The Gender of Piety: family, faith, and colonial rule in Matabeleland, Zimbabwe by Wendy Urban-Mead (review)

Following her earlier close study of the influence of missionaries in South-western Zimbabwe, Wendy Urban-Mead’s examination of the lives of six African converts and evangelists (three women and three men) takes the reader through Zimbabwean colonial history from African early battles and encounters with company pioneers and missionaries, through increased settler occupation and the attendant removal of Africans from their territories, to the liberation struggle and postcolonial conflicts. The Gender of Piety is a study of the Brethren in Christ Church (BICC) in Matabeleland from the end of the nineteenth century to the first decades of the twenty-first. Urban-Mead argues that men’s and women’s lives show different trajectories of piety, where piety is demonstrated by church membership and obedience to the tenets of the church. Men’s piety is sequential, with men often leaving the church to fulfil masculine duties or follow pursuits not warranted by the church. In contrast, women’s piety seems consistent with women’s values and is constant. Her conclusions, based on her readings of missionary archives and colonial records, scholarship in African history and anthropology, as well as extensive interviews with the principals in her study and with their children and other relatives, is reassuring to those who have noted this pattern in African history: men and women both join missionary churches in search of a better life. Women seek freedom from restraining customs, and men, at least in the early days, want to gain knowledge of the powers of the conquerors. Both men and women adapt the religious tenets to their lives, but women more often break with family to abide by the church’s teachings while men break with the church to engage in worldly activities.

The pacifist doctrine of the BICC, an Anabaptist denomination similar to the Mennonites, holds that believers should feel the warmth of God in their hearts, confess and be baptized, and retreat from worldly pursuits. In politics, they should not resist authority, whether it is just or not, and believers should not engage in violence or go to war. After the hardening of the colour bar, forced removal from their ancestral land and destocking of cattle, some believers lost faith. Men left the church to join the liberation struggle. But the pull of politics was not the only thing that made men backsliders. Monogamy, modest living and abstention from alcohol also posed problems for them. The detailed biographies of the men studied show that conventional Matabele masculinity - kinship responsibilities, fatherhood and camaraderie - swayed some men. To attain fatherhood, one entered into a polygynous marriage when a first wife was childless. Men drank beer with their friends and kin. But their piety was sequential: each of the three men studied returned to the church and one former backslider became the leader of the church in Zimbabwe. The latter, Reverend Steven Ndlovu, faced one of the greatest tests of his faith during the Gurkurahundi (the postcolonial murderous attack on the people of Matabeleland), when he stepped into the world to join with leaders of other religious groups appealing to the head of state to end the atrocities. In the twenty-first century, church members in Zimbabwe and the Zimbabwean diaspora are reconceptualizing their religious practice to include working for justice and peace.

Urban-Mead has done solid work. She has a great feel for history and pulls the reader into her stories. The life histories in this volume are wonderfully contextualized and the conclusions incontrovertible. Because her reasoning is so cogent, there is one area that this reader would have liked her to give more thought to: namely, what makes women so constant in their belief? In discussing men, Urban-Mead explains that meeting Matabele demands of masculinity pulls them away from the church. The reader is left...