The example of Christian Zionism in South Africa seems a perfect illustration of the scholarly vogue for portraying Christianity in Africa as an eminently ‘translatable’ religion. Zionism – not to be confused with the Jewish movement focused on the state of Israel – is the largest popular Christian movement in modern Southern Africa, to which millions in South Africa, Swaziland, Lesotho, Mozambique, Botswana, Zimbabwe and Zambia belong; by the 1960s, 21 per cent of Southern Africans were Zionist.Footnote 1 However, with now over three thousand active Zionist denominations in the Southern African region, there is no single Zionist organization. The biggest is the Zion Christian Church in northern South Africa, with six million members, while the vast majority of Zionist churches have between fifty and two hundred members.Footnote 2 Historically, adherents of this diffuse, decentralized movement have been drawn from South Africa's working classes; today, Zionists are still perceived as representative of the rank of minimally educated, economically marginalized black South Africans. And although thus vastly diverse, a unifying feature of Zionists across this region is their emphasis on health and healing. Almost uniformly, a Zionist service centres on a healing event during which congregation members receive prayer from a ‘prophet’ for physical, emotional or psychological ailments. Some groups still eschew both Western and African medicine in favour of exclusive reliance upon prayer.Footnote 3
Both scholarship and popular perception have largely understood Zionism as a uniquely Southern African phenomenon, entirely indigenous to the region. The first study of Zionism was Swedish Lutheran missiologist Bengt Sundkler's 1948 Bantu Prophets in South Africa.Footnote 4 Sundkler's book was a pioneering effort to take Zionists seriously. Previously they had been dismissed as a superstitious corruption of Christianity; ‘orthodox’ Christianity was instead supposed to reside in Anglican, Methodist, Presbyterian and Roman Catholic white-led mission Churches. But, living side by side with Zionist congregations in Zululand as a missionary, Sundkler's curiosity about this popular black religiosity led him to reassess Zionists as a complex mixture of indigenous religion and Christianity. Thus while the African Christians he observed in 1940s Zululand had discarded many aspects of the old ‘pagan’ order, in Zionist churches he found there was still a strong emphasis on pre-Christian ritual.Footnote 5 Sundkler thus drew a now-famous chart comparing how old religious rituals – the ‘surviving forms of Zulu culture’ – found ‘new expressions in Zionist churches’.Footnote 6 He concluded that Zionist rituals such as healing, prophecy and baptism were evidence of the old religion with merely a Christian gloss upon it, ‘new wine in old wineskins’.Footnote 7 Zionism was a means for mid-twentieth-century Africans – amidst racial segregation and economic and territorial dispossession – to give ‘a more honored place . . . to the religious and cultural heritage of the Zulus’.Footnote 8
While Sundkler's early analysis was highly ambivalent about Zionists’ orthodoxy (he was after all a 1940s Lutheran missionary), subsequent scholarship – including a later edition of Sundkler's own Bantu Prophets Footnote 9 – was far more celebratory of Zionism's status as an indigenous African Christian movement. Scholars such as Jean Comaroff, amongst many others, seized upon Zionists as examples of the resilience of African religiosity against a ‘foreign’ European Christianity.Footnote 10 Rather than being understood in the context of an Evangelical Christian tradition long concerned with bodily healing therapies, Zionists’ healing rituals were instead interpreted as remnants of indigenous cosmologies, evidence of Africans’ ability to appropriate Western Christianity, to remake it in the mould of so-called traditional African religious practices and thereby to ameliorate the alienating effect of colonial capitalism.Footnote 11
What many of these studies overlooked, however, is that the origins of Zionism in South Africa – this supposedly most ‘African’ of all religious movements in Southern Africa – lay far outside the region. Rather than being a genuinely local growth, Zionism, introduced to South Africa in the 1890s, was in fact the product of a white North American missionary organization known as the Christian Catholic Apostolic Church in Zion. In this respect, Sundkler's later study Zulu Zion and some Swazi Zionists (1976) offered an important qualification to the general trend.Footnote 12 In it, he nuanced the by-then usual depiction of Zionism in Southern Africa as exclusively a black phenomenon by demonstrating the importance of local white Evangelical culture to its early history, detailing the extensive involvement of like-minded whites in propagating Zionism across the districts of the Transvaal and Orange Free State.Footnote 13 Sundkler thus showed us that the early beginnings of black Zion were not as ‘exclusively African as one might like to believe. The first decade . . . echoes with the . . . relationship between White commitment and an emerging Black charismatic community.’Footnote 14
But while Sundkler demonstrated that the earliest decade of the local movement was to a considerable degree inter-racial, he nonetheless left largely unexplored the exact character of the internationalist resources which both black and white South Africans were receiving from North America. While detailed in his analysis of why white Evangelicals in South Africa joined the movement, he spent little time situating the development of Zionism in Southern Africa as an outgrowth of a Midwestern faith healing movement. And although Sundkler showed that both blacks and whites responded with alacrity to Zionism, he did not explain why and how this worldwide Protestant phenomenon resonated so profoundly on both sides of the Atlantic. Even though within a few decades many – but not all – black and white Zionists had separated from the original North American denomination to found their own independent congregations, a large number of these autonomous groups nonetheless sustained intensive contact with the North American, white-led mother Church throughout the twentieth century. As I shall argue, the influence of turn-of-the-century Midwestern Zionism – a popular working-class religiosity focused on bodily perfection and overall self-improvement – long endured in Southern Africa, even after the departure of American missionaries. But most scholars – including Sundkler – have depicted the contribution of North Americans to African Zionism as merely a transitory phase with limited influence.Footnote 15 In this way, Zionism's origins as a phenomenon arising as the result of complex collaborations and alliances between blacks and white Zionists in South Africa and white Zionists in the USA, are obscured.Footnote 16
The reasons for scholars’ focus on Zionism as a nativist movement are not hard to find. Shaped by the wave of political independence sweeping the continent and the corresponding search for African identities, post-colonial scholars of the 1960s seized upon the thousands of black-led, healing-focused Zionist churches as evidence of African resistance to a ‘white’ Christianity, a genuinely ‘African’ translation of the gospel amidst politically adverse circumstances.Footnote 17 Even Sundkler in 1976 – more cognizant than most of the contribution of local whites to the movement – expressed wariness at flagging up the importance of non-African elements to Zionism at that particular historical juncture: ‘it would seem unfortunate, perhaps, not to say unwise, at this time of Black Power and Black Theology to try to argue such a case, as though even this purely and gloriously Black movement of the Spirit somehow originated with a few Whites’.Footnote 18 And not only did missionaries appear to many liberal academics and observers to be profoundly implicated in the machinations of colonialism, but a growing attention to the profound demographic shift of Christianity from the North and the East to the Global South was also transforming scholarly models for the study of Christianity outside of the West. Rather than focusing on the activity of Western missionary societies in Africa, scholars were now disposed to view faith communities as unique centres of Christianity in their own right, developed with little or even no attention to traditional missionary-sending centres.
