diocese of Bloemfontein was too big and there were proposals for the formation of a separate Bishopric with its seat in Kimberley. But in the event the bishops decided upon establishing the missionary Diocese of Mashonaland instead - an area also up until then administered from Bloemfontein.

From 1907 to 1910 motions were passed and planning and fund-raising initiatives were being conducted in earnest towards founding a new Diocese of Kimberley. These included the “Million Shillings Fund” launched by Arthur Chandler, Bishop of Bloemfontein, in London on 2 February 1909. It was hoped that all would be in place so that the coming into being of the new Diocese would coincide with the establishment of Union in South Africa in 1910. However it was not before July 1911 that all was ready and a formal resolution could be proposed, as it was at a meeting in the Kimberley Town Hall, that ‘the western portion of the Diocese of Bloemfontein be constituted a new and separate Diocese with Kimberley as its Cathedral Town’ – to which Episcopal Synod, meeting in Maritzburg, gave its final consent in the form of a Mandate dated 11 October 1911. The Elective Assembly for the choosing of a bishop for the new Diocese was held in Kimberley on 13 December 1911, at which Wilfrid Gore Browne, Dean of Pretoria, was the unanimous choice. Gore Browne was consecrated in Bloemfontein Cathedral on 29 June 1912. He was enthroned the following day as Bishop of Kimberley and Kuruman, at St Cyprian’s Cathedral.

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