Isaiah Shembe's Nazaretha Church is one of the largest, oldest and most influential ‘independent’ churches in South Africa. With estimates of between 4 million and 6 million members, its particular combination of Zulu tradition, Protestant piety and Old Testament imagining has helped shaped the religious field of Kwa-Zulu Natal since the early twentieth century. In the twenty-first century, the Nazaretha Church has continued to flourish, and has commanded the attention of the most senior ANC politicians, with Nelson Mandela, Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma all paying homage to its leadership and laity.

The Nazaretha Church has also commanded the attention of numerous scholars: anthropologists, missiologists and theologians, even ethnomusicologists and literary critics. And rightly so. The church's founder, a semi-literate man from Natal, and his sons and grandchildren have made a remarkable religious world – or worlds, as the case may be, for one thing the Nazaretha Church seems best at is schism (thus providing grist for the anthropological and theological mills). This largely androcentric tradition of charismatic leaders has been complemented by a largely female following; some of the most interesting work on the church has indeed addressed the dynamics of gender. These dynamics in turn are enlivened by the range of musical and other performative genres cultivated within the church: traditions of song, dance and personal testimonies that now make up a substantial corpus of texts, both literal and figurative.

It is the importance of these texts that animates Joel Cabrita's careful and insightful analysis of the Nazaretha Church. Taking her cues from recent work in anthropology, history and literary studies that complicate the divisions between orality and literacy, between text and performance, Cabrita hones in on the huge range of Nazaretha devotional, exegetical and expressive books, pamphlets, stories and other accounts. In doing so, her main aim is to chart the ways in which Shembe's church should be seen not only – or even primarily – in relation to native and nativist appropriations of Christianity, but, rather, to worldwide currents and dynamics of evangelical Christianity. The Nazaretha faithful, as she often refers to them, belong as much if not more to the efflorescence of evangelical Protestantism than to Zulu cultural nationalism.

The debate at the heart of Cabrita's concern is a long-standing one within the scholarship on African churches, and has to do with the extent to which the juxtaposition of the terms ‘African’ and ‘church’ signals problems, whether theological or sociological. While in many ways this debate is as settled in theology as it is in the human sciences – among theologians, there has long been recognition of ‘authentic’, ‘indigenous’ Christianities in sub-Saharan Africa – Cabrita diagnoses a continuing bias in the scholarship on the Nazaretha toward their African-ness. While not inattentive to the politics of culture and tradition – indeed, the conclusion to the book is largely devoted to an exploration of the contemporary valences of Zulu-ness in and for the church – Cabrita wants to correct the bias. She wants to emphasize the Christianity of African Christianity, all the while questioning the sufficiency of such boundary-drawing exercises in the first place.

Cabrita's writing and analysis are impeccable: careful, clear and systematic. She provides a wealth of valuable insights and detail for how we should not just assume but can actually find links between evangelical traditions and those of the Nazaretha faithful. In Chapter 3, for example, she adds considerably to the historical and exegetical pictures of how Pentecostal and holiness movements were taken up by Isaiah Shembe in the early years of the twentieth century. Here, as throughout the book, the thoroughness of the treatment is impressive.

There are, though, benefits and disadvantages to studying such an institution as the Nazaretha Church. Having a substantial body of primary and secondary texts and treatments gives the analyst a lot to work with. At the same time, it can be so much to work with that it becomes difficult to see the wood for the trees. If, indeed, the scholarship on the Nazaretha Church has – with a few exceptions – struggled to get beyond the ‘African’ question, this is not, as Cabrita often acknowledges, the case with the study of Christian independency more widely. At several key points, Cabrita refers to work on Christian independency in Botswana, Zimbabwe and Zambia: some of it classic, but some of it quite recent and even ongoing. For those familiar with this wider literature, some of Cabrita's arguments and conclusions may seem de rigueur; she may seem to be fighting battles that have already been won in terms of how we should understand textual authority, for instance, or healing (the main subject of Chapter 5). If looking outward rather than inward might have enriched this book's argumentative engagements, however, that is not to detract from its considerable insights and merits vis-à-vis the Nazaretha Church itself, and the church's position within both South Africa and the world of evangelicalism.