In particular, Lamin Sanneh's influential work on the ‘translatable’ gospel shaped how indigenous non-Western Churches such as the Zionists in South Africa were viewed. In Translating the Message, Sanneh described how as Christianity expanded into new environments beyond its Middle Eastern milieu it faced new challenges as a minority religion within non-Christian societies.Footnote 19 The key to Christianity's subsequent success was its ‘translatability’. According to Sanneh, this was Christianity's intrinsic, engrained capacity to not remain enshrined within a single language or cultural system, but rather to adapt to local cultural and linguistic contexts. Thus Pentecost, that singular occasion in Jerusalem when each person heard what was being spoken ‘in his own tongue’, reversed the disorderly confusion of Babel. Rather than humanity's different cultures resulting merely in incomprehensible fragmentation, Sanneh proposed that Christianity grafted itself onto a wide range of different cultures and languages; human cultural difference was not the seed of disorder, but rather the bearer of divine revelation.Footnote 20
The implications of the approach of Sanneh and others for the study of Christian movements outside the Western world have been profound, predisposing scholars to focus on the local, regional characteristics of Christianity. Thus Sanneh has also argued against the term ‘Global Christianity’ on the grounds that it obscures the local particularity of the multiple Christianities of varying cultural contexts, wrongly foregrounding a homogenizing, European form of Christianity.Footnote 21 According to Sanneh, it is ‘World Christianity’, in contrast to ‘Global Christianity’, in which the voices of Global South Christians speak freely for themselves.Footnote 22 Guided by the particularist impulses exemplified in the scholarship of Sanneh and others, the topographical ‘map’ of non-Western Christianity now tends to be highly fragmented, comprised of multiple local Christianities studding the globe but rarely interacting with each other or with traditional missionary-sending centres and possessing little consciousness of belonging to a single religious community.Footnote 23 These scholars study how Christians translated a universal faith into local concerns, rather than how a universal faith knits together a range of local believers.Footnote 24 And so, in emphasizing the autonomy of local Christianities, this scholarship perhaps runs the risk of neglecting the other side of the story: that local Christians across the world have prized highly contact with Christians in the so-called Global North, as well as sustained exchanges with believers in other parts of the southern hemisphere, choosing to stress not only their regional credentials, but also their universalist affiliations.
Furthermore, in the case of Zionism, the model of indigeneity may obscure more than it reveals. For one thing, it imbues ‘Africanness’ with an overly exaggerated explanatory power in accounting for the popularity of Zionism in South Africa. In seeking to emphasize local agency, exponents of this approach have placed too great an emphasis on black South Africans’ reliance upon tropes of ethnicity and local culture; black South Africans, as much as any ethnic constituency in history, have also used resources far beyond their immediate cultural horizons. A rich new body of transnational history – locating South Africa within currents of global history – is pertinent in this regard.Footnote 25 Furthermore, Christianity's transformative power to cut across culture as well as be translated within culture must be accounted for. Following the recent approach of the Anthropology of Christianity school, exemplified by the work of Joel Robbins and others, it is evident that believers across the globe have chosen to stress that fidelity to Christ does not necessarily baptize their existing culture and language but rather enacts a radical break with pasts frequently characterized by converts as degenerate, corrupt and sinful.Footnote 26
Following in this revisionary spirit, then, and building upon Sundkler's own path-breaking contribution from the 1970s, this article argues that the time is ripe for a reappraisal of Zionism as a phenomenon of transatlantic history and international Protestantism, rather than as a nativistic Christian appropriation. What follows eschews the usual portrayal of Zionism as an indigenous Southern African movement. Instead, the origins of Zionism are situated in the North American divine healing movement of the late nineteenth century, demonstrating that the Christian Catholic Apostolic Church in Zion was a unique product of the rapidly industrializing Midwestern metropolis of Chicago. It was particularly the universalist promise of the new Zion Church – its self-proclaimed aspiration to remake all humanity into a new redeemed race, characterized by healthy bodies – that appealed to a recently urbanized, working-class, largely immigrant Northern European Chicago-based population eager to assimilate to the New World. The article then shows how the rapid transmission of these universalist beliefs to black South Africans in the farmlands of the early twentieth-century Transvaal was not, after all, so great a jump. Dispossessed by rapid industrialization and marginalized by racial segregation (these were intertwined processes), black farmers embraced Zionism's egalitarian healing techniques as a means of asserting their equality with like-minded believers across the world. Attending to this comparative element allows us to move away from isolated regional histories of Christianity in South Africa and the USA, and instead to consider Protestantism in Africa as the fruit of lively transatlantic exchanges (and conflicts) throughout the late modern period.
