For those of us who have been ‘bewitched’ by Isaiah Shembe, there is always space for “another book about Shembe” (xi), so it was with great interest that I embarked on a careful reading of Lauren V. Jarvis’ A Prophet of the People: Isaiah Shembe and the Making of a South African Church. A central question for Jarvis is “why and how Shembe became an emblem of a changing South Africa” (xvi). So while the book is “about” (xi) Shembe, it is also about South Africa. By following Shembe “through the places he lived, visited, and learned to avoid” (xvi), which Jarvis does in eight chapters – as “An Inheritor in the Free State” (pp. 1–20), as “A Baptist in Town” (pp. 21–36), as “An Evangelist in Durban” (pp. 37–51), as “A Guest in the Reserves” (pp. 53–70), as “A Landowner in Inanda” (pp. 71–90), as “A Matchmaker at Ekuphakameni” (pp. 91–109), as “A Dissident in Southern Zululand” (pp. 111–130), and as “A Celebrity in South Africa” (pp. 131–151) – “one draws new insights,” Jarvis claims, “not only about Shembe’s success but also about his world” (p. xvi). “Shembe’s actions and decisions,” she argues, “expose processes that defined modern South Africa” (p. xvi). This is what Jarvis means when she invites us to approach Shembe “differently” (p. xvi), following him from place to place and discerning through an emblematic Shembe the contours of an emerging modern South Africa.

Jarvis’s foregrounding of place is a useful trope for structuring each chapter and the book as a whole. However, place is often made to work rather hard in holding together the kinds of analysis and conjecture that Jarvis includes in what are rather short chapters. Here is where a clearer account of the research process and its analytical conceptualization would have been useful. Jarvis says very little about her research process, offering fragments in the “Acknowledgements” and no further detail or clarity in the “Introduction.” Jarvis has clearly read the extensive archival and published material on Shembe carefully (as her generous endnotes attest), and there are hints that she may have done some fieldwork (pp. x–xi), but her own particular research contribution is not adequately explained and located within the field of Shembe studies.

The priority for Jarvis, as she states at the end of the “Introduction,” is to read the vast corpus of sources about Shembe in order “to understand what Shembe can tell us about the place South Africa was becoming in his lifetime and that the place that it, in many ways, still is” (p. xxx). Though her understanding of how Shembe is emblematic of an emerging South Africa is often thought-provoking, the resonances sometimes appear forced. Jarvis astutely identifies “mobility” as a key feature of Shembe’s movement from place to place (p. 28), echoing the work of other scholars, and views this as emblematic of how African chiefs later “turned to mobility as a strategy that entrenched their status in ways that differed from a few decades earlier” (pp. 139–140). Jarvis’ analysis of the significance of “evasion” in Shembe’s early life (p. 10) aptly identifies a crucial African survival strategy, though it is not clear that “evasion” is an appropriate concept for the kinds of resistance Jarvis extends its reference to include (pp. 158–159).

Constructing Shembe as an emblematic figure of an emerging postcolonial South African nation is suggestive, and Jarvis provides plenty of detail that is persuasive. However, Jarvis’ approach also relies on conjecture. Part of her style is to invite the reader to conjecture. Reflecting on how Harrismith offered Shembe “opportunities to learn with and alongside other African Christians,” Jarvis continues by conjecturing: “Shembe seemed to dive into the process” (p. 27). Yet the reader is not provided with supporting documentation. Similarly, citing the “first song in the Nazaretha hymnbook,” Jarvis goes on to conjecture: “These lyrics drew Shembe into biblical narratives …” (p. 54), but without offering the reader a detailed documentary account. This conjectural style is a feature of the author’s argument, and while suggestive, sometimes leaves the reader wanting further detail. A related rhetorical style is to make an assertion without substantiation. For example, Jarvis refers to Shembe descending “like Moses from the mountain, to announce a new set of rules for following God” (p. 53). Given that my own work on Shembe engages with Shembe adopting and adapting the voice of the biblical Moses, I immediately turned to the relevant endnote, anticipating Jarvis’ analysis of how Shembe was “like Moses,” but all I found was a reference to a biblical text, “Ex. 19–20” (p. 198, note 5), without any additional argument.

What Jarvis’s conjectural style accomplishes is a plausible narrative account of how Shembe is emblematic of an emerging South Africa, even if there is not always sufficient detail and argument to make the case. Furthermore, by considering Shembe as emblematic of an emerging postcolonial (though she does not use this concept) South Africa risks insufficient reflection on how Shembe is different from the landscape which shaped him. An obvious example resides in Jarvis’ title. There is considerable contestation among the amaNazaretha of those who use the designations “church” or “Christian” of their movement. It could be and has been, argued that iBandla lamaNazaretha is something quite distinctive and different.

The book contains a comprehensive bibliography (pp. 247–283), and a useful index (pp. 285–293).