In October 2008, Minister Mkhwanazi of the South African Nazaretha Church delivered a sermon to Nazaretha believers in his home region, describing the conversion of his grandfather, the Mkhwanazi chief, to the Church in the early 1930s.Footnote 1 But first the Minister recounted to the listening congregation how his chiefly grandfather had initially banned the prophetic founder of the Church, Isaiah Shembe, from his territory. He related the rivalry between chief and prophet, recounting how his grandfather said: ‘How big is he, he who is worshipped by all these people? Because we the abaMkhwanazi are the ones who are chiefs in this area! Now how come this person is followed by all my people?’
After one of Isaiah's ministers was accused of sexual relations with a young female convert, Chief Mkhwanazi and the local magistrate had Isaiah jailed. But Isaiah miraculously escaped and, in retaliation for the chief's enmity, caused drought to descend upon Mkhwanazi land. Eventually the chief relented, realizing Isaiah's superior powers. In return, Minister Mkhwanazi concluded to the listening congregation, Isaiah blessed his grandfather, Chief Mkhwanazi, and granted him many children with which to continue the flourishing of his chiefly lineage. The minister finished his sermon by enumerating his own 56 grandchildren, proof of the continued blessing of Shembe upon the Mkhwanazi royal house. The minister's preaching performance affirmed the moral legitimacy of the royal household – of which he was himself a member – to the listening congregation, many of them Mkhwanazi subjects.
Over the past hundred years, chiefly converts to the Nazaretha Church have used disciplines of preaching to mobilize loyal constituencies. Throughout the early to mid-twentieth century, chiefs struggled to assert their authority over recalcitrant subjects, with the performance of praise poems being one device that they used to summon up popular loyalty. Chiefly converts within the Nazaretha Church drew upon a new narrative resource. They told stories that described their encounters with the Shembe leaders of the Church, and these stories were related by chiefly elites to assembled gatherings of Nazaretha believers in their own wards. Chiefs narrated to their subjects how their political rule was divinely established, and recounted stories of divine punishment for disobedient subjects. They instructed and exhorted their constituencies into submission to their rule, not only as a secular obligation but also as a spiritual virtue. For chiefs, their conversion offered an opportunity to reconstitute their patriotic subjects into communities of devout believers, bound by religious obligation to political governability.
The incorporation of chiefs was key to the Nazaretha Church's social vision. Isaiah Shembe was part of a turn-of-the-century flowering of African Christianity in southern Africa, one of many contemporary churchmen who sought independence from missionary control. Born in the Free State in about 1870, he moved to the Natal coast to pursue a ministry of itinerant preaching, baptizing, and, reputedly, healing. By the time of his death in 1935, he had amassed about 40,000 ‘Nazaretha’ followers throughout Natal and Zululand, and had accumulated numerous church properties, including the headquarters, ‘Ekuphakameni’ (the Elevated Place), ten miles north of Durban. He was succeeded by his son, Johannes Galilee, and today the Church is led by Johannes's nephew, Vimbeni. Throughout the twentieth century, both Isaiah and Johannes evinced nationalist aspirations for the Church, imagining it to offer rehabilitation to the fragmented Zulu nation.Footnote 2 Chiefly converts were therefore important evidence of the Church's stature as a nationalist institution.
The story traditions of these chiefly converts illuminate the diverse ways in which twentieth-century South African chieftaincies legitimated their authority to their often sceptical subjects. A growing literature has discussed the role of religion in shaping colonial and postcolonial identities, demonstrating that Christianity may play a vital role in the formation of sub-national identities.Footnote 3 Studies have already demonstrated how certain Natal and Zululand chiefs allied with European mission bodies, discerning strategic advantages in access to land and education.Footnote 4 And, in the case of the Nazaretha Church in particular, scholars have frequently commented on their alliance with chiefly power.Footnote 5
A broader literature has highlighted how ‘the art of oratory and the art of ruling’ intertwined in southern African society.Footnote 6 Through praise poetry, both political elites and commoners crafted and criticized power, and proposed virtuous political comportment.Footnote 7 But, from at least the late nineteenth century, chiefly power in Natal and Zululand began to undergo severe erosion. The formalized performance of praise poetry as a means of bolstering chiefly authority and rallying local subjects declined throughout the twentieth century, although it nonetheless displayed flexibility and resilience in adapting to new social circumstances. In the same spirit of creative innovation, Natal and Zululand political authorities of the twentieth century began to make use of new narrative resources to persuade their subjects to offer them allegiance. Studies from southern Africa and elsewhere have discussed the currency of autobiographical and biographical texts to propel readers into action, and to initiate new social, political, and religious communities.Footnote 8 Nazaretha chiefly converts drew upon the autobiographical genre of the conversion narrative to relate their own journeys from degeneracy to spiritual health. As well as individual accounts of spiritual journeys, the composition and performance of chiefs' conversion stories recounted new forms of political thought to their subjects and, in doing so, transformed unruly dissidents into governable, obedient constituencies.
