Joel Cabrita. The People’s Zion: Southern Africa, the , and a Transat- lantic Faith-Healing Movement. Cambridge: Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press, 2018. 368 pp. $45.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-674-73778-5.

Reviewed by Edna Bonhomme (Max Planck Institute) Published on H-Socialisms (October, 2019) Commissioned by Gary Roth (Rutgers University - Newark)

Transatlantic

Joel Cabrita’s The People’s Zion: Southern Africa, the linguistically diverse communities who approached the United States, and a Transatlantic Faith-Healing Move- faith in different ways. Cabrita is attentive to the signifi- ment is a transnational story about the role new forms cance of these dynamics, and the contrasting social con- of Christianity had in shaping concepts of identity and texts in which the sect was implanted. Christianity was a community among religious believers, as well as the web of ideology and social and cultural practices that was ways racial inequality and segregation transformed in not exported wholesale from place to place but was trans- the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Cabrita’s story ported in the bodies and minds of people. As Christian begins in the 1880s during a moment when societies, shifted from northern European and North ideas, and economies were being transformed by rapid American contexts to the southern hemisphere, its new advances in communications and transport technology, adherents remade the faith in their own image in ways against a background of increasing industrialization and that made sense in their own environments. This allows an acceleration of colonial annexation and imperialism. Cabrita to develop an illuminating comparison between Religion was not insulated from these trends but influ- the Zionist movement among Americans in and enced the direction they took—while itself being trans- black and white believers in southern Africa. formed. In turn, new religious ideas and practices—and At the core of The People’s Zion is an interest in how sometimes, wholly new religious sects—shaped the pro- cesses of self-fashioning by which believers made sense religions attract new followers and why some are more of themselves and their spirituality. One hitherto under- successful than others in this endeavor. In common with examined sect was the Zion Bible movement, which re- other newly developed Christian sects in the late nine- ferred to itself as Zionism, though it had no connection teenth century, the Zion church was a social movement most popular among the working class. Cabrita is espe- to the movement for a Jewish homeland. Cabrita argues cially interested in the Zionists’ use of the rhetoric of col- that the movement was a new iteration of Christianity’s transnational history from the nineteenth to the twenti- orblindness as a means to unite black and white workers eth century. in Johannesburg, as well as their embrace of reformist politics. Concurrently, the movement developed a cri- Zion was founded in the late 1800s by the missionary tique of medical practices, particularly vaccination, de- John Alexander Dowie, a transnational evangelical leader veloping its own ideas about bodily perfection and forms whose movement covered the United States and south- of healing tied to religious faith. ern Africa. In all of these contexts it found racially and The text is not only concerned about the histori-

1 H-Net Reviews cal legacy of the Zion church but also how it exists to- Chicago, which had been home to the Haymarket mar- day. For Cabrita, “Zion’s remarkable success in south- tyrs, was also a hub of working-class political organizing ern Africa demonstrates the saliency of Christian evan- and Marxist ideology: the population was heavily politi- gelicalism for diverse societies undergoing profound so- cized and unionized. Cabrita’s key intervention in this cial changes—industrialization, urbanization, widespread chapter is to argue that “secular labor movements were migration, nativist and colonial racially inflected legisla- not the only forces propagating notions of human frater- tion” (p. 2). As well as seeking to account for the popu- nity” (p. 61). The reader comes to understand the plu- larity of the Zion church—today approximately 30 to 40 rality and contested notions of egalitarianism that were percent of Swazis and 30 percent of South Africans are overlapping during this time. Mostly European immi- Zionists, Cabrita also asks how the faith functions in such grant workers from various ethnic and linguistic back- seemingly different contexts as the American Midwest grounds attended Dowie’s Zion Tabernacle, and during and the whole of southern Africa. his sermons, he also catered to African Americans in Chicago by arguing that there was one human race. Peo- Cabrita uses a broad but detailed corpus of archival ple of all backgrounds were allowed to attend services materials spanning from missionary archives in South and he constructed a church by the name of Zion City and Africa to the papers of the Zion Historical Society in Illi- several establishments that he called “healing homes.” He nois. In addition to textual materials, the author included was later fined for maintaining an unlicensed hospital. present-day interviews with people in southern Africa Integration and healing were key features of the church and the United States. The sources are enriched by the during its missionary period and are emblematic of other integration of poetry and print media that concretely link themes to which Cabrita returns repeatedly in this book. the early Zion movement of the American Midwest and southern Africa. These expansive sources speak not only In chapters 3 and 4 Cabrita explores the significance to the history of the sect but also to the personal stories of Zionist egalitarianism in sections that deal with cos- of members of the community. mopolitanism and racial exclusivism. The Zion church in South Africa was a contested terrain for English- Chapter 1 begins with nineteenth century Australia and Dutch-speaking settlers who were trying to envi- and makes links between the evangelical healing move- sion themselves as part of a transnational white com- ment in this settler-colonial context and the rise of urban munity. Johannesburg was home to many evangelical reform. The founder of the Zion Bible movement, John Protestant churches that became sites for the promotion Alexander Dowie, then living in , was part of “racial health” and imperial “white South Africanism” of competing networks of nascent independent churches (p. 109). In the first part of the twentieth century, the that claimed apostolic prowess. Cabrita illustrates how Zion congregation in Johannesburg eschewed racial in- Dowie’s career in Australia shaped the subsequent trajec- tegration and maintained apartheid. Zionism began to tory of the Zion church in America. Anti-establishment integrate in South Africa once rural black elites began to tendencies in Australia, and its important temperance be drawn to the cosmopolitan project, but such integra- movement, are among the themes Cabrita explores here. tion did not lead to material equality. While some white What we gather from this chapter is that Dowie’s re- South African Zionists were able to visit Chicago in the jection and ultimate failure in Australia led to his mis- early twentieth century, black South Africans did not. sionary efforts in North America. While Cabrita de- scribes the circulation of the Zionist movement in three After engaging in a thorough history of the so- settler-colonial societies—Australia, the United States, cial experience of apartheid in South Africa, chapters 5 and southern Africa—she does not demonstrate how the and 6 articulate the ways that Zion churches emerged religious movement relates to settler colonialism. within a growing literate black population in other south- ern African contexts, especially as they increasingly Chapter 2 explores the successes and failures of expressed anti-establishment views. The explosion of Dowie in the United States. After spending two years churches among the urban middle class and unskilled in California, he left in 1890 for Illinois, where he es- men happened mostly during the interwar period. At tablished the Divine Healing Association. At the time, the same time, popular healing practices were also linked 80 percent of people in Chicago were foreign-born, with to religion, and the Zion movement was “a seamless Germans accounting for approximately 30 percent of the continuation of indigenous healing therapies” (p. 192). population while other Europeans such as Swedes, Poles, While much is written about Zion’s connection to heal- Italians, and Lithuanians were also a significant presence. ing, Cabrita misses an opportunity to further explore

