Isaiah Shembe’s Prophetic Uhlanga: the worldview of the Nazareth Baptist Church in colonial South Africa by Joel E. Tishken (review)

Isaiah Shembe founded Ibandla lamaNazaretha, the Nazareth Baptist Church, in around 1910, the same year in which the Union of South Africa was formed. Shembe himself was born around 1870 in Ntabamhlophe near Estcourt. In 1873, after Langalibalele of the Hlubi clan was deposed, the Shembe family was forced to move to the Free State to live on a white-owned farm. Six years later, in 1879, the Anglo-Zulu war broke out. Both these events are mentioned in ‘Isaiah Shembe’s Testimony’ (Papini, August 1999 issue of Journal of Religion in Africa) and I suppose they played a role in shaping Shembe’s world view.

The Union Government introduced a number of laws, many of them anathema to black people. Black educated elites, most of whom were Christians, resisted this formation and its laws, and in 1912 formed the South African Native National Congress (later the African National Congress). There has been much debate, however, regarding the involvement or otherwise of the African-initiated churches, including Ibandla lamaNazaretha, in the politics of resistance. Joel Tishken’s is the first book-length study to tackle this issue with regard to Ibandla lamaNazaretha. It makes a convincing argument that Shembe and his Ibandla lamaNazaretha were neither resistant nor acquiescent. The church’s foundation is its prophetic nature: prophecy was Shembe’s Uhlanga, the source of his theology and world view.

Tishken is critical of those scholars who have sought to find resistance in churches such as Ibandla lamaNazaretha, claiming that ‘the focus on resistance in the 1960s–1990s says a great deal about who was doing the writing’ (p. 11). But, for Tishken, it is inaccurate to claim that all the people under the yoke of colonialism were always engrossed in feelings of hegemonic oppression, and that they were constantly searching for ways to resist their oppressors.

Tishken develops his argument by examining what he calls Shembe’s and AmaNazaretha’s world view, which he maintains saw the imposition of colonial rule as God’s plan and AmaNazaretha as God’s chosen people. He challenges those scholars who have argued for ‘Zuluness’ in Ibandla lamaNazaretha, and maintains that the foundational texts of the church make references to biblical and Christian history, and there is very little that links them to Zulu indigenous religion. He refutes the claim that Shembe’s intention was to resist Western culture and establish a Zulu ethnic religion. However, the argument for Zuluness has been made, I believe, based on the actual practices of Ibandla lamaNazaretha that challenged the views of the missionaries, who were the harbingers of the Christian faith. Rightly or wrongly, Christianity in (South) Africa was associated with Western civilization, so that when people wanted to convert to Christianity, they had to jettison their African ways. Shembe, on the other hand, allowed and even encouraged the observation of the African or Zulu traditions in his church. These included practices such as polygamy, African song and dance (reconfigured as the sacred dance), and slaughtering for the ancestors – all considered barbaric and uncivilized and therefore unchristian by the missionaries.

Tishken’s book is warmly welcome because of its attempt to look at the Nazareth Baptist Church from an emic standpoint, and, in a way, in that it seeks to recentralize the church in terms of the colonizer/colonized relationship. It is true that the kind of scholarship that has sought to find resistance in institutions such as Ibandla lamaNazaretha has tended to reinforce the importance of colonialism because it implies that all that happens in countries under colonial rule happens because of colonialism.

However, I think Tishken takes his argument too far when he claims that Shembe was completely against resistance, and that he meant every word when he stated: ‘I therefore realise that God has also placed the Authorities over us, and those who disregard or...