NARRATING CHIEFLY AUTHORITY
Political authorities of Natal and Zululand had long drawn upon storytelling to facilitate their state-building work. Zulu praise poets of the nineteenth century composed histories that described how their chiefs came to exercise their rule over everyone else; in particular, these narratives stressed chiefs' militarism and their corresponding ability to exert control over bounded territorial units and to subdue enemies. Performed at key ceremonial events such as weddings, national meetings, and chiefly inaugurations, the praises actively made claims upon subjects' loyalty to the figure of a leader, stamping a chief's right to rule upon his subjects. The chief's official praise-singer (imbongi) was a storyteller-cum-historian whose role it was to rally people around chiefly leaders, summoning up popular admiration by extolling their laudable characteristics and their roving ability to draw territory and subjects into their grasp.Footnote 9
Key to these chiefly narratives were idioms of mobility and militaristic conquest. Shaped by the military and political turmoil of the early nineteenth century, praise poets of this period drew upon martial images to describe how political authorities knit together their constituencies.Footnote 10 This ‘heroic ethic’ was conveyed through references to journeying, travelling, and movement: chiefs would conquer opponents and claim control over territories and subjects by fearlessly traversing lands, rivers, and mountains. The praises (izibongo) of the early nineteenth-century Chief Zwide of the Ndwandwe described him as:
He who crouched over people that they might be killed … Amongst the roads which one does he resemble? He is like the one which cuts straight across.Footnote 11
By the start of the twentieth century, the militaristic chieftaincies celebrated by these praises had largely come to an end. After the defeat of the Zulu kingdom in 1879, chiefs' powers were curtailed by the appointment of district magistrates.Footnote 12 By the 1920s, industrialization meant that young men and women left difficult conditions upon European labour farms for growing opportunities in cities. Consequent generational and gender disputes were a source of anxiety for early twentieth-century chiefs, exacerbated by the rise of class-based political movements in the late 1920s, and in particular the Industrial and Commercial Workers' Union.Footnote 13 Chiefs faced recalcitrant and increasingly politicized subjects resistant to the moral legitimacy of ‘traditional’ law, and ukuhlonipha, a social code of respect. The European Native Affairs Department viewed chiefs in Natal and Zululand as a bulwark against politicized Africans, and attempted to calcify chiefly authority into ‘traditional rule’ (seen most fully in the Native Administration Act of 1927). But this reduced chiefs' popularity with their subjects, as did the ascent to power of headmen, or izinduna, who were often able to gain the popular legitimacy that chiefs lacked.Footnote 14 Even the relatively privileged chiefly elites of Zululand (whose monopoly on cattle contrasted with commoners' reliance upon migrant wage labour) found their power eroded.Footnote 15
In some form, the performance of chiefly praises survived into the twentieth century.Footnote 16 Despite changing social circumstances, twentieth-century chiefly praises still used heroic idioms, describing control over bounded territories and acquiescent subjects.Footnote 17 But praises also reflected the challenges that chiefs faced, including violence between wards of the same tribe, caused by scarce land, and unruly youth.Footnote 18 The praises of the Hlabisa chiefs in Zululand commented on the attempt of their chiefs to maintain codes of respect for elders amid the corrosive effects of urban migrant labour. The chief is lauded in the course of his debilitating experience of drunken brawls in the Witwatersrand mine compounds:
These Brawls will Kill Me! The drunkards sleep at the canteen.Footnote 19
However, despite the ability of praises to respond to new chiefly predicaments, in general the twentieth-century erosion of chiefly power corresponded with a decline in the institutional, formalized aspect of praising. On the one hand, praising performances of the highest political authorities continued largely unaffected: Zulu Paramount Chief Solomon kaDinuzulu employed an imbongi, Hoye, to carry out the work of praising him full time.Footnote 20 On the other hand, the frequency and intensity of chiefly praising practices abated: their praises would be performed on special occasions only, and few chiefs could afford to keep a full-time imbongi.Footnote 21 By the 1970s, as Gunner observed, ‘months, sometimes years, would pass between the performance of chiefly praises’.Footnote 22 The twentieth century also saw praises begin to be composed for political figures who rivalled the authority of chiefs; for example, trade unionists were publicly praised from the early twentieth century.Footnote 23
NAZARETHA ORATORY AND HIERARCHY
As did contemporary chiefs, Isaiah Shembe recognized the power of rhetoric to bolster his authority. Storytelling practices whereby early twentieth-century believers gave hagiographic accounts of Isaiah's miraculous deeds were an important means of generating loyal piety among converts. Sabbath-day sermons, as well as mid-weekly meeting sermons, provided frequent occasions for believers to recount to each other izindaba (stories) about the extraordinary deeds of Shembe. In addition to these ongoing performances, there were large annual occasions. Thousands of believers undertook pilgrimages to the Church's large biannual meetings – in July at Ekuphakameni, in January in Nhlangakazi – for several weeks of sermons, while there were meetings at various regional temples in other months. The storytellers at these events were usually senior ministers, often male. Their listening audiences were thousands of believers, who would store up the stories they heard about Shembe's miraculous deeds – ‘put them in their bag’Footnote 24 – and recount them in their own local temples upon travelling home after the meeting ended. These occasions were opportunities for Nazaretha elites to garner believers' loyalty to ‘Shembe’, ensuring that stories circulated widely through the repeated narrations of congregation members.
