Joel Cabrita

Text and Authority in the South African Nazaretha Church

Text and Authority in the South African Nazaretha Church tells the story of one of the largest African churches in South Africa, Ibandla lamaNazaretha, or Church of the Nazaretha. Founded in 1910 by charismatic faith healer Isaiah Shembe, the Nazaretha church, with more than four million members, has become an influential social and political player in the region. Deeply influenced by a transnational evangelical literary culture, Nazaretha believers have patterned their lives upon the Christian Bible. They cast themselves as actors who enact scriptural drama upon African soil. But Nazaretha believers also believe the existing Christian Bible to be in need of updating and revision. For this reason, they have written further scriptures – a new ‘Bible’ – which testify to the miraculous work of their founding prophet, Shembe. Joel Cabrita’s book charts the key role that these sacred texts play in making, breaking, and contesting social power and authority, both within the church and more broadly in South African public life.

Making African Christianity: Africans Reimagining Their Faith in Colonial South Africa

contribution to the zoology of Africa. The title ‘African Naturalist’ seems ambiguous. Wood spent 50 years of his life in Africa, but he was not African. He rather needs to be seen as occupying a ‘Third Space’. This is not a standard science biography, such as Jane Carruthers’ Wildlife and Warfare: The Life of James Stevenson (2001), and importantly lacks information about the role local informants played in Wood’s knowledge production (see, for example, p. 82). The initial chapters have minor flaws such as typographical errors, incorrect dates (e.g., pp. 33–34) and word repetitions. The biography is worth recommending for readers interested in the history of Malawi, the Seychelles, and zoology; and it may inform historians working within History of Science and Knowledge. The inclusion of various genres of source material, the extensive notes and bibliography may lead to subsequent studies and, as this book shows, biographies can certainly inform historians, raise their interest and initiate a research process.

Patriot and Prophet: John Dube's 1936 Biography of the South African Churchman Isaiah Shembe

In 1936, Zulu patriot, John Dube, wrote a biography of local Natal prophet, Isaiah Shembe. Dubes biography – ‘UShembe’ – contained multiple authorial voices. Partly written by Dube, material was also contributed by Shembe and his followers. This collaborative literary method illuminates how rival theories of civic virtue interacted in early twentieth-century South Africa.

People of Adam: Divine Healing and Racial Cosmopolitanism in the Early Twentieth-Century Transvaal, South Africa

This article analyses the intersection between cosmopolitanism and racist ideologies in the faith healing practices of the Christian Catholic Apostolic Church in Zion. Originally from Illinois, USA, this organization was the periods most influential divine healing group. Black and white members, under the leadership of the charismatic John Alexander Dowie, eschewed medical assistance and proclaimed Gods power to heal physical affliction. In affirming the deitys capacity to remake human bodies, church members also insisted that God could refashion biological race into a capacious spiritual ethnicity: a global human race they referred to as the “Adamic” race. Zionist universalist teachings were adopted by dispossessed and newly urbanized Boer ex-farmers in Johannesburg, Transvaal, before spreading to the soldiers of the British regiments recently arrived to fight the Boer states in the war of 1899–1902. Zionism equipped these estranged white “races” with a vocabulary to articulate political reconciliation and a precarious unity. But divine healing was most enthusiastically received among the Transvaals rural Africans. Amidst the periods hardening segregation, Africans seized upon divine healings innovative racial teachings, but both Boers and Africans found disappointment amid Zions cosmopolitan promises. Boers were marginalized within the new racial regimes of the Edwardian empire in South Africa, and white South Africans had always been ambivalent about divine healings incorporations of black Africans into a unitary race. This early history of Zionism in the Transvaal reveals the constriction of cosmopolitan aspirations amidst fast-narrowing horizons of race, nation, and empire in early twentieth-century South Africa.