2 H-Net Reviews the dynamism of indigenous medical practices. Chap- Zionist advocacy of egalitarianism sometimes fell ter 6 also outlines how the reconfiguration of evangelical short of what it might have been. Southern African Zion- churches was driven by inter-Southern African migra- ists did not explicitly challenge apartheid. Leaders went tion as a result of labor demands, particularly in mining. so far as to say that apartheid officials were “God’s ser- The cosmopolitanism of the Zion church, for black South vants for your [own] good” (p. 12). Their interventions Africans who came from a variety of ethnic and linguistic in, or quiescence in the face of, the political apparatus groups, elided those differences. This was especially true were paradoxical. In addition to the significance of di- for black migrants to South Africa. However, perceptions vine healing and the meaning of egalitarianism, a further about ethnic differences were not completely erased by unifying theme in this book is the idea of reform, at the participation in the church, where ethnic patriots would level of the church’s organization. In southern Africa, sometimes make claims to leadership of their compatri- congregations were decentralized and factional in their ots within the church. approach, which allowed space for new members to join and be incorporated into a congregation. This meant that Chapter 7 returns to themes explored at the begin- in the South African case, black South Africans who were ning of the book, outlining the links between the North finding the limits of living under apartheid could find American and southern African Zion churches. In both an accessible and seemingly multicultural and interconti- contexts, the Bible School and prophecies were central nental religious movement. That is to say, they were able means of galvanizing the congregations. This was mostly to make connections with white people from outside of achieved by healing prayers. The chapter goes on to ex- South Africa on the basis of religious affinity. plore how Protestants developed a transnational move- ment that made claims to human equality. At the same The book mostly focuses on southern African per- time, transnational connections in evangelical Protes- spectives and the latter half of the twentieth century, tantism emerged and were crystalized during a broader with the cosmopolitan and transnational claims in the imperial project in the latter half of the nineteenth cen- endless present. It is not always clear that the Zion tury. Churches functioned as a site for southern Africans church of the late nineteenth century is comparable to to make sense of sickness, health, and healing. Divine that of today. Cabrita’s text explains that when the Zion healing, too, was an international phenomenon that did movement started, it sought to be multiracial; however, not develop in isolation. As Cabrita argues, the devel- by the end of the twentieth century, the congregations opment of ideas of divine healing in the Zionist church in Chicago were mostly white and those in South Africa was part of a global shift in Christian healing therapies. were mostly black. While the mostly monoracial congre- For southern Africans, medical and religious knowledge gation in South Africa is explained, the same is not true were co-constituted, mutually reinforcing each other. for the case in Chicago. Divine healing practices existed in awkward tension What one gathers from this work is that egalitarian- with other forms of Christian religiosity such as Victo- ism had its limits insofar as it was incendiary and con- rian piety, which tended to call for a passive response ventional. It was not the case that leadership within the to sickness. Divine healing, in contrast, allowed believ- Zionist movement reflected the diversity of the commu- ers to find earnest and direct methods for remedy. These nities it had reached. This is an interesting work ofan in turn could be connected in the believer’s mind with understudied religious movement that makes new con- religious faith, such that personal holiness and disease nections between southern Africa and the United States management were closely interlinked. and illuminates the relationship between social history and the history of religion.

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Citation: Edna Bonhomme. Review of Cabrita, Joel, The People’s Zion: Southern Africa, the United States, anda Transatlantic Faith-Healing Movement. H-Socialisms, H-Net Reviews. October, 2019. URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=52401

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