Rituals of Fertility and the Sacrifice of Desire: Nazarite Women's Performance in South Africa (review)

Rituals of Fertility and the Sacrifice of Desire: Nazarite Women's Performance in South Africa. By Carol Ann Muller. (Chicago Studies in Ethnomusicology.) Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. [xxiv, 316 p. + 1 CD-ROM. ISBN 0-226-54820-1. $26.]

In 1910, the black South African prophet Isaiah Shembe formed what is today one of South Africa's oldest and largest indigenous religious groups, the ibandla lamaNazaretha (Church of the Nazarites), now a million strong. By appropriating, reinventing, and fusing aspects of Western mission Christianity and Nguni custom and cosmology, Shembe forged a body of cultural and religious truth that, in a particularly repressive and debilitating social, economic, cultural, and political environment, his followers found empowering and affirming.

In this insightful, sophisticated ethnography, Carol Ann Muller focuses particularly on the experiences and ritual practices of female Nazarites. In lucid prose lightened with touches of humor, she addresses contemporary theoretical concerns in anthropology and ethnomusicology as well as in gender, religious, and African studies. Neither apologetic nor self-righteous, she reflexively addresses her complex positioning in South African society with regard to the Nazarite community, establishing an authorial voice that is confident without being arrogant and imbued with respect for her subjects.

Structured from the general to the particular, the book moves from an historical analysis of ibandla lamaNazaretha, though a broad overview of Nazarite religious culture and expressive forms, to an in-depth analysis of the ritual practices of young virgin girls and married women. Muller explains the rise of Isaiah Shembe and the establishment of his religious empire as a response to the sociopolitical struggles and suffering of Zulu peoples at the hands of the mythical Shaka and his descendants, Afrikaner trekkers, and British colonists. In the early twentieth century, Shembe provided material, economic, cultural, and spiritual alternatives for his followers, many of whom were particularly disaffected by societal upheaval: orphans, widows, wives ejected from polygamous households, and those dispossessed of their land. Muller analyzes the hybrid set of religious and cultural practices established by Shembe in relation to space, time, and ritual attire--parameters that defined the boundaries of the Nazarite community through clear, ritualized distinctions between self and other, purity and pollution, cyclicity and linearity.

The two primary forms of Nazarite worship are (1) inkhonzo, the structured liturgical service incorporating hymns, and (2) religious dance, known as ukusina. Muller highlights rhythmic complexity as the definitive element of Nazarite musical style, particularly in dance contexts. Her description and explanation of a particular ukusina performance, based on a framework outlined by an "insider" field assistant, provides one of the best in-depth analyses of Zulu music presently available. She also examines the poetics of Nazarite hymns and the effects of musical innovation, such as the introduction of organ accompaniment, and she discusses important recent developments, particularly the advent of youth choirs performing gospel-style compositions and the commercial recording of Nazarite hymns.

Muller devotes the final and largest section of the book to the central role of women in ibandla lamaNazaretha, focusing specifically on the dependence of the whole community on female moral and ritual purity. Analysis of two Nazarite rituals performed by young female virgins demonstrates how the merging of precolonial Nguni fertility rites for young girls with the biblical story of Jephthah harnesses physical fertility for the physical and moral reproduction of the Nazarite order. Abstinence from sexual desire by young girls is seen to protect the religious community from pollution, particularly that caused by struggle with the state over land ownership. Shembe purified the pollution of older women's sexuality caused by marriage by interpreting Nazarite marriage (a fusion of precolonial Nguni and European Christian matrimonial constructs) simultaneously as social, physical wedlock between humans and spiritual union between himself and Nazarite women. Muller concludes this section with an examination of married women's testimonies about the power of Shembe in their lives as expressed through hymn singing...