Many early twentieth-century chiefs could not afford to keep a full-time praise poet, and the formal performance of their praises had diminished, becoming an ‘event’ rather than a daily occurrence. By contrast, Isaiah, and later Johannes, had their own praise poets – the first was a man called Dladla – and their praises were performed daily to rouse people to morning prayer, as well as after each Sabbath-day service.Footnote 25 The Shembes' praises employed similar motifs to chiefly praises, using militaristic idioms to describe evangelistic victories, and emphasizing ceaseless journeying across far-flung lands in order to gather up the ‘beautiful ones of God’, as Nazaretha believers of the period named themselves.Footnote 26 For example, referring to Isaiah's missionary journeys to southern Mpondoland, the praises name him as a great, inexorable steam train: ‘Mbombela, The train bound for the Pondos!’Footnote 27 And Johannes's praises laud him as a spiritual warrior, fighting noisily with ministers of other, rival, churches:
He is fighting overnight, The morning is coming. His shield clashing with those of the ministers. A Noise Maker, Who Made Noise at esiNothi.Footnote 28
As well as consolidating the power of the Shembe dynasty, Nazaretha oratory was an occasion for the congregation to assert power. Preaching was a highly competitive performance form, and rhetorical talents could establish a speaker's authority within local congregations. Female converts who sought prestigious positions as women's leaders (abakhokheli) or young girls' leaders (abapathi) drew upon their talents as persuasive preachers to consolidate their reputations. A successful speaker skilfully employed Nazaretha oratory conventions, such as using undulating vocal cadences and exhorting audiences to respond with rousing repetitions of ‘Amen!’ But renowned speakers were also those who told the right types of stories. In preaching performance, aspiring leaders related their spiritual pedigree by recounting their tales of miraculous healings by one of the Shembe leaders, as well as of their own evangelistic successes and spiritual triumphs. For twentieth-century chiefly converts too, as we shall shortly see, preaching performance was a means to craft a reputation, both within the Church and among their wider political constituencies.
CHIEFS AND THE NAZARETHA CHURCH
Isaiah, and later Johannes, sought chiefly converts because of the credibility that they would lend the Church as an institution of national stature. Upon arriving in a new area, Isaiah first ‘reported’ to the chief, in the hope both of receiving permission to work in his ward but also of gaining an influential chiefly convert.Footnote 29 The Nazaretha Church was one of numerous contemporary African churches that sought the patronage of ‘traditional’ authorities, part of a wider nationalist fervour. The African Congregational Church had tried to become the ‘National Church of Zululand’, seeking the close patronage of the king,Footnote 30 while the ‘National Swazi Native Apostolic Church of South Africa’ proclaimed the Swazi king, Sobhuza, their ‘Priest, Bishop, Minister and President in this the Swazi Church, as he is of Royal Birth’.Footnote 31 Archbishop E. Mdlalose, who led a prominent group of Zionists in Zululand, frequently ‘open(ed) important national functions’ at the royal household ‘by prayer and religious address’.Footnote 32 A ‘prayer’ narrated by Isaiah, and scribed by an anonymous follower sometime after 1920, suggests the link between the search for chiefly converts and the Church's nationalist credentials. Isaiah proclaimed himself to be:
In mourning for our Nation which is dispersed … At that time, there was no one who was a chief who was of the faith of Ekuphakameni … And now today we have chiefs with us at Ekuphakameni. Should we not then believe in the new God of Ekuphakameni?Footnote 33
Chiefly converts also offered valuable access to land.Footnote 34 Chiefs' willingness to host the Church upon their land was crucial. Hostile chiefs frequently reported Isaiah to the Native Commissioner or Magistrate, leading to a ban on Nazaretha missionary work in that area.Footnote 35 Black buyers struggled to gain land after the 1913 Land Act and, as a religious institution ‘unrecognized’ by the government, the Church was unable from 1937 legally to obtain sites for churches and schools in the African Reserve areas.Footnote 36 When able, a sympathetic chief would grant converts land upon which to erect a temple.Footnote 37
But, despite Isaiah's efforts, many chiefs viewed the Church as a threat to their own diminishing control of land and subjects.Footnote 38 For one thing, the abstentious moral disciplines of Nazaretha converts distinguished them from chiefs' secular constituencies.Footnote 39 Nazaretha believers abstained from medicine (both ‘traditional’ and Western), did not drink beer, smoke, eat pork, or keep pigs or dogs, and espoused an ethic of extreme cleanliness.Footnote 40 Furthermore, their practices of pilgrimage disregarded bounded chiefly polities. Throughout the Church's year, Shembe and hundreds of itinerant followers pilgrimaged to various holy sites – ‘temples’ – erecting temporary dwellings for two weeks of preaching, baptizing, and healing. Chiefs' anxieties over these strange itinerants, who treated their, already insecure, territorial borders as permeable, were voiced in terms of ‘disease’. In 1922, Chief Mqedi, whose ward Isaiah and the Nazaretha passed through on their annual pilgrimage to Mount Nhlangakazi, complained to the Ndwedwe magistrate about ‘the danger of infection being spread by diseased persons who have come to Shembe to be healed’.Footnote 41 In 1944, Paramount Chief Mshiyeni complained that:
People come from afar whom we do not know, and say they are Messengers of God. We don't know these people … no person should preach until he has reported himself to the Chief, who will question him and ascertain his standing and character.Footnote 42
