Journal of Natal and Zulu History Vol. 29, 2011 1 Practices of Naming and the Possibilities of Home on American Zulu Mission Stations in Colonial Natal Meghan Elisabeth Healy 1 and Eva Jackson, 2 Harvard University and University of KwaZulu-Natal Early in the spring of 1846, a young man named Nembula and a young woman called Mfazimuni came to the American missionary church at Amanzimtoti in Natal, run by Newton Adams, to be married by Christian rites. Both of their families included early converts in the American Zulu Mission (AZM) of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. The groom had been living on Adams’ station for a decade with his mother Mbalasi, widow of the Makhanya chief Duze whom the Zulu leader Shaka ka Senzangakhona had reputedly killed. Two months before the wedding, Mbalasi had become Adams’ first convert. Two years after the wedding, the bride’s brother would become a founding member of the American Board church at Inanda. Nembula and Mfazimuni had met as students at an American day school, and their union marked an early triumph for the mission, the first to begin evangelising north and south of Port Natal. But this was not the couple’s first wedding. Nembula was already living with Mfazimuni and a second wife at Amanzimtoti at the time of his mother’s baptism, and his Christian marriage to Mfazimuni entailed a concomitant desertion of his other partner. Their wedding at Adams’ church was also a double ceremony, as another man married one of his two wives and left the other that day. Newton Adams comforted the grooms’ former wives, while his wife prepared coffee and cake for the wedding reception. A few African women partook in the celebration, likely clad in the calico dresses that congregants usually borrowed upon entering their church and left with them at the door when they departed. Around the station, men and women murmured about and, in some cases, disparaged this surreal enactment of New England nuptial respectability on the south coast of Natal. 1 mehealy@fas.harvard.edu 2 jackson.eva@gmail.com