Browsing by Author "Sithole, Nkosinathi."

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Performance, power and agency : Isaiah Shembe's hymns and the sacred dance in the Church of the Nazarites.
(2010) Sithole, Nkosinathi.; West, Gerald Oakley.; Brown, Duncan John Bruce.
This study examines the sacred dance in the Nazaretha Church and Isaiah Shembe's hymns as “agency” and not “response” (Coplan, 1994: 27). A number of studies on the Nazaretha Church and Isaiah Shembe posit that Shembe created his popular texts (especially the sacred dance) as a response to colonialism and the oppression of black people. In countering such a proposition I argue that in exploring the sacred dance we need to look at the motivation for members to participate in the dance. With that view in mind, I examine the sacred dance and the hymns as examples of a popular culture which is both „transnational‟ and „transglobal‟, to use Hofmeyr‟s terms (2004). This is because it is common in the Nazaretha Church that members taking part in the sacred dance claim to be doing so on behalf of their dead relatives, as it is believed that ancestors are able to participate in those dances through the bodies of their living relatives. In return, those in the ancestral realm will reward the living performers by offering them „blessings‟. In the Nazarite Church, and through performances like the sacred dance, the physical and spiritual worlds are perceived to be integrated. I therefore examine these hymns and performances as examples of popular culture “that is more than sub- or trans-national, [that] is trans-worldly and trans-global” (Hofmeyr, 2004: 9). In other words, I examine the sacred dance as performances and the hymns as texts whose audience is not only living people but also people in heaven. This means my study goes beyond the view that Nazarite performances are rituals of empowerment for the members, a majority of whom are economically, socially and politically marginalised (Muller, 1999), to look at them as significant on their own account. In undertaking the abovementioned task, I examine these hymns and performances in relation to “oral testimony of their significance to the people who [perform] and [listen] to them” (White, 1989: 37). Oral testimony of dreams and miracles suggests that Nazarite members who take part in the sacred dance do so primarily because of the imagined relationship between the individual and divine power. As Mbembe states, “it is the subject‟s relation to divine sovereignty that serves as the main provider of meanings for most people” (2002: 270). I argue that Nazarite members take part in the sacred dance mainly as an attempt to “manage the „real world‟ on the basis of the conviction that all symbolisation refers primarily to a system of the invisible, of a magical universe, the present belonging above all to a sequence that opens onto something different” (270).
Testimony, identity and power : oral narratives of near-death experiences in the Nazarite church.
(2005) Sithole, Nkosinathi.; Brown, Duncan John Bruce.
In this study I investigate the narratives of near-death experiences in the Nazarite Church as one way in which this community grapples with the question of death and the after-life. However, I am particularly interested in the manner in which Nazarite members deploy these experiences to define individual and collective identities. I argue that in the Nazarite Church the significance of near-death experiences is neither rooted in the future nor in the past, but it is something of the here and now. As Biesele states, " Old stories are powerful not because they come from the past, but because they are told in the present" (1999: 167). Nazarite members are not only regarded by many as backward, uneducated, and unemployed rural people, they are also accused of worshipping another human being like themselves, Shembe. For the Nazarites then near-death narratives are important because they serve as proof that Shembe is not just an ordinary human being, he is the one sent from above. Many near-death experiencers testify that they have met Shembe on their spiritual journeys. While this does give the Nazarites a sense of what may happen to them when they die, it is more important as a tool for confirming or defending their faith against the people who criticise and look down upon them and their church. However, Nazarite members, especially those who have had near-death experiences, also use these experiences to imagine individual identities. Since the church has grown rapidly in the past decades, there has been a growing need to define the self in relation to the group. Newcomers (there are many of them) are regarded as ignorant of the ways of the church and are sometimes called by pejorative names like Qhawe, (Braveman) and Khethankosi (Converts). The near-death experience provides those 'newcomers' who have experienced it with a means to assert their agency in that they have been to the other world and have witnessed what many only hear about. Even for those who were already members of the church when they had the experience, this make them important. They have seen 'home'. Their stories are recorded and disseminated in the church, thus becoming part of the church's cultural capital. Sometimes ministers and preachers invite those who have had near-death experiences to come and share their stories in the Temples they oversee.