Zionism in the American Midwest
John Alexander Dowie was the divine healing movement's most famous figure. He was born in Edinburgh in 1847 to a tailor father. In 1860 the Dowies migrated to South Australia, part of the wave of working-class Scottish emigration of this period.Footnote 27 After returning to Edinburgh to study theology, Dowie was ordained pastor of an Australian Congregationalist church. Through periodicals and international revivalist networks, Dowie became an advocate of divine healing. This was quite a widespread phenomenon within Protestantism, reflecting both the period's Methodist-derived perfectionistic confidence (Christ could redeem the body as well as the soul) and its intense interest in bodily health against a backdrop of industrialization and urbanization, exemplified by the popularity of rival therapies such as hydrotherapy, homeopathy and magnetism. By the 1860s and 1870s, divine healing associations and groups were found in a number of European capitals and in cities along the east coast of the United States, as well as in the rapidly emerging Australian and Canadian metropolises of the ‘Anglo-world’.Footnote 28 Deeply impressed by its powerful spiritual techniques, by the late 1870s, Dowie had fallen out with the Congregationalist establishment in Australia and had founded his own independent Divine Healing Association in Melbourne.Footnote 29
From its early beginnings in Australia, Dowie's experiments with divine healing were shaped by a broader set of Protestant concerns regarding a new swathe of largely working-class city-dwellers. Melbourne, as with other major Australian cities of the period, was the site of intense anxiety on the part of Protestant activists regarding the demoralizing and enervating effects of industrialization on this new urban working class.Footnote 30 The work of many Protestant reform groups sought to ‘uplift’ the urban poor while leaning on an elitist rhetoric of working-class degeneracy, but other religious movements – including the newly founded Salvation Army – emerged as more populist entities. These were instances of Evangelical piety appropriated by the city's working classes for their own ends, and in ways the Protestant establishment – including Dowie's own Congregational church – often disapproved of deeply because of their exuberant public piety.Footnote 31 After resigning from the Congregationalists, Dowie worked briefly with the Salvation Army.Footnote 32 Its populist influence upon him was clear; in forming his new association, Dowie proclaimed divine healing a movement for the working people of the city, and in angry written and spoken polemic, frequently pitted it against the ineffectual interventions of the Protestant establishment. For in sharp contrast to entrenched Protestant tropes of working-class degeneracy and ‘poor-shaming’, his new divine healing services in Melbourne offered working men and women the promise of full and permanent bodily perfection, and proclaimed that spiritual power was available to them at merely the request of a prayer.Footnote 33 Many for whom Dowie prayed in his regular services in the working-class suburbs of Fitzroy and Collingwood told of feeling extraordinary bodily jolts during the experience of laying-on of hands, a ‘shock as the Holy Spirit's power’ passed through them, as one devotee recounted.Footnote 34 Some claimed that they experienced healing instantaneously, and as a consequence, found their lives transformed for the better, with resulting economic benefits; a Mrs Parker of Napier Street in Fitzroy, a tailoress who relied upon her sight for her living, recalled that Dowie prayed for a ‘running cancer’ in her eye, and that upon his touch it burst and ‘poured’ out.Footnote 35
Following these formative years in urban Australia, Dowie and his family travelled to California where he preached and healed in missions along the Pacific Coast. By 1893, Dowie – like many others – travelled to Chicago's World Fair, holding healing meetings in a rickety wooden tabernacle on the Fair's perimeters. Riding the wave of subsequent publicity, in 1896 Dowie founded his own Chicago-based Church, the Christian Catholic Apostolic Church in Zion. In addition to divine healing, what might be called universalism was a key tenet of the Church. While the inclusion of ‘Apostolic’ in the Church's name reflected his preoccupation with restoring primitive Christianity (including the practice of healing through faith), ‘Catholic’ indicated Dowie's older commitment (discernable even in his Australian days) to an inclusivist organization that cut across secular markers of class, rank, denomination and even, as we shall see, ethnicity. In Chicago, Dowie opened several healing homes which were heavily patronized by women. He started a periodical, Leaves of Healing, which broadcast his healings by imitating techniques of popular broadsheets – eye-grabbing headlines, compelling testimonies and dramatic photographs. Soon, branches of the ‘Zionite’ Church sprung up around the Midwest and the entire country.
Chicago in the 1890s epitomized the dramatic economic and social changes catalyzed by America's industrializing economy. By 1890, Chicago was the United States’ second city, subordinate only to New York in economic power and size.Footnote 36 Chicago's unique position lay in its role as broker between Eastern cities and the natural resource-rich Midwest, as exemplified in its meat and lumber factories and steel mills, and its monopoly of railroads linking the east coast to the west.Footnote 37 The worldwide divine healing movement flourished particularly in locations such as Chicago, a premier example of the large industrializing cities of the late nineteenth-century Atlantic world. Although an occasion for self-congratulation in accounts ‘boosting’ the status of such cities, the rapid pace of urban social change in them also caused much anxious social commentary. Worries were voiced in terms of the poor health precipitated by industrialization and urbanization. In North American as well as Australian cities, commentators worried that industrialization undermined modern people's health, resulting in decadent manhood and poor racial health.Footnote 38 Neurasthenia was considered a principal nervous ailment linked to industrialization, draining men of their vigour and lowering the birth rate.Footnote 39 New occupational diseases abounded, including lung diseases from industrial dust and damaged spines through long hours over new machinery.Footnote 40 Housing for the new urban labouring classes was cramped and insanitary. Evangelical Protestant urban reform movements such as the YMCA and the Salvation Army focused on improving public and personal health in a swathe of these Anglo-world cities, including tightening temperance laws and advocating reform in slum housing. Stressing temperance, divine healing advocates also emphasized the intertwined importance of a sanctified soul and a healthy body, especially in environments dubbed ‘unhealthy’ and morally corrupting, as Chicago was imagined to be.Footnote 41
But in Chicago Dowie also encountered a further phenomenon of urban industrialization, one he had not experienced in Melbourne, and which was unparalleled in any other American city save New York: an extraordinarily polyglot and ethnically heterogeneous working-class population. Chicago's explosive growth had largely been fuelled by migrant labour from outside the United States. By 1890, 78 per cent of the city's population was of foreign, largely European, parentage, with many more immigrants arriving yearly.Footnote 42 Germans made up the largest immigrant group, with industrialization and commercialized agriculture in Germany leading to mass immigration to the New World.Footnote 43 Over two-thirds of Chicago's working-class German community engaged in traditional crafts such as furniture-making, as well as being absorbed by the city's new factories.Footnote 44 Many who flocked to Dowie's new Zion Tabernacle were drawn from precisely this newly arrived working-class constituency eager for social and economic mobility and self-improvement in the New World. Fred Trampsich, a German-born, self-professed ‘low man, a drinker, a smoker, a chewer, a filthy man’, was one of the thousands who by the early 1890s had heard of this ‘wunder doctor at the World Fair’. He visited Zion's Tabernacle, and ‘Dr Dowie laid hands on me, my disease passed away . . . today I can say I'm a healthy man.’Footnote 45 Another example was George Wiedeman, a second-generation German immigrant who worked his way to Chicago from New York to become a painter at the World Fair. While there, he heard Dowie preach and was so impressed that he boarded with a family near the Tabernacle so he could regularly attend services.Footnote 46 Swedes, Norwegians and Czechs were also well represented among those who attended Dowie's Tabernacle services. For example, Karin Lindquist, a Swedish-born domestic servant in Chicago, read about Zion Tabernacle in the city's newspaper Chicago Inter Ocean and attended Dowie's healing services. She was a sufferer from lumbago, and ‘what a relief to hear that God could heal us . . . the first time you [Dowie] laid hands on me, the pain ceased’.Footnote 47