Not only did pilgrims disrespect chiefs' territorial authority; female converts also transferred allegiance to Shembe as their spiritual patriarch. Early twentieth-century chiefs' diminishing authority was predicated upon obedient female subjects domiciled at home.Footnote 43 Isaiah's huge success in gaining female convertsFootnote 44 led to many embarking upon evangelistic journeys with him, loosening patriarchs' already shaky control of the homestead economy.Footnote 45 Chief Msebenzie of the Lower Umzimkulu complained in 1915 that Isaiah drew away ‘women and children (who) have gone away with these preachers to the Ixopo and Durban for two and sometimes three months at a time, without the permission of their husbands and fathers’.Footnote 46 Female converts quit their kinship affiliations and transferred loyalty to ‘Shembe’ as their spiritual father and husband. Women performed symbolic ‘wifely acts’ for him: ‘the men complain that Shembe makes the women wash his feet, which they are not made to do even by their own husbands’.Footnote 47 Chief Msebenzie's headman, Sotshobo, who lost his wife and two sisters to the Church, reported that ‘all Shembe's washing and mending is done at my kraal by my wife which fact goes to show the hold this man has over the women’.Footnote 48
Further, chiefs sympathetic to the Church risked the disapproval of their employer, the Native Affairs Department (NAD). The NAD viewed the Church, a body entirely free of European missionary supervision, as a threat to public order.Footnote 49 In 1939, Chief Magemegeme Dube was rebuked for permitting believers in his area to build a school for Nazaretha children upon his land.Footnote 50 He was warned by the Chief Native Commissioner that, ‘as the Shembe sect was not recognized by the government, he, as a chief, would be well advised to disassociate himself entirely from the activities of that sect’.Footnote 51 In the same year, Chief Ntshidi Mzimela was reprimanded by the Mthunzini Native Commissioner for allowing the Church to erect unauthorized buildings in his ward and, more generally, for not reporting its presence to him.Footnote 52 The NAD perceived chiefs' frequent visits to Ekuphakameni as ‘shirking’ their duty.Footnote 53
Despite this, by 1940 the Church boasted about 15 chiefly converts, many from the Zululand districts. For these authorities, conversion provided significant benefits. First, the Church's espousal of Zulu ‘culture’ made it a natural ally; Isaiah and Johannes styled the Church as the repository of beleaguered Zulu ‘tradition’. In the 1970s, many chiefs aligned to Chief Buthelezi's Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) were also members of the Church – both institutions that bolstered ‘traditional’ chiefly power.Footnote 54 Most importantly for chiefs, the Church interpreted Zulu ‘tradition’ in terms of the conservative social code of ukuhlonipha, or respect for seniors, elders, and political authorities. In their alliance with the Nazaretha Church, convert chiefs drew upon its high estimation of traditional authorities both to recast their own chiefly legitimacy and to fashion their subjects into constituencies knit together through bonds of spiritual fellowship. Chiefly elites made use of the Church's rich oratory tradition to carry out this imaginative work of recasting their political authority and claiming obedience from subjects. Nazaretha leaders and laity already used preaching performance to create religious status and reputation. Chiefly converts drew upon the hierarchy-generating rhetorical traditions of the Church in order to exhort audiences of subjects to pious political obedience.
DIVINE AUTHORITIES AND LOYAL SUBJECTS: PREACHING CHIEFLY CONVERSION NARRATIVES
Chiefly converts who struggled with beleaguered borders and recalcitrant womenfolk and youth drew upon the Nazaretha Church's preaching practices to bolster their authority. While these chiefs disliked the unsettling effect of roving religious itinerants, they also recognized the value of the Church's rhetorical practices, combined with its willingness to validate ‘traditional’ authorities. Key annual meetings provided chiefs with an opportunity for frequent and heavily attended narrative performance before their subjects. At these events, chiefly elites preached on their testimonies, narrating their conversion as a spiritual defeat at the hands of the all-powerful prophet. This was an inversion of the militaristic motif of secular chiefly praises: rather than their conquest of territories and subjects, political elites narrated how they were ‘defeated’ by Shembe. As a result of this, chiefs could recount stories to their subjects in which they cast themselves as divine agents and depicted their political constituencies as spiritual fellowships. To the end of commanding obedience from their subjects-cum-fellow believers, chiefly elites told cautionary tales that exhorted unruly early twentieth-century subjects to loyal patriotism as a spiritual virtue.
Convert chiefs hosted large Nazaretha meetings within their wards, events which enabled lengthy performance of religious oratory. Meetings were several-week-long, annual preaching events held at temples throughout the region, and attended by Shembe and his itinerant followers. Furthermore, temples were frequently built upon land that chiefly converts had made available to the Church within their wards. For example, the Church's strong Zululand presence by the 1920s was largely because several local chiefly converts – with more access to land than their Natal counterparts – donated substantial land to Isaiah, and later Johannes, leading to the erection of the large temples of Judea, Gibizisila, Velabahleka, Nelisiwe, and Mikhaideni.Footnote 55 These temples were usually built in close proximity to the chiefly homestead. For example, in 1958, the Nazaretha temple of eMzimoya (‘Places of Winds’) in the Msinga district was built within the precincts of the royal homestead of the Mchunu chief, Simakade.Footnote 56 Meanwhile, the travelling meeting, hosted by the chief himself, came to be known as ‘the chief's meeting’ (Umhlangano wamakhosi). The largest of these was started in the 1920s at Judea temple, in the ward of Chief Magemegeme Dube of Mthunzini district in Zululand (built near the Dube royal homestead). Thousands of believers travelled to this meeting every October, affording Chief Magemegeme the opportunity to ‘host’ the several-week-long preaching event.
