Joel Cabrita - The People’s Zion: Southern Africa, the United States, and a Transatlantic Faith-Healing Movement

THE PEOPLES ZION

SOUTHERN AFRICA, THE UNITED STATES, AND A TRANSATLANTIC FAITH-HEALING MOVEMENT

Joel Cabrita

THE BELKNAP PRESS OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge, Massachusetts

London, England

2018

Copyright 2018 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College

All rights reserved

Cover photograph: uSipho Mathunjwa noScara (2015) 2016 Sabelo Mlangeni. All rights reserved.

Cover design: Annamarie McMahon Why

978-0-674-73778-5 (alk. paper)

978-0-674-98576-6 (EPUB)

978-0-674-98577-3 (MOBI)

978-0-674-98578-0 (PDF)

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Names: Cabrita, Joel, 1980 author.

Title: The peoples Zion : southern Africa, the United States, and a transatlantic faith-healing movement / Joel Cabrita.

Description: Cambridge, Massachusetts : The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017042704

Subjects: LCSH: Zionist churches (Africa)Africa, Southern. | Zionist churches (Africa)South AfricaJohannesburg. | Zionist churches (Africa)IllinoisZionHistory20th century. | Spiritual healingAfrica, Southern. | Spiritual healingIllinoisZion. | Africa, SouthernRace relations. | Africa, SouthernChurch history20th century. | Zion (Ill.)Church history20th century.

Classification: LCC BR1446 .C33 2018 | DDC 276.8/082dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017042704

DANIEL NKONYANE was an early twentieth-century small-scale farmer who was born, lived, and died within a small region in the South African Highveld, a plateau of arable farmland in the middle of the country. In common with many thousands in this area, Nkonyanes horizons were much broader than the narrow world of his farm. Nkonyanes life had been dramatically impacted by a series of world events, including the discovery of precious minerals in the Witwatersrand in the 1880s and the ensuing international gold rush as the city of Johannesburg rapidly industrialized, the devastation to African farmers by the global South African War (18991902), and the subsequent annexation of the region and its subjects as a possession of the British Empire. But there was one international event that perhaps defined the course of Nkonyanes life more profoundly than any other. This was the arrival in South Africa in 1904 of a Christian church known as Zion. With roots that spanned nineteenth-century imperial Australia and the North American industrial metropolis of Chicago, Zion was a worldwide faith-healing movement that instructed its working-class followers to pray for bodily health and to renounce medical assistance. Upon joining this international Protestant movement, Zionists such as Daniel Nkonyane were immersed in a worldwide fraternity of evangelical Christiansblack and whitewho eschewed the elite expertise of doctors for the ministrations of the Holy Spirit. A life-long member of Zion, Nkonyane corresponded with representatives of the church outside of Chicago and eagerly received and read its faith healing tracts and periodicals. In addition, he regularly sent across the Atlantic tithes from his congregation to the North American headquarters, as well as posted lengthy baptismal lists of his members in South Africa, a sign of his literal registration of his regional church within the international movement. Nkonyane, as was the case for many other Africans of this period, felt himself intimately part of what Zions founder, John Alexander Dowie, dubbed one great, universal church [in which] there are no foreign fields, no home fields everywhere Zion is one.

This book tells the story of transatlantic Zion, an international evangelical Christian faith-healing church that originated in Australia, and subsequently spread from the United States across the Atlantic Ocean to become what is now the single largest religious movement of modern Southern Africa.The Peoples Zion argues that Zions remarkable success in Southern Africa demonstrates the saliency of Christian evangelicalism for diverse societies undergoing profound social changesindustrialization, urbanization, widespread migration, nativist and colonial racially inflected legislationthroughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In North America and Southern Africa, Zion flourished as the faith of choice for working-class people attempting to navigate the stark social inequalities resulting from these transformations. Part of the international Protestant divine healing movement of the late nineteenth century, Zions emancipatory teaching was that ordinary Christians such as Daniel Nkonyane could access dramatic powers of healing through prayerful reliance on God, relegating the expertise of doctors and other biomedical professionals irrelevant at best, and ungodly at worst. North American and African Zionists criticism of medical experts was part of their larger attack on all thosewithin the church and withoutwho claimed prestige and status according to worldly criteria of education or wealth or social standing. Over the past century and a half, Zionist believers of different races on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean have joined company with countless working-class people who found in evangelical Protestant Christianity a Bible-derived faith that claimed to topple the new stratum of upper-class elites emerging from the crucible of industrialization and urbanization. In Melbourne, Chicago, and Johannesburg, for more than a century, Zion emerged as a vast, loosely defined evangelical Christian movement of and for the people. It has consistently spoken most powerfully to those who found themselves on the margins of power during a century of great fluidity and social change, and it has equipped these believers with the conviction that it is precisely they who possess the spiritual credentials to disrupt established authorities. In modern Southern Africa, as across the American Midwest, transatlantic Zion has taught its members the democratic lessons of populist evangelicalism: how to resist the new medical, religious, economic, and social elite who emerged throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as well as how to subvert restrictive stratifications of humanity by mobilizing Zions vision of the equality of all.

Today, approximately fifteen million Southern Africans belong to Zion.

This book argues that a transnational lens is the best way to view the story of Zions remarkable success in diverse regions and societies across the world. In addition to its staggering size, Zions story exceeds national and territorial boundaries. The movement had its roots in colonial Australia, came to fruition in the American Midwest and found its greatest success in Southern Africa. Today, Zion retains its border-crossing character, spanning South Africa, Swaziland, Mozambique, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Malawi. Reflecting the highly interconnected nature of Southern Africa itself, Zion is best understood as a network of exchanges between believers across the region. Further adding to its complex border-crossing nature, Zion is no longer a single organization, as it was in the American Midwest of the 1890s. Instead, it constitutes a loose evangelical federation of thousands of Zion churches displaying much diversity in theology and practice. Indeed, it is partly Zions decentralized, diffuse nature that has enabled the movement to travel so nimbly across territories, cultures, and languages, predisposing Zionists to rapidly adapt to local conditions and assume protean forms. Yet alongside this diversity (itself an enduring characteristic of the Protestant tradition), most of these believers continue identifying themselves with the evangelical values of Zionreflected in their choice of names for their disparate organizationsand some still express loyalty to the original faith-healing church of the nineteenth-century Midwest, continuing to use its devotional literature and reiterate its doctrinal credos.