In Text and Authority in the South African Nazaretha Church, Joel Cabrita presents a case study in the use of “texts”—the term denoting any written or spoken word, graphic symbol or physical gesture that can be used to communicate meaning—to build a Christian church. Cabrita tells the story of the South African Nazaretha Church, an African independent church originally established in Natal Province, South Africa among the Zulu people. Cabrita relates how the founder Isaiah Shembe, his sons, and his grandsons created both a church and a unique religious experience and maintained control of them through the manipulation of types of texts.

Much influenced by the work of Karin Barber on textual anthropology, Cabrita does a remarkable job of identifying the languages, that is, the texts, through which Isaiah Shembe and his successors conveyed their holiness to their followers. Isaiah could not read until late in life and a large majority of his adherents never learned any written languages. Cabrita demonstrates, however, the ways other than alphabetic literacy ideas of faith can be communicated. Isaiah, as did many of his followers, had been trained by other African Christians to quote from memory ‘chapter and verse’ of the Old and New Testaments. He both practiced and rewarded the display of this skill. Isaiah had a gift for visualizing stories from the bible as rituals and performance theater. He also had a willingness to grant women space for feminine expression of ideas of his spirituality, creating a corps of Christian virgins dedicated to his worship as a prophet.

Yet, as Cabrita shows, for all of their capacity to conceive and comprehend non-alphabetic forms of literacy, for the Nazaretha alphabetic textuality remained the benchmark of spiritual authority. The members of the church who could read and write Isaiah recruited to write down his words and actions. He then had these literary recapitulations copied by hand and circulated among readers, who in turn would read them to their non-literate co-congregants. Later, the stories told about Isaiah were collected and archived by his son and successor Johannes Shembe. Still later the archive became a point of contention among the various claimants to succeed Johannes. Cabrita includes a fascinating chapter about the strategies of the claimants to get their version of the archive of stories about Isaiah into print, an effort that culminated in a five-volume collection of the stories being published in the United States.

Throughout his work Cabrita's ambition is to challenge the ideas of Bengt Sundkler, most importantly the latter's Bantu Prophets of South Africa, where Sundkler doubted the capacity of the charismatic leaders of African independent churches, prophets in Sundkler's terminology, to create churches that could last past the latter's' own lifetimes. Cabrita endeavors to prove to the contrary that the non-literate forms of texts these prophets used permitted the conveyance of their claims to spiritual authority across generations. Isaiah, far more than his offspring, demonstrated Cabrita's argument. Miracles, interventions of the unseen into the seen, provided the source for all indigenous African claims to Christian spiritual authority. Africans accepted that traditional deities, along their own ancestors, could cause problems as well as supply solutions in their daily lives. Africans sympathetic to Zionistic Christianity were open to the idea that the Christian God, working through his chosen African intermediaries, could bring a spiritual force superior to both of these to bear on their problems. Africa, especially South Africa, abounded with Christian faith healers, i.e., prophets, who used the miracles they performed to build congregations of followers.

According to Cabrita Isaiah Shembe distinguished himself among these prophets in three ways: the number and breadth of miracles he performed; the self-conscious ways through which he sought to contextualize his performance of miracles; the innovative ways through which he made sure that his understanding of what he was doing was passed on to his followers. Isaiah did not see himself as an apostle of Christ. Rather he fit himself more broadly into an Abrahamic tradition that recognized Moses, then Christ, and ultimately himself as the chosen prophet for African peoples. For those who accepted him in this role, his ministry took on this meaning. Those literate followers who wrote down his words and actions, then, were gathering “acts” for a third testament to the bible.

Seeking to fit a discussion of Isaiah's successors into his critique of Sundkler, Cabrita encounters conceptual difficulties. Contesting the dichotomy between charisma and bureaucracy first postulated by Max Weber, and then used as a presupposition by Sundkler, Cabrita tries to show how charisma can be bureaucratized, that is, in this context, collected and applied in support of specific claims of spiritual succession. For Isaiah's sons and grandsons, after his death he became the “Shembe,” the incarnation of the prophetic spirit sent by the Abrahamic god to Africans. When Isaiah died, this spirit left his body and inhabited the body of his successor, who gained the same faith healing abilities Isaiah had possessed. It is here that Cabrita's argument about the reconciliation of charisma with bureaucracy becomes a bit disingenuous, the battle over Isaiah's legacy among his heirs ending up in courtrooms and publisher offices.

Cabrita's study will help scholars seeking to broaden the understanding of the expansion of Christianity beyond a focus on the proselytization of European ideas of faith and behavior. Cabrita does a great job of both tracing the sensibilities upon which Isaiah built his notions of his mission back to non-African sources, and then showing how Isaiah built something new upon those notions. Historians may be a bit flustered by Cabrita's book, however. So many of the features of the religious experience Cabrita described can be found in the history of other African churches, indeed in the history of Christian churches in Europe, that it is hard to grasp the case for uniqueness he makes here.