While part of the meeting was made up by Shembe and his travelling retinue, these sermon events offered chiefs large audiences composed mainly of their subjects. Conversion to the Church mobilized entire ‘tribal’ constituencies rather than atomized individuals; chiefs would convert alongside their subjects.Footnote 57 Isaiah is said to have called chiefs the ‘gates’ to the people: if he could gain chiefly converts, then their subjects would be more likely to follow. In the 1940s, the vast majority of subjects of the convert chief of the Qwabe in Maphumulo district, Mavuthwa Gumede, were also members of the church.Footnote 58 In the case of Melmoth district in Zululand in the 1940s, the Biyela chief, Nkombisi Biyela, was a member of the Church, and so too were the bulk of his subjects. However, the Zulu chief in Melmoth was not a member of the Church, and there were almost no converts to be found in that district.Footnote 59 The influence could also go the other way: constituencies that were hostile to the Church pressured their chiefs not to convert, as was the case with Chief Mfene of the Ndwedwe district in the 1920s.Footnote 60 The affinity between a chief's chosen church and the spiritual loyalties of his subjects meant that regional meetings were peopled by believers who were simultaneously political subjects of the hosting chief.
In this way, regional meetings provided a platform for political elites to address their constituencies. Often it was the chief himself who preached to the meeting: traditionally, the hosting chief would deliver the last sermon of a meeting held in his ward.Footnote 61 If not the chief himself, narrators of sermons at these large regional meetings were influential figures within the chieftaincy. For example, in the 1970s, a respected Nazaretha storyteller and preacher was the praise poet of the Mzimela chief, Phemba Mzimela, who was himself a member of the royal family.Footnote 62 From the 1950s onwards, Azariah Mthiyane of the Mthunzini district doubled up as both the imbongi of the Mbonambi chief, Manqamu, and a Nazaretha chronicler, crafting historical narratives about his chief's conversion to the Church.Footnote 63 These elite Nazaretha preachers and historians were not only men. One of the most senior storytellers in the Msinga district was MaDhlomo, a well-known convert from the 1920s. She was also a member of the Mchunu royal family, having married the chief's brother in the early 1930s.Footnote 64
As well as spoken preaching, these storytelling elites created written records of their narratives, elevating stories of chiefly conversion to canonical status. These texts were not only important documents within Nazaretha sacred scriptures but were also significant regional political histories. In 1949, as part of the Church's efforts to legitimate its status as an institution with a codified, formal body of writings, Johannes had appointed an official Church archivist, Petros Dhlomo, to type out and store believers' accounts of his father, Isaiah.Footnote 65 Numerous believers, including a number of chiefs and members of their royal families, travelled to Ekuphakameni to deposit their conversion stories in written form.Footnote 66 From the 1960s, Johannes and Dhlomo circulated selected traditions from the archive among believers in the form of photocopied, stapled booklets. These informal texts included many stories of chiefly conversion, traditions that had been narrated to the archivist by either the chief himself or his pious subjects.Footnote 67 The circulation of these texts elevated chiefly conversion narratives to part of a Nazaretha corpus of sacred texts, and also created a wide popular readership for the stories.
Chiefly conversion traditions were also committed to writing by regional ‘archivists’ and historians. Amos Qwabe of the Maphumulo district, a member of the Qwabe royal family, was also a devout believer of the Nazaretha Church. Writing as both a Qwabe patriot and a pious convert, in about the 1950s, Amos produced a lengthy history of the conversion of the Qwabe chiefs to the Church.Footnote 68 Amos's text was stored by him at home and, while it is not clear what performance life his textual history would have had (if any), his act of ‘archiving’ chiefly histories in textual form seems to have been a means of codifying their significance. From about the 1970s onwards, regional believers also used tape-cassette recorders to create lasting records of stories of their chiefs' conversions. MaDhlomo, the respected female historian of the Mchunu chieftaincy, had many of her sermons recorded by attendant members of the congregation, forming a permanent ‘archive’ of the conjoined history of the Mchunu royal family and the Church.Footnote 69 These tape recordings would have been frequently replayed. Repeated acts of listening to historical narratives of how Isaiah converted their Mchunu chief were both a profession of faith and also a catechism of identity as rehabilitated Nazaretha patriots.
In these ‘canonical’ story traditions – circulating in spoken sermons, codified in textual form, and preserved in audio recordings – royal converts used older vocabularies of chiefly authority to narrate new forms of political thought to their subjects. These narrators used militaristic idioms of journeying and conquering, not to celebrate their own control over bounded territories, in the style of secular chiefly praises, but rather to describe their own spiritual ‘defeat’ at the hands of Isaiah. Chiefs' conversion narratives typically described their rebuke by the prophet, and his command to them that they relinquish aspects of their old life connected with a degenerate social order.