What drew this group of newly industrialized, working-class immigrants to Dowie's church? Divine healing was key to its popularity in late nineteenth-century Chicago. Its rhetoric of bodily perfection undoubtedly resonated with these new urbanites, who frequently experienced their environments as deeply physically degrading. While factories carried grave occupational dangers, it was estimated that half Chicago's children died before the age of five due to poor sanitation and overcrowding.Footnote 48 Dowie's promise of healing resonated with a population that – as in Melbourne – lived in the most squalid areas of the city and were simultaneously unlikely to use the expensive services of private physicians, many of whom were in any case regarded with great mistrust in this still uncertain period of medical advance. Moreover, in the context of a milieu of lively religious debate in the city, the perfectionistic underpinnings of divine healing were far from new to this immigrant constituency. Despite the fact that immigrant Lutheran and Catholic Churches were highly influential, many contemporary Midwestern religious organizations were nonetheless riven with debate over newer and still controversial forms of Evangelical spirituality.Footnote 49 This was especially true of Swedish Lutherans, who were still reverberating from the Evangelical awakenings of the 1850s, in which ‘Meetingsmen’ departed from the set liturgy of the Lutheran national Church of Sweden to focus on the transformative effect of a private, highly pious conversion.Footnote 50 Once transplanted to Chicago many of this Evangelical working-class group joined organizations such as the Zionist Church, whose emphasis on bodily perfectionism meshed well with their interest in personal conversion and transformation.Footnote 51
In addition to tapping into a European-American constituency that already – among some sections – favoured an Evangelical, personal spirituality, Dowie's church was also perceived by his followers as highly sympathetic to precisely their own immigrant constituency. Dowie's marvelling appreciation of Chicago's diversity was frequently voiced in the Leaves editorials: repeatedly he rejoiced that ‘we are living in a city where all the nations of the earth are assembled’.Footnote 52 Ethnic heterogeneity came to be interpreted via a biblical grammar that celebrated Christ's impending sovereignty over the entire world; Dowie and his followers deeply felt the spiritual value of a pan-ethnic fellowship where ‘the nations would be assembled together’ in glorious foretaste of Christ's coming kingdom.Footnote 53 Dowie and this first generation of ‘Zionites’ saw in this cosmopolitan community a dramatic illustration of the fraternity of Christians, imperfectly realized in the present day but to be fulfilled at the end of times. A much quoted saying of Dowie's was that ‘neither race, nor colour, nor education, nor position, nor wealth can be a barrier to fellowship, for our Lord said, “One is your master and all ye are Brethren.” There are no aliens among Christians.’Footnote 54 Echoing the inclusivist rhetoric of his Melbourne days, Dowie was explicit in his sermons to the Chicago faithful that all were welcome in the church, regardless of ethnicity or nationality. This was especially powerful in a context where working-class immigrants often reported feeling stigmatized by the city's English-speaking Protestant establishment. The Chicago German-language newspaper Fackel published a satirical account of a devout working man named ‘Zachary Godloving’ who was refused entrance to the churches of the city's Anglophone middle and upper classes on account of his heavy accent and shabby clothing.Footnote 55 Dowie, by contrast, proclaimed his as a church for the immigrant, no matter how down-and-out, booming from the pulpit of his huge new Tabernacle on Michigan Avenue that
. . . while many of us here are called ‘foreigners’ in this country, if you are a Christian, you are not a foreigner in the Church of God (applause). There is one place you won't be called a stranger or a foreigner, and that will be the Christian Catholic Church . . . we do not want to hear ‘foreigner’ applied to brethren or any such nonsense.Footnote 56
In voicing such cosmopolitan sentiments, Dowie was tapping into a vein of thought already existent amongst Chicago's immigrant population. This was the aspiration to transcend ethnic and national differences by joining forces in a new common identity forged in the New World. While Old World resources were skilfully deployed in industrialized settings (language and culture could certainly be powerful identity-building resources), many within immigrant communities simultaneously aspired to think of themselves in ways antithetical to narrower ethnic self-identification, seeking the elusive goal of ‘Americanizing’. Trade unions of the period were important venues for such projects of ethnic cosmopolitanism; one Lithuanian packinghouse worker commented in 1904 that joining the union was ‘giving me [a chance] to enjoy life like an American . . . it is combining all the nationalities, the night I joined the Cattle Butchers’ Union, I was led into the room by a Negro member, with me were Bohemians, Germans, Poles, and the President is an Irishman who spoke to us in English’.Footnote 57 Echoing the internationalism of trade unions, the Christian Catholic Apostolic Church in Zion offered its polyglot membership a platform for pan-ethnic fellowship, while simultaneously catering to cherished ethnic and linguistic communal identities. Services were regularly translated into multiple languages, and special missions were held for different nationality groups in areas of the city where they lived.Footnote 58Leaves of Healing was produced in a German version by 1895.Footnote 59 Soon editions of Leaves in Swedish, Norwegian, Dutch and French were appearing, translated by devout members in their own time and without charge.Footnote 60
The church's vision of a reformed industrial society, characterized by good health, temperance and the harmonious coexistence of nationalities, culminated in the purchase in 1900 of land forty miles north of Chicago. Here Dowie and church members founded Zion City, a town envisioned by adherents as a new Jerusalem, which at its height in 1904 had six thousand residents.Footnote 61 Many Zionists – the press scathingly called them ‘Dowieites’ – were Northern European first- and second-generation immigrants from Chicago, while some relocated to Zion from rural states such as Colorado, Nebraska and Minnesota. All were attracted by Zion's utopian vision of an ideal environment for immigrant working people, prizing godliness, health and the promise of non-discrimination on the basis of nationality or language. To offer residents sustainable employment, Dowie imported a lace factory piece by piece from England and fifty skilled workers from Nottingham.Footnote 62 Unions were banned, but eight-hour working days were mandated and working conditions tightly regulated: Dowie's ‘aim [was] a population of godly people who shall work together for something more than dollars’.Footnote 63 Dowie employed a civil engineer who, inspired by Ebenezer Howard's Garden City movement, located industry at Zion's periphery, ensuring a green, tranquil centre with boulevards and leafy avenues.Footnote 64 Residential lots were large, and made no discrimination in size between poorer and wealthier areas. Doctors, chemists, alcohol, tobacco and gambling were all prohibited.
