Nkosinathi Sithole's fine book on the Nazaretha church (in isiZulu, Ibandla lamaNazaretha) emerges amidst a recent efflorescence of scholarship on this South African religious group.Footnote ³ Indeed, this organization has proved enduringly popular with scholars of religion. The earliest account of its founding prophet Isaiah Shembe was written in 1936 by Shembe's neighbour in Natal, the educator and writer John Langalibalele Dube. Further work on Shembe by Lutheran missiologist Bengt Sunkler appeared in the 1940s, which was followed by a steady stream of monographs and articles over the following decades.Footnote ⁴ Shembe's bold vision for his faithful – who numbered approximately 30,000 by his death in 1935 – resulted in the founding of a cloistered settlement in the Inanda Valley north of Durban where a distinctive community flourished; its members renounced medicine and made prayerful supplication to God for their health. Along with these bodily disciplines (which included foregoing alcohol, nicotine, pork, and both biomedicine and indigenous healing therapies), the community of Nazaretha also developed a distinctive culture of song and dance that they codified and canonized (including the institutionalization of an annual dance festival at the church in the 1930s, and the publication of a formal hymnal in 1942). This production has undoubtedly played an important role in making this church such an attractive subject of research for scholars of the region and of religion in Africa. And it is this rich hymnal and dance culture of the church that is the focus of Sithole's monograph.

With a number of other South Africanist scholars, Sithole argues against a prevalent trend in South African scholarship that emphasizes political resistance and that reads all aspects of black life as determined by the overpowering presence of the white state, and thus all subsequent action – religious or otherwise – as either implicitly or explicitly political in intent. Sithole's approach is instead marked by his deep interest in the cultural weight of religious worship (perhaps it is no coincidence that Sithole is also an acclaimed novelist whose first work of fiction, Hunger Eats a Man, garnered several prestigious prizes in South Africa).Footnote ⁵

Over the course of six chapters, Sithole examines two of the most important worship practices of the church: its large body of religious hymns, most written by Isaiah Shembe himself (Chapters One and Two), and the incorporation of dance as a key component of religious worship (Chapters Three through Six). While Sithole is not the first scholar to have focused on the convergence between the aesthetic and the religious in Nazaretha worship (the work of Liz Gunner stands out in this respect), Sithole's book is distinguished in yet another way. Unlike most other researchers, who bring a dispassionate distance to this topic of study, Sithole is notable because he is both a professional scholar and an active member of the Nazaretha church.Footnote ⁶

This biographical fact – which Sithole introduces to the reader in the first pages of the book and repeatedly returns to throughout its pages – has profound implications for the study (7). Sithole is concerned that academic researchers who occupy a purely ‘outsider’ status in relation to the church run the risk of not seeing the ‘inside’ of Nazaretha life and worship; and that they superimpose the ‘pre-occupations and demands of academia’ upon the church, rather than letting believers speak for themselves (7–10). This critique is familiar in much religious studies scholarship – see, for example, Robert Orsi's well-known reflections on the topic – and Sithole continues this tradition by questioning the tendency of scholars to conceptualize religious experience in categories that differ from those that religious practitioners themselves recognize and use.Footnote ⁷ What gives this fraught dynamic a double twist is that, in the South African context, much scholarship on Christianity has historically been produced by white academics, rendering many scholars ‘outsiders’ in more ways than one. Sithole undoubtedly possesses a great advantage in his fluency with regard to Nazaretha life and, although he does not make so much of this asset, he is also one of the few researchers of the church who is an ‘insider’ by virtue of being a first-language isiZulu speaker. The fine-grained analysis of uniforms in Chapter Six, for example, would be difficult to obtain were not one a regular participant in the church's dances, and Sithole's sensitive, textured account of tensions between laity and clerics is likewise informed by a deep familiarity with the social dynamics of the church.

Yet as Sithole himself points out, his own position as church member and researcher is far from straightforward. His ties to the church present both opportunities and challenges, as, for example, when he cites the suspicion of church members towards those who are educated, or their unease that he might be undertaking surveillance on behalf of a rival faction (the church is currently divided into five fractious groups each claiming legitimacy as the true heir of Isaiah Shembe). Sithole handles this delicate dynamic with frankness, and to my mind, it is this dialectic between Sithole's varying experiences of intimacy and distance in relation to his church that gives the book much of its energy and insight.