A rich example of this type of narrative is the conversion story of the elderly Mchunu chief, Simakade, of the Msinga district.Footnote 70 In September 2008, at his royal homestead of Nhlalakahle in the Msinga district, Simakade related the story of his conversion to me. Although this was a private, one-on-one recounting – that is to say, a context with no ‘performance life’ – this tradition is part of a frequently performed Mchunu–Nazaretha corpus of stories.Footnote 71 Indeed, Simakade's narration was seamlessly delivered, reflecting the practised narration of his conversion story. It was also a story that Simakade considered sufficiently ‘canonical’ to store in the central archive at Ekuphakamani. The second source used here for the chief's conversion narrative is a text that he deposited in typewritten form with Petros Dhlomo, after his conversion in 1957.Footnote 72
Simakade's conversion narrative describes how he was overcome – indeed, ‘defeated’ – by the superior powers of Johannes Shembe. Simakade described how his mother, MaNgubane, the first wife of his father, Chief Muzocitwayo, had joined the Church in the early 1930s, during Isaiah's missionary visit to the region.Footnote 73 However, in the 1940s, he and the other young men of the royal family were reluctant to embrace the Church's strict discipline. Simakade remembers that they said to themselves:
Well, we do hear what Shembe is saying, but his message is for the older people. It has got rules that prevent a person from enjoying life. So we were saying that we would believe when we were old, but we were lying!Footnote 74
Chief Simakade's conversion story goes on to describe his defeat by Shembe's miraculous powers. In 1955, he fell seriously ill.Footnote 75 His second narrative, from the Church archivist Dhlomo's collection, recounts how, in desperation, his devout mother broke Church laws against the use of medicine by summoning a ritual healer. But this doctor had no success. In January 1956, MaNgubane arranged for her chiefly son to be taken to Shembe. On the way to Ekuphakameni, suddenly, by miracle, Shembe, the ‘Lord’, appeared before them on the road. Simakade related what happened:
The Lord assembled all our mothers and reproved them for administering me with medicine … Then he turned to me and asked me whether I would like to be the chief of the amaChunu. I said, ‘Yes.’ ‘Why then did you use medicine?’ I did not know what to answer. He asked, ‘Did the medicines make you chief?’ I replied, ‘No, our Father.’ Then he said I should never use medicines again if I wanted to be the chief of the amaChunu tribe. By this conversation I was healed and I chose the Lord of Ekuphakameni. Amen.Footnote 76
Simakade's conversion narrative depicts him to his listening and reading subjects as subdued by Shembe's powers. This contrasts sharply with older, nineteenth-century narratives of Mchunu chiefly authority. The Mchunu chiefs had long drawn upon militaristic idioms of warfare to account for their legitimacy as rulers. The praises of Simakade's great-great-grandfather, Chief Macingwane, described his rule through military valour and cunning. Macingwane was a ‘croucher like a beast sneaking into a maize field’, and an ‘indolent one who eats the corn of the diligent ones’.Footnote 77 In contrast, Simakade, Macingwane's descendant, describes in his conversion story – a new narrative genre of political power and legitimacy – how he is defeated by the power of the ‘Lord of Ekuphakameni’, subsequently relying upon him alone to fashion his chiefhood.
Clearly there were political advantages behind chiefs' willingness to narrate themselves to their subjects as defeated by the power of Shembe. Simakade's conversion story describes how, in return for his obedience, Johannes offered him moral approbation of his rule. Sermons frequently describe how Isaiah prophesied the chief's reign, pronouncing that Simakade would be ‘the chief I have brought back from the sands of the sea!’Footnote 78
The conversion traditions of the Mbonambi chief demonstrate a similar moral weight being given to secular authorities who embraced the Church. In the 1960s, Azariah Mthiyane – imbongi of the Mbonambi chief of the Empangeni district of Zululand, as well as Nazaretha historian – narrated the following story to Dhlomo:
Then the Mbonambi chief sent a message inviting [Isaiah] Shembe to his residence, because they had never seen each other … When they had met, Chief Manqamu Mbonambi allocated Shembe the site for the building of the village of Mikhaideni. The chief Manqamu praised Shembe and said, ‘It is said that you are a pastor like others, but are you not God?’ … The Lord [Shembe] thanked him and said, ‘I thank you, because you have seen me. Therefore you will walk as a great man, and the people will respect you until you will be drawn on a skin [that is, until you die]. God will extend the days of your life here on earth until you go home as an old man.’Footnote 79
Mthiyane's story describes how the two figures – chief and prophet – entered into an alliance of mutual recognition. Chief Mbonambi asked if Isaiah was not ‘God’ himself and, as a mark of his spiritual esteem of the prophet, allocated him a site, Mikhaideni, for Shembe's work in his ward.Footnote 80 In return, Shembe offered the chief moral approbation of his standing – ‘you will walk as a great man, and the people will respect you’. If chiefs recounted their submission to Isaiah as narrative, they could then cast themselves to their followers as divinely legitimated.