Its organizers and residents made much of Zion City's cosmopolitanism, a sign of the restoration of the kingdom of God where the ‘nations’ mingled freely and harmoniously. Five years after the city's founding, Dowie boasted that ‘Zion City, ethnologically, is a miniature representation of the world . . . the citizens of our city represent over 80 nationalities.’Footnote 65 The church was especially proud of the two hundred-strong community of African-Americans in Zion City, identifying blacks with the biblical ‘race of Ethiopians’ mentioned in Psalm 68. Zion City's incorporation of ‘Ethiopians’ was therefore lauded in church accounts as a foretaste of Christian triumph: ‘there is victory all along the line. Prophecy is being fulfilled. Ethiopia is “hastening to stretch out her hands unto God.”’Footnote 66 The view that racial difference should be subordinate to Christian unity led Dowie to controversially argue for ‘miscegenation’, a bio-spiritual discipline that – like divine healing – rehabilitated degenerate bodies.Footnote 67 And if Zion City was a home for the world's races, then Dowie was equally adamant that Zionist teachings should fan out across the world and draw all of humanity into its orbit. In this spirit, after 1900, the Church sent missionaries to Australia, New Zealand, China, Japan and (in 1904) the Transvaal, in the territory that would be known as South Africa, newly at peace after the devastating three-year war between Britain and the two independent Boer Republics. Politically and economically speaking, black Africans were the principal casualties of the war's after-effects, and it was precisely to this marginalized constituency that Zionism would come to speak to most powerfully in the following decades.
Zionism in South Africa
By the end of the nineteenth century, the worldwide dissemination of Leaves of Healing meant that Dowie's Church already had a vibrant following amongst a small community of whites – both Boers and Britons - in South Africa. In 1904, two Midwestern missionaries from Zion City – a married couple, Daniel and Emma Bryant – arrived in Johannesburg, South Africa, recently ordained evangelist and elder (the latter the highest rank a woman could hold).Footnote 68 Commissioned by Dowie to extend divine healing to the region's African population, the Bryants made contact with two local white members of Dowie's Church already engaged in missionary work with black communities: Pieter le Roux, a former Dutch Reformed cleric, and Edgar Mahon, an ex-Salvation Army captain. Le Roux was the former missionary to the Zulu for the Dutch Reformed Church in the Transvaal district of Wakkerstroom, a region dominated by stock farming, maize and tobacco production. Despite the Evangelical leanings of the Dutch Reformed Church in this period, and the fact that some in its upper echelons practised divine healing (including the highly respected theologian and minister Andrew Murray),Footnote 69 its officials had ‘serious objections’ to Le Roux disseminating these teachings amongst Africans.Footnote 70 They worried that divine healing would appeal primarily as an efficacious technology, rather than as part and parcel of the Christian gospel, thereby ‘distracting [Africans’] attention from more essential things’.Footnote 71 But Le Roux was unable to comply with a racial demarcation of divine healing's blessings. As one who could ‘personally bear witness of this ‘happy tiding’ he avowed he could not ‘remain silent about this any longer’.Footnote 72 In 1903, Le Roux joined Dowie's Church, ordained by Dowie – via postal communication – as a Zion missionary to his black former Dutch Reformed congregants. Mahon was another local white figure who found that established Protestant Churches of the day would not support divine healing, particularly amongst Africans. The Irish Mahon had joined the Salvation Army in the working-class suburb of Fordsburg in early gold-rush Johannesburg, and as an adult became a Salvationist missionary.Footnote 73 During a bout of lung illness, Mahon read Dowie's literature and, greatly inspired, began to teach divine healing to the Africans to whom he was ministering. The local Salvation Army, however, opposed this (perhaps also due to a particular dislike of Dowie himself, who had since fallen out with international Army leadership),Footnote 74 leading to Mahon's resignation. Mahon became an independent missionary in the Orange Free State, where he and his family were housed upon the farms of sympathetic Evangelicals,Footnote 75 charged with preaching to Africans on the surrounding farms, as well as free to practise supplicating God through prayer for bodily healing.Footnote 76
In South Africa, as in the United States, Zion's cosmopolitan ethos greatly appealed to both whites and blacks. Individuals such as Le Roux and Mahon were part of a group of several hundred white members of Dowie's Church in early twentieth-century South Africa. Divine healing appears to have particularly taken off during the South African War; copies of Leaves were disseminated amongst both Boer and British soldiers (even reaching as far as Boer POW camps in Ceylon and India), and its tenets were preached in evangelistic meetings in camps, hospitals and mess rooms.Footnote 77 While a gospel of physical uplift undoubtedly resonated during difficult war-time conditions, amidst the fierce conflict between the two white ‘races’, the Church's purposively internationalist message also came to the fore. Newly converted Zionists asserted that it was their duty to assert kinship with enemy combatants. John Taylor, a clerk in a law firm in Pietermaritzburg, enlisted as a military chaplain.Footnote 78 His motive: ‘as Gospel messenger, Boer and British were all alike to me’.Footnote 79 Unlike Taylor, most male Zionist sympathizers almost certainly fought. But even these were keen to stress, at least rhetorically, that they avoided killing Boer brethren. One soldier reported to Leaves that ‘I had my rifle levelled at the head of a Boer, when something said to me, “If you pull the trigger, he is a dead man” . . . I at once cocked my rifle in the air.’Footnote 80 Another soldierly correspondent attributed his terrible injury to taking up arms against his Dutch kin: ‘I [saw] that war was the Devil's work, and that God never intended me to take up arms to shoot my brother.’Footnote 81 In the aftermath of the war, ‘racial’ reconciliation between Boers and Britons, and the project of forging a new white South Africanism, was pursued by politicians as well as adopted by many Protestant Churches. Once again, Dowie's cosmopolitanism resonated. By 1904, the Zionist Tabernacle on Bree Street in Johannesburg was regularly packed with congregations of several hundred,Footnote 82 and one member proudly proclaimed ‘our church in Johannesburg [is] one half Boer and one half Briton’.Footnote 83 Some Zionists even extended this cosmopolitan rhetoric – unusually for the day – to black congregants. The view of one Mrs Ward was that ‘we love British and Boer and Kaffir alike, for we have all one Father, one Savior and one Guide’.Footnote 84