Texts, Authority, and Community in the South African 'Ibandla lamaNazaretha (Church of the Nazaretha), 1910-1976

This six-decade history of textual production in the Nazaretha church seeks to illuminate the changing practices of governance and community in the church during this period. The church’s documentary history provides insight into its leaders’ efforts to use texts to govern, centralize and discipline their geographically far-flung, often unruly congregations. In addition to focusing on the documentary regime instituted by the church’s leaders, this article also explores the reading and writing practices that animated ordinary believers. For laity, as well as for leaders, texts and a general range of literate practices were a means of knitting themselves together in opposition to the incursion of the state, and in distinction to contemporary rival Christians. Finally, this article also seeks to position the texts of Nazaretha leaders and laity as significant material objects in their own right.

Isaiah Shembe's Theological Nationalism, 1920s–1935

This article situates the early twentieth-century writings of the South African Nazaretha1 church and its founder, Isaiah Shembe, within a broader context of Zulu nationalism. Accounts of Zulu nationalism in this period have focused on the role of the Zulu king as a unifying symbol. The Nazaretha church, however, developed a strong polemic against the monarchy, and instead positioned its own leader, Isaiah Shembe, as the unifying national figure of the Zulu. In a fraught relationship between the two institutions, the church denounced the contemporary king, Solomon kaDinuzulu, as well as the historical monarchy, as sinful. By contrast, chiefly converts to the church were used as a template of virtuous political leadership for the nation. This study of Nazaretha ‘theological nationalism’ – a discourse that, to legitimate itself, posited national unity on ideas of virtue, healing, peacefulness, repentance and submission to Jehovahs dictates – suggests that Zulu nationalism could be a medium for criticising the African kholwa-monarchical élite of the day. Shembes nationalism also demonstrates the importance of Independent churches to public debate in early twentieth-century Natal and Zululand.   1 ‘Nazaretha’ denotes members of the Ibandla lamaNazaretha (Church of the Nazaretha).

Christian Ecumenism, Swazi Nationalism, and a Unified Church for a United Nation, 1920s–1970s

I am grateful to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for its support of this research in the form of an Early Career Fellowship.

New Centers of Global Evangelicalism in Latin America and Africa

influential on what is a wide religious field, but this is certainly not the case for many new monastics, who are much more ecumenical (see Gay) and more concerned about practices than belief. Markofski’s new monastics emerge as socially concerned evangelicals who celebrate individual autonomy in matters of belief and religious expression and a progressive politics based on community and localism. This is in contrast with an understanding of new monastics as proponents of a more radical understanding of individuality based on relationships (see Montemaggi). Markofski’s focus is strictly on the evangelical world, without any analysis of the wider religious and secular American culture. American evangelicalism is presented as a complete universe divorced from all else. Its ‘transformation’ is thus disconnected from wider changes in American society, including globalisation. Bourdieu’s theoretical frame inexplicably gives way to an unsophisticated understanding of Weberian theory. New monasticism becomes a ‘celebratory asceticism’, although there is no analysis of what Weber meant by asceticism and in what way, if any, new monastics are ascetic. Markofski’s account lacks reflection on the choice of the term ‘monasticism’ and where it originates (see Wilson), which might provide a more solid understanding of the wider philosophical debates influencing the religious and political standpoint of new monasticism. The book is perhaps too close to a thesis and overly concerned with the competing and contrasting narratives of mainstream evangelicals and new monastics to the detriment of its own object of study: new monasticism. However, Markofski can be credited for putting new monasticism on the map.

RICHARD ELPHICK , The Equality of Believers: Protestant missionaries and the racial politics of South Africa . Charlottesville VA: University of Virginia Press (hb

unfortunately does so only in a superficial comparative manner. Still, this study not only originally and brilliantly recognizes the role of the diaspora in this cultural field, but it brightly manages to let the audience speak back to cultural producers. Indeed, Shipley repeatedly succeeds in giving voice to these participants, from a local public transport conversation to online forums. The author thus paints an accurate portrait of hiplife in various urban spaces, outlining how this musical genre interactively impacts on contemporary Ghanaian youth and their identity. Therefore, his book significantly contributes to a much neglected field that is the economy of popular music in urban Africa; and I can only welcome and salute such a study, full of original insights, as a firsthand account from an obviously enthusiastic and dedicated participant.