Isaiah espoused a return to ukuhlonipha as a means of enhancing chiefly authority, with respect for chiefs being advertised as a religious obligation. An undated text records a sermon that he delivered to an outlying congregation, instructing them to obey their chiefs (amakhosi): ‘You should not love the amakhosi only when you see their faces, but you should love them with your hearts. Even when the amakhosi say to you that you should pay tax money you ought not to be angry.’Footnote 81
The Church's practice of ukuhlonipha made it the envy of chiefs across the region: Sundkler describes how in the 1940s he met a ‘young heathen chief who told me that he had come to the prophet's place, not in order to become a Nazarite, but to study the ways of imposing ukuhlonipha on his people’.Footnote 82 Advocating ukuhlonipha as a religious virtue could translate into tangible political benefits. For example, contemporary accounts described how Isaiah taught that membership of a trade union was a sin, instructing Nazaretha believers to publicly burn their red membership cards.Footnote 83 Chiefs have continued to recognize the Church's espousal of ukuhlonipha into the twenty-first century. The current chief of the Dube people, whose grandfather, Chief Magemegeme, first joined the church in the 1920s, confirms this:
There are people in this church who are older (than me), but even though I'm young – I'm not sixty yet – they respect me, they salute me, because of the position that I'm holding. So all of that makes me believe that I should follow Shembe. There are so many good things that Shembe does.Footnote 84
The Nazaretha Church not only lauded chiefs as divinely appointed political authorities but also positioned them as high-ranking figures within the Church, placing them higher than even the most senior minister. When he founded Ekuphakameni in 1914, Isaiah was said to have established a special gate for his hoped-for chiefly converts to enter by, so that they would not have to mingle with commoners.Footnote 85 Isaiah and subsequent leaders of the Church ensured that chiefs who chose to convert received full honours. During Nazaretha services, they were given a special area to sit in and could sit on chairs, like Shembe, while ordinary Nazaretha (including highly ranked ministers) were seated on grass mats on the floor. Within Ekuphakameni, chiefs had their own cordoned-off area for their amadokodo.Footnote 86 In the 1940s, Sundkler found that during the annual meeting Johannes ensured that chiefs had a ‘private full-day session’ with him, to discuss not only religious matters but also the ‘whole net of legislative enactments that descends upon chief and people’.Footnote 87 A visitor to Ekuphakameni in the 1930s reported that the Nyuswa chief's arrival to the holy village was greeted with great ceremony.Footnote 88
Although chiefly converts found that recasting their authority in a divine mould afforded significant benefits, they were reluctant to relinquish their secular narratives of legitimacy entirely. Convert chiefs had to negotiate complex double identities, and, especially during the 1970s and 1980s, Nazaretha chiefs were key figures within the KwaZulu homeland political economy, as well as senior figures within the Church. In particular, the Qadi chief, Mzonjani, was both a prominent IFP official and a key Nazaretha patron, having granted Amos Shembe the land upon which the new church centre of Ebuhleni was built in 1982.Footnote 89 Chiefly converts such as the Qadi ruler attempted to maintain prestige by staying aloof from the many Nazaretha ritual observances: they insisted that they still could smoke, drink, shave their beards, eat pork, and keep dogs.Footnote 90 As one member of the Qadi chieftaincy, also a Nazaretha convert, commented in the 1950s: ‘chiefs … are like gods, and cannot be expected, nor are they able to conform to the regulations made for laymen’.Footnote 91
When they could, chiefly converts continued to have their ‘secular’ praises recited.Footnote 92 The elderly Mzimela chief Zimema, of the Ngoye region of Zululand, joined the Church in the period of Isaiah Shembe.Footnote 93 His successors in the chieftaincy – his son, Ntshidi, and his grandson, Lindelihle, who was chief in the 1970s – were also members of the Church. All three continued to have their ‘secular’ praises recited at weddings, court hearings, and meetings of chief's councillors.Footnote 94 The praises of the convert Mzimela chiefs describe their chiefly authority through typical images of bellicosity, warfare, and quarrelling. The elderly Zimema is described as a great warrior: ‘The Black Sheep which defeated the bheshu-makers … Steady-stalker-and-grab-him … (the) Swift One who went ahead.’Footnote 95 His chiefly son, Ntshidi, is a ‘Tall Deep-Chested One, the old bull, catcher of two bulls’;Footnote 96 while Lindelihle is praised as a ‘Stiff-stander … hewer of great trees’.Footnote 97 The ongoing performance of convert chiefs' praises – with their concomitant virtues of militarism and warfare – points to the diverse range of legitimating narratives that twentieth-century authorities were willing to utilize.