Working alongside Le Roux and Mahon, the Bryants made rapid inroads into rural black communities in the Transvaal and the Orange Free State, baptizing thousands at open-air services. White emissaries of Zion relied heavily upon a network of talented African evangelists, including individuals such as Daniel Nkonyane and Elijah Lutango, to whom Le Roux and Mahon respectively had ministered in their former denominations, and who became the main engines of this evangelistic drive, working as interpreters as well as preaching and laying hands on converts in their own right.Footnote 85 Unusually for the period, these white and black proselytizers worked together in disseminating Zionist's divine healing teachings across farm lands. Yet the Zionists’ vision of racial fraternity – discernable in church members’ determination to transcend divisions between Boer and Briton as much as in this network of white and black evangelists – was a very distant ideal in turn-of-the-century Transvaal and the Orange Free State. In previous decades, sharecropping, and its rich profits for talented African farmers, had produced an upwardly mobile class who positioned themselves as a new black elite, prizing individual landownership and their progressive Christian faith, and increasingly detached from chiefly authority.Footnote 86 Rather than seeing themselves as subjects of ethnically and linguistically determined polities, this Christian African elite appealed to the promises of the British Empire, optimistically viewing themselves members of a colour-blind worldwide federation that promised full rights and equal standing to all who embraced its progressive values and came to consider themselves civilized men.Footnote 87 Added to this heady rhetoric of imperial citizenship, the mission societies’ message of Christ's redeeming death for all – regardless of race – was also appropriated by African Christians as a platform for proclaiming racial, social and economic equality.Footnote 88
However, in the aftermath of the South African War in 1902, a shifting political and economic mood rapidly dissipated black aspirations; South Africa's non-white population was increasingly viewed merely as cheap labour for white production and agriculture. Far from ushering in the hoped for race-blind polity, imperial rule meant increased strictures upon black mobility, as Britain sought strategic compromises with disaffected Boers, leading to the creation of a new South Africa aligned with white interests.Footnote 89 The explosive growth of Johannesburg – now the gold metropolis of the world – necessitated vast amounts of labour, meaning that government policy tried to dislodge the wealthy African peasantry from farming into the mines. Independent African accumulation in the rural areas was now frowned upon as an obstacle to white industry. Denied land of their own, Africans were permitted to squat upon farmers’ land. In return, they worked the farmer's land for several months annually, and paid him rent. It was a system designed to squeeze maximum labour out of black tenants for labour-hungry white farmers. Tenants considered idle were ejected.Footnote 90 One recent Zionist convert from Wakkerstroom in the Transvaal, Muneli Ngobese, commented that ‘our sorrow is that we live on land rented from the white man. We pay him rent but we have little peace.’Footnote 91 Underpinning this economic exploitation was a racial ideology that cast Africans as intrinsically inferior and best suited to manual work. African self-improvement was discouraged. Government officials and white farmers both disapproved of ‘book learning’ for Africans, believing industrial education of more use.Footnote 92 Finally, in the first decade of the twentieth century, both Protestant and Catholic Churches retreated from their former promise of equality for all believers. African ordinations slowed to a trickle, and missionaries increasingly echoed the racist views of politicians, industrialists and agriculturalists.Footnote 93 Many responded by breaking away from mission-led denominations and forming independent organizations under black leadership – some linked to the North American African Methodist Episcopal Church – and widely dubbed ‘Ethiopian’ churches for their emphasis on black autonomy from white rule.Footnote 94 The eastern Transvaal was the site of extensive Methodist activity, and thus one of the most important independent Churches of this area was a former congregant Joel Msimang's Independent Methodist Church. New Ethiopian churches such as Msimang's retreated from the former rhetoric of multi-racial fellowship, instead – in this era of dashed hopes in racial inclusivity – investing in notions of black pride and self-reliance, exemplified by the term ‘Ethiopian’.Footnote 95
But not all Christian Africans in areas such as these turned away from the older dream of cosmopolitanism; in an era of increasing restriction of African aspiration, Zion's inclusivist ethos was all the more welcomed by many blacks in the Transvaal and Orange Free State. Mahon's assistant, Elijah Lutango, observed that prior to the Christian Catholic Apostolic Church in Zion's arrival, the ‘Gospel was preached and people received it, but there was no fellowship between the whites and the blacks . . . they were never one in the love of the Lord’.Footnote 96 But in Dowie's Zion, he found a remarkably different ‘brotherly love’ – this was ‘the True Love which does not separate brethren because of difference in the colour of their skins’.Footnote 97 The practical implications of this cosmopolitan theology – divine healing knit humanity together – were profound; throughout the Transvaal and Orange Free State, African Zionist preachers worked in remarkably collaborative, egalitarian relationships with their white