Introduction

Introduction This book is concerned with Isaiah Shembe, a Black South African Prophet who founded Ibandla lamaNazaretha in 1910; it is concerned with the hymns he composed for himself and his followers to sing in church services and in other contexts; and it is concerned with the sacred dance which is performed using the hymns. Isaiah Shembe founded Ibandla lamaNazaretha near Durban in what is now KwaZulu-Natal, but he himself was born around 1870 in Ntabamhlophe, Estcourt. Ntabamhlophe was the land of the Hlubi clan under Chief Langalibalele Hadebe. Three years after Shembe’s birth, in 1873, Langalibalele was attacked and imprisoned by the Natal Government forces. He had been commanded to bring the guns that the young men in his tribe had acquired in the Diamond Diggings for registration in Pietermaritzburg. Langalibalele refused to do so, and instead, armed himself and his men and prepared to flee to Lesotho. The AmaHlubi tribesmen and the Carbineers from Pietermaritzburg met at the Bushman’s River Pass (near Giants Castle) and engaged in a fight out of which three Carbineers and two Africans loyal to the government were killed. Langalibalele managed to escape to Lesotho, but was captured there on 11 December 1873 and was brought back to Natal in chains (Pearse, et al: 1973: 4–5). This marked the end of the Hlubi chiefdom, which was then divided among a number of petty chiefs. Isaiah Shembe was related to the Hlubi royal house on his mother’s side as his mother, Sitheya, was a daughter of Langalibalele’s induna and uncle Malindi. Some years earlier, according to oral tradition in the church, Sitheya had eaten a strange flower in the mountains when going with other girls to fetch wood. Later that day a “voice” told her that what she had eaten was not a flower but a spirit of God. She was going to give birth to a messenger of God called Shembe. While it may have been strange for Sitheya to hear such a voice, the supernatural was not something unknown to the Hlubi people of Ntabamhlophe. The chief himself was well-known for his rainmaking abili- ties. But Sitheya became uneasy when a man called Shembe came to ask her to marry his son. The man was Nhliziyo Shembe and the son was Mayekisa, Isaiah Shembe’s father. Both Nhliziyo and Mayekisa were the indunas in the Hlubi tribe; Nhliziyo was Mthimkhulu’s (Langalibalele’s father) induna, and Mayekisa was Langalibalele’s induna. Soon after Langalibalele was deposed, Mayekisa left Ntabamhlophe and moved with his family to the Free State where he lived in a farm belonging to a white man. While Isaiah Shembe could not have witnessed the above events due to his age, he got to know about them through storytelling. His father, Mayekisa, was an important person in the Hlubi chiefdom and witnessing its destruction and © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��6 | doi ��.��63/97890043�06�8_00� 2 Introduction being forced to leave it was very painful to him. These events then constituted a great part of the stories narrated to the young in the Shembe family. In Isaiah Shembe’s Testimony, Isaiah Shembe says: “I heard from my father that I was three or four years old when Langalibalele was deposed” (Papini, 1999: 261). Isaiah Shembe’s father did not say this in order to refer to his son’s age, but Isaiah’s age happened to be part of a larger and more significant story: the story of Langalibalele; of the destruction of the Hlubi chiefdom. It is, perhaps, because he was highly regarded as an induna that Mayekisa’s ‘exile’ from Ntabamhlophe was so painful to him. This is shown by the fact that he did not quite accept his new life in the Free State. As he was living amongst the Sothos, he did not allow intermarriage between his children and the Sotho speaking community. Amos Shembe, Isaiah Shembe’s son and third leader of Ibandla lamaNazaretha who founded eBuhleni Village, tells in one of his undated tape-recorded sermons that Mayekisa, his grandfather, instilled this idea to his sons. He tells that when a certain Sotho man wanted to marry his aunt after Mayekisa had passed away, Isaiah Shembe and his brothers chased him away on the basis of his tribe being Sotho, not Zulu (A.K. Shembe, unti- tled sermon, undated). This is pretty significant for this study because some of Isaiah Shembe’s hymns and sacred texts evince a kind of Zulu nationalism that has led most scholars to see him as concerned with Zulu ethnicity while he was interested in broad (South) African issues that impinged on every (South) African. I deal with this issue in more detail in Chapter One. In this book I am interested in the way in which Isaiah Shembe uses the medium of hymns to imagine the South African situation like the tragedy that befell the Hlubi people and their chief, Langalibalele (even though he does not mention Langalibalele particularly in his hymns); the Zulu king Cetshwayo in 1879 (about which he tells that ‘the war between the English and Cetshwayo was fought while we were at Coenraad’s. We were uprooted by the Anglo-Boer war) (Papini, 1999: 260); as well as his present historical context. I explore these hymns as spiritual and sacred texts that have an ability also to speak to the ‘burning issues’ of Isaiah Shembe’s time. In other words what I am proposing here is a reading that, while exploring the way in which Shembe used the genre of hymns to deal with socio-political issues, is not reluctant to acknowledge and engage with the spirituality and sacredness of these texts. This reading is important because even though some of these hymns deal with ‘political issues’, they are predominantly religious texts used in wor- ship and many times when performed their political content does not take centre stage in the minds of those performing them. For Nazaretha members, .

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