The chiefs' determination to maintain a degree of political independence was matched by Shembe leaders' efforts to display their moral superiority to their chiefly converts. Isaiah was frequently reported to ‘show his authority by keeping important chiefs waiting for days’ when they came to interview him.Footnote 98 He, and subsequent leaders of the Nazaretha Church, depicted their reign as morally superior to the political might of the chiefs. During the 1935 pilgrimage to Mount Nhlangakazi, Shembe told the listening congregation that, while they should respect their chiefs, nonetheless they should remember that ‘the “horn” to anoint the chiefs is with us at Nontandabathakathi [the homestead of Shembe's grandfather, Mzazela]’.Footnote 99 Particularly during the violence of the 1980s, the Church sought to maintain its independence from secular politics. Although Chief Gatsha Buthelezi was a frequent visitor to Ebuhleni throughout the 1980s, the Nazaretha Church resisted depiction as the ‘spiritual wing’ of Inkatha.Footnote 100
Despite these mutually felt tensions, however, these twentieth-century chiefs recognized that Nazaretha rhetorical performance afforded them opportunities to preach obedience to their subjects as a sacred obligation; as we have seen, they used their conversion testimonies to this end. Disciplines of narrative preaching also provided chiefs a vocabulary with which to cast their political opponents as ‘sinful’. When Isaiah arrived in the Maphumulo region in about 1914,Footnote 101 the Qwabe chieftaincy was in a state of disrepair. Its involvement in the Zulu Rebellion of 1906 had led to the government's deposal of the Qwabe royal family and the appointment of a Ngubane as acting head.Footnote 102 Qwabe chiefly tradition casts the rival Ngubane chief as the enemy of God, and also recounts his ‘defeat’ by Isaiah. In traditions still circulating in the present-day Church, Qwabe–Nazaretha historians describe how Isaiah restored power to the royal lineage. Minister Khuzwayo, who is the minister in charge of the Qwabe ward in Maphumulo today, described to a listening congregation at eMthandeni temple (itself situated a few hundred metres away from the Qwabe royal homestead) that, upon arriving, Isaiah declared to the royal family that ‘I am sent by God to come here and return the chieftaincy to the sons of the chief.’ The minister's sermon narrated how Isaiah engineered an incident whereby the Ngubane chief fell from favour in the government's eyes, and ‘so the land was returned to the hands of Meseni, as the prophet had said’.Footnote 103 Chiefly converts also used preaching to legitimate themselves within familial disputes. For example, to combat his brother's rival claim to the chieftaincy, the current Mchunu chief, Nduna, frequently narrates how Johannes Shembe came to him in a dream and commissioned him alone to lead the Mchunu.Footnote 104
In addition to denouncing chiefly rivals, political authorities also used their conversion stories as a means of condemning anti-social forces within the boundaries of their chieftaincies. Unruly subjects were cast as evil forces. In the 1960s, Chief Simakade of the Msinga district personified the endemic fighting of the district as a ‘demon’ stalking his land that only Shembe could quiet.Footnote 105 The chief related a story to the Church archivist:
I was suffering from faction fights in our tribal area. In one year, I ordered all the people to pay one shilling each. I brought this offering to Shembe and said that my tribe had sent me to cry for this state of war. The Lord Shembe told me to put all the money into the offering basket. Thereafter it was calm in Mchunuland for five years. And when this demon waked again, I always went to the Lord to report it. Then the fighting would stop.Footnote 106
Contemporary Nazaretha chiefs continue to use storytelling to make claims upon their subjects' loyalty. Today, as in the early decades of the twentieth century, the Mchunu chieftaincy struggles to assert its authority over recalcitrant subjects. The royal house is attempting to claim restitution of large amounts of land lost during the colonial era. However, ordinary Mchunu communities are making their own, counter-claims, questioning the chief's right to customary land ownership.Footnote 107 Relations between the post-apartheid government and the Mchunu chieftaincy are fraught: the Mchunu royal family feels undermined by party-loyal municipal authorities, and maintains that the ‘democratic’ constitution affords inadequate recognition to traditional authorities.Footnote 108 In this uncertain contemporary environment, chiefly converts continue to recount affirmations of chiefly power in services. Regional sermon-tellers work hard to emphasize that the Mchunu chief's rule is divinely appointed and blessed. In 2008, a minister at the annual meeting of the Msinga district, hosted by the Mchunu chief, proclaimed to hundreds of gathered subjects of the chief:
I wish the Lord may help us increase the days of the Mchunu chief. We are happy to be ruled in a place like this. God loves him, this chief of ours!
Whole congregation cries ‘Amen’.Footnote 109
The minister urged subjects to obey their chief, who had decreed Nazaretha laws over all his subjects, believers and non-believers alike. Mchunu subjects were commanded to keep the Sabbath, which involved abstaining from work and from lighting any type of fire. Further, in espousal of ‘traditional’ Zulu codes of female virtue, women of his region were forbidden to wear trousers (which was also the practice of the Church). The minister asserted that those who defied Simakade's authority, and who sought refuge in the government discourse of democratic ‘rights’, would be punished:
Our chief has said what God wanted him to say. He was not afraid of people. Wearing trousers is not allowed in this land. These days whoever persists in wearing trousers, wears them by their own force and stubbornness – because now people have ‘rights’ … Many people were stubborn, they wanted to light fire on the Sabbath. But that fire jumped, and burnt them!
Congregation cries ‘Amen’.Footnote 110
Telling stories of Mchunu subjects punished by divine wrath was, and still is, a means for chiefs to create governable communities of subjects. Narrated at large regional gatherings, these stories enabled preacher and congregation to affirm chiefly authority against those who would dispute it. Today, as in the mid-twentieth century, the narration of Shembe's miraculous power summons up communities of devout believers, converts who are also obedient chiefly subjects.
CONCLUSION
The storytelling practices of the twentieth-century Nazaretha Church offered the political authorities in Natal and Zululand new ways to tell their subjects stories about their legitimacy as rulers. The well-established praising tradition of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Zulu political culture had been – and, to some extent, still continued to be – an important narrative practice for legitimating chiefs. Throughout the twentieth century, however, the erosion of chiefly power corresponded with a decline in chiefly praise poems. During this same period, new narrative opportunities for chiefs seeking to legitimate their power before their subjects arose in the form of Nazaretha sermon performance. Chiefs used the autobiographical conversion testimony to narrate their own spiritual ‘defeat’ by the miraculous powers of Shembe. They told these stories to their subjects in an effort to cast themselves as divinely appointed, and to exhort their political constituencies to offer obedience to their rulers as a religious obligation.