superiors. Unlike other white-led mission organizations which were increasingly dragging their foot over African ordination in this decade, the Zionist Church followed a policy that ‘natives should be ordained to the office of deacon and evangelist (the highest rank outside of Zion City)’.Footnote 98 And while this was certainly an aspiration shared by the Americans Dowie and Bryant, it also seems to have been an opinion shared by local white Zionists, especially Mahon, who lamented the style of his Dutch Reformed neighbours who had ‘the Bible in one hand, the whip in the other, the whip being used in preference to the Bible’. Instead, Mahon proclaimed that his own practice was to eschew ‘the whip, and to actually shake hands with the natives and sit at meals with them’.Footnote 99 Evidence suggests that he did indeed fraternize with black colleagues in a manner largely unprecedented in missionary circles of the period. As late as 1915, his practice was to spend long evenings at his own home with his closest African co-workers: ‘Deacons Mabula, Lutango and Ndebele called at our home and spent the evening with us. We spoke of things pertaining to the Kingdom, sang some hymns and just before parting about midnight spent a short season in prayer.’Footnote 100 A black stable boy fell ill at the Zionist headquarters outside of Harrismith run by Mahon and ‘was prayed for just as earnestly and tenderly as would any of the white workers have been . . . for we are all one family in the Lord’.Footnote 101
Admittedly, this cosmopolitan ethos was limited in its longevity. White South African membership fell sharply after Dowie's death in 1907 and the near-collapse of the church in Zion City. Most white Zionists migrated under the leadership of Pieter Le Roux to the newly-formed Pentecostal Apostolic Faith Mission, which rapidly retreated from Dowie's cosmopolitan vision and had soon entrenched racial segregation into its Church life.Footnote 102 Yet there were other attractions of Zion for its African constituency. The self-improving disciplines of Zionism – forged amidst the newly industrialized cities of Melbourne and Chicago – meshed surprisingly well with this dispossessed group of African peasantry.Footnote 103 In a context in which Africans were increasingly encouraged by the white administration to view themselves as members of confined ethnic political units, the Zionist Church cut across many of the constraining solidarities the government was trying to inculcate amongst its black subjects. For example, Dowie's Church forbade the consumption of both alcohol and tobacco. But the communal brewing of beer and its consumption undergirded hierarchical relationships between chiefs and subjects, and husbands and wives, and the government was keen to uphold this, partly to enshrine cultural difference and thereby to diminish Africans’ claims to equality with whites. But one woman who felt moved by Zionist teachings in this period decided to cease brewing for her husband, even though she would ‘be considered to have lost love for [him]’. But the woman ‘remembered the words of Jesus – “Who loveth Father and Mother more than me is not worthy of me” – and folded her hands’.Footnote 104 And if divine healing's bodily disciplines set Africans at odds with the social hierarchies of traditional society, it also engendered conflict with their white masters. Formerly employers had paid African workers in tobacco, now Zion labourers objected on the grounds of divine healing's ban on smoking: ‘the master would threaten them, but “no” was the answer . . . [they] used to be slaves of drink and tobacco. Glory to God.’Footnote 105 Farmers increasingly objected to Zion preachers on their farms, complaining that tenants absconded from work to attend church.Footnote 106 Zion's stance on relations between the races further alienated the white settler community from the Church, leading local Harrismith farmers to treat Mahon and his family with contempt for ‘lowering the prestige of the white race’.Footnote 107
But it was the promise of healing that became the most popular aspect of Zion's work in these areas.Footnote 108 On the one hand, as much of the existing scholarship has argued, divine healing undoubtedly resonated with Nguni cosmologies in which Africans viewed sickness and health as being ultimately spiritual matters, not physiological predicaments. Popular thought held that while some illnesses stemmed from natural causes, certain bodily and societal afflictions resulted from spiritual causes.Footnote 109 The nefarious interventions of witches could precipitate these misfortunes; ancestors, too, could visit their displeasure upon the living.Footnote 110 It is hardly surprising, then, that the well-documented increasing frequency of accusations and suspicions of witchcraft in this period served as a barometer for the social and economic dislocation experienced by the region's Africans. But while Zionism's identification of sickness and health as spiritual matters clearly provided a powerful parallel, these self-consciously modernizing Africans did not prize divine healing primarily for its affirmation of indigenous healing therapies. Instead, it was understood as a technique of modernizing self-improvement, part of the broader repertoire of African progressiveness and optimism that characterized this period. For all Zion's resonance with indigenous health theories, adherents knew its bodily disciplines were strictly exclusive: all faith must be placed in the Judaeo-Christian God alone. This, therefore, was a spiritual discipline that detached Africans from local loyalties, setting them on an entirely different trajectory to one mapped out by indigenous concerns. A Zionist evangelist in the Transvaal ‘gathered all the people together and explained the truths of Zion’. Immediately they ‘took down all their medicine charms as a token from that day on they were going to live for God alone’.Footnote 111 Zionist evangelist Fred Luthuli preached the necessity of renouncing local therapies for divine healing's superior cures: ‘a woman who had been ill for a long time was treated by the native doctor. When I came to her the woman told me that the doctor could not heal her, and we threw her medicine out.’Footnote 112 Whatever the deeply felt continuities with existing cosmologies, conversion to Zionism was cast – by both Zionist preachers and ordinary members – as a decisive break with older religious systems.
