Abstract
This qualitative study focuses on the impact of religious faith on the sense and politics of belonging
amongst Black undergraduate students from a selected African Initiated Church at the University
of Johannesburg. The findings are based on focus group and individual interviews conducted with
a total of nine students who belong to the Nazareth Baptist Church (NBC), which was established in the
early 1900s in a context marked by resistance towards colonial Christianity and whiteness. The findings
reveal that, on the one hand, research participants view their faith as integral to gaining access to the
university and succeeding in the university setting. On the other hand, their faith also frequently renders
them the ‘other’ on campus, be it through a personal/communal choice of self-exclusion or through
feelings of out-of-placeness in relation to the broader campus community. Against the backdrop of the
debates on the westernised university (informed and shaped by Eurocentric ways of being) and a South
African university (informed and shaped by the diverse ways of being in South Africa – and globally), the...