Chapter One centres the issue of culture by arguing that the Nazaretha hymnal is a significant work of regional literature, of relevance to the ‘plight of black people in South Africa and beyond’ (46). While more than 200 hymns of the church have frequently been taken as evidence of the Zulu cultural-nationalist fervour that gripped the region in the 1920s and 1930s, Sithole argues for their cosmopolitan character, their willingness to embrace a suffering black people beyond the Zulu nation, and an even broader sense of universalism that encompassed the entire human race. Sithole's point that Isaiah Shembe perceived himself as a heavenly emissary not for the Zulu people but for humanity as a whole has many merits, including his note on the early Indian membership of the church (45). But it also leaves unexplained the racial exclusivity of the church, to the point where sexual relationships and marriages between individuals of different races are still prohibited today (134). By emphasizing the cultural significance of the hymnal Sithole offers a corrective to ‘politicized’ scholarly readings of the church. His interpretation also directs itself against church members who insist upon the divine origins of these songs, which, Sithole maintains, downgrades the creative agency of Shembe as a composer.

Chapter Two shows that the hymns were a product of Isaiah Shembe's active engagement with Judeo-Christian scriptures, which establishes the very human origins of the hymnal and adds nuance to commonplace church understandings that Shembe ‘received’ these hymnal compositions as direct gifts from heavenly guides (63). Here, Sithole wrestles with his position as both a church member (for whom it is orthodoxy that Shembe received his hymns via heavenly inspiration) and as an academic researcher, seeking to show that the hymnal can also be read as ‘interesting and important religious poetry that contributes … to South African literature more broadly’ (63).

In Chapter Three, which is the first of the chapters dealing with Nazaretha dance, Sithole again rebuts the tendency to use the lens of political resistance to understand the church and, in particular, the way in which its dance rituals have been taken by some scholars as ‘coded’ assertions of female power against the patriarchal power of the white state. Sithole is briskly scathing of this interpretation, arguing that it bears little or no resemblance to how church members themselves perceive their dance practice (15–17). Rather, Sithole shows how for church members, the dance is nothing more and nothing less than a means to worship God and to enact unity with their ancestors whom – church members believe – are simultaneously performing the dance in the life to come. This chapter also reveals that this idealised understanding of the dance obscures the reality of its contested usage: church members frequently disagree on what correct dance looks like, and they also dance for reasons that are removed from spiritual concerns. Sithole's analysis portrays the dance not as a critique of an external oppressive state, but rather as a complex internal and ongoing debate among church members about the boundaries of orthodoxy and orthopraxis, and the correct measure of spiritual commitment.

Chapters Four and Five, respectively, take male and female experience within the church as their subject matter. They discuss what is required for both men and women to be considered spiritually ‘complete’ and thus authorized to take part in the sacred dance: for women, the importance of being publicly shown to be a virgin via participation in virginity tests, and for men, circumcision and marriage. As elsewhere, Sithole is highly attuned to internal debates within the church community, describing how the ideal and the reality of marriage frequently clash, and detailing the pragmatic adjustments made by those who find themselves in compromised situations (152). Chapter Six, the final chapter, offers fascinating insight into the varied interpretations individuals and groups make of the sacred dance, especially their contentious choices around dress; a practice that church leadership is eager to standardize, but that is, in practice, highly susceptible to rival appropriations for divergent ends. According to Sithole, dress serves as ‘an artistic form that [dancers] use to define their own personal identification’ (180). Here, as elsewhere throughout the book, Sithole repudiates older interpretations of religious ritual as coded politics. Sithole instead portrays dance as a depoliticized aesthetic-religious practice that is mobilized by individual church members as self-conscious acts of self-fashioning – often in defiance of clerical pronouncements. We are given nuanced detail about how different groups understand and appropriate the dance forms; less is revealed, however, about the social worlds, and their accompanying debates, within which these dance forms are then mobilized. Even if the result is an assertion of greater piety or a more concentrated experience of worship on the part of an individual dancer – rather than any discernible outcome in the ‘outside’ world – it would enrich the discussion to learn more about the rationale and aspirations of these individualized appropriations of a standardized dance form.

In sum, this is a significant contribution to the existing literature on the church. Sithole's analysis deals sensitively with issues of great importance for the academic study of religion, reminding scholars to exercise humility regarding the power of academic analysis. It also advocates for a disciplined attentiveness to language, practice, history, and geography.