The progressive discipline of divine healing promised working men and women uplift and self-perfection in all areas of their lives. Thus Zion also stood for education and schooling for all, cast by Dowie as an essential aspect of the self-improvement of working people, both in the Midwest amongst industrialized Europeans and amongst labouring Africans in the Transvaal and Orange Free State. And while white opinion was highly unsympathetic to education for Africans,Footnote 113 considering it supplied them with ideas above their status, Dowie instructed Bryant to ‘embrace every opportunity of teaching these poor people to read and write’.Footnote 114 By 1905, there were seven Zion schools in the Transvaal, with seventy-six pupils, located on sympathetic farmers’ land, founded by sharecropping families who had converted to the Church.Footnote 115 In contrast to the government's views on the desirability of manual training rather than subversive ‘book learning’, no industrial skills were taught by Zionist schools, which instead focused on reading, writing and arithmetic.Footnote 116 Black Zionists celebrated any prospect of progress. This was the opinion of one Zionist parent: ‘we grew up in the dark . . . we had no school and no teaching. But we do not want our children to be the same.’Footnote 117
Finally, in a period when African aspirations to private land ownership – a key marker of modernizing self-improvement and detachment from obligations to chiefs and other traditional leaders – were disappointed, the vision of ‘Zion City’ – a physical sanctuary where Zionist disciplines could be practised unmolested – resonated profoundly with black converts. Dowie had founded Zion City as a healthy haven from Chicago's urban corruption. New African converts similarly sought land to pursue their new identity as people of Zion, renouncing former societal obligations and seeking to escape racist strictures. Dowie's local representative Pieter Le Roux recognized that ‘the peoples’ one desire is to have a Zion City in their own country, where they can live and serve God in peace’.Footnote 118 In 1903, Le Roux leased land and applied to officials to build a church and school and settle fifty families ‘for the spread of Christianity’ upon it.Footnote 119 Zionist evangelist and wealthy peasant farmer Daniel Nkonyane aspired to build a Zion church and school upon his 300 acres of land.Footnote 120 There were a ‘good few’ Zion people living upon Nkonyane's farm, and he boasted that ‘everybody in the area comes to church upon my land’.Footnote 121 In rural South Africa, as much as in the urban Midwest, working people drew upon Zionist practices in their pursuit of economic independence and social autonomy.
Conclusion
What, then, can be concluded from this brief comparative history of the origins of a Protestant divine healing movement in Illinois, and its successful transmission to the farmlands of South Africa, over a century ago? This article has sought to highlight that when the two phenomena are compared, important features emerge. Conversely, when the purely indigenous nature of Zionism is stressed – or, as is more usual, its seamless ‘translation’ into an African context – these aspects are invisible. This conclusion will make three brief points about the value of this comparative approach, and close by reflecting on its broader significance for scholarly histories of Christianity in sub-Saharan Africa as well as beyond.
In both the Midwest and rural South Africa, Zionism can only be understood as a product of the seismic social changes that gripped the globe in this period. Technological advances catalysed the industrialization of Chicago alongside the large-scale commercial mining of gold in Johannesburg. In both contexts, turbulent social change was triggered by these processes of mechanization and industrialization; the demand for cheap, plentiful labour produced the large immigrant European ethnic enclaves of working-class Chicago and also dislodged Africans from their territorial inheritances as gold-hungry mine owners attempted to co-opt cheap labour. Far from Zionism in South Africa being merely a unique product of local conditions – black resistance to colonialism and apartheid, for example – we see instead that the transatlantic Zionist movement was a response to the economic and social changes wrought by industrialization, as well as part of the rich repertoire of responses concocted by urban residents in this period.
In both contexts, Zionism emerged in environments – North American and Southern African – in which bodily health was overlain with spiritual meaning. While South African Zionists’ interest in healing is often cast as an extension of local healing therapies, in fact, industrializing communities on both sides of the Atlantic were prone to interpreting health and sickness in moral terms, notwithstanding important differences in their interpretations. In nineteenth-century Chicago, as in Melbourne, urban disorder was understood as a moral predicament that resulted in diseased and degenerate bodies; in the farmlands of Transvaal, disease was a symptom of the social, economic and political insecurity that gripped dispossessed agrarian African communities. Zionism was a way to address the social and spiritual implications of ill health that gained potency in an unusually turbulent social period across much of the world. It is necessary to historicize robustly Africans’ interest in Protestant healing therapies in this period, rather than simplistically ascribing them to supposedly innate cultural predispositions on the part of African Christians to supernatural interpretations of health and sickness.
Finally, a comparative study of Zionism illuminates the popular saliency of cosmopolitan thought in South Africa. While political parties such as the African National Congress have traditionally been viewed as the main vehicles for multiracial thought, in fact, a whole swathe of cosmopolitan practices existed beneath the radar of formal political participation. Yet Zionism has largely been identified as part of a nativist, racially exclusive strand within South African social history, an insular response by besieged African communities of retreat from the broader world, and disengagement from political involvement. But a transnational lens – analysing Zionism in South Africa alongside its precursors and companions in the USA and in Australia – reveals that immigrant communities in industrializing Chicago, at the bottom of the economic ladder and socially ostracized, as well as black small-scale farmers of the Transvaal dislodged by the demands of Johannesburg, were all searching for new languages with which to assert claims as old certainties vanished. For both communities, we see the value of Zionism's cosmopolitan claim that all humanity found fraternity in a single kingdom of God. And although the local multiracialism of the movement in South African soon fractured, Zion's internationalism was carried forward in other ways. Black South Africans maintained contact via correspondence with white American Zionists throughout the twentieth century (often leaning on American brethren for strategic contacts during an era when the apartheid government was deeply suspicious of independent black churches). And in the present day, over forty missionaries commissioned by the descendent of Dowie's original church in Zion City work as theological educators amongst Zionist Churches throughout Southern Africa, offering affordable opportunities for education to black ministers hungry for the legitimacy bestowed by a diploma.Footnote 122
In closing, then, while the above discussion has argued for the specific value of this approach for Zionism in South Africa, there are broader implications for our historical understanding of Christianity in Africa and beyond. Protestantism in Africa was not insulated from broader developments in the history of Christianity. We cannot, therefore, lean too much upon categories such as ‘African’, ‘culture’ and ‘tradition’ in understanding African religious change in the modern period, or at any other time. While translation is an important theme to consider, in the study of Christianity in Africa the term has often become shorthand for imprecise emphases on the ‘Africanness’ of Christianity as an explanatory device. The challenge now for historians of Christianity in Africa is to find better ways to describe modern Africans’ experience of the modern world, as well as to account for their lively dreams of horizons far beyond their immediate environments.
