Dance uniform history in the church of Nazareth Baptists: the move to tradition.

Uniformed traditional "holy dance" makes the Nazareth Baptists most conspicuously the cultural nationalist African-initiated or independent church (AIC) in South Africa today. No other wears its African identity so forthrightly. In this essay I discuss modifications to the IsiZulu dance uniforms during the period of the founder's younger son and successor Johannes Galilee Shembe (1935-76). These changes--the Church's adoption and adaption of traditional Zulu attire, symptomatic of a broader societal move toward neotraditionalism--allow us to trace what kinds of pressure Shembe was under, socially and politically, as a "middle way" Christian enculturator. In securing the "uniformizing" of this dance worship's African attires, Galilee Shembe had to address two broader social tendencies that complicated his struggle for formal state recognition and registration: pervasive Zuluist ethnic-national nostalgia and tenacious pre-Christian sexual mores, in combination influencing a church already controversial and in uneven transit from its phase of founding charisma to the rigors of institutionalization. These, I argue, were the two major influences on the emergence and development of the Nazarites' African dance uniforms into today's splendor.

Procession into Dance

The Zulu-Hlubi visionary Isaiah Shembe founded the Nazareth Baptist Church in 1910 at his citadel Ekuphakameni, just north of Durban. South Africa's earliest "Zion City," (1) it is today's single enduring instance of this category in KwaZulu-Natal and is believed to be expanding steadily. Though the reputation for miraculous powers inherited by the founder's three successors (two sons and a grandson) may account for much of this growth, it must owe in equal part to the appeal of a style of worship that is unique and markedly different from that of the Zion-Apostolics.

Since the early-to mid-1920s, "Shembe's Church"--the AmaNazaretha--has observed a "holy dance" as well as a temple service, respectively the "African" and "biblical" streams whose confluence here makes this church so iconic an instance of the indigenization or enculturation of Christianity by charismatic African bricoleurs. Today at the dance ground of the post-1978-schism citadel Ebuhleni, the onlooker cannot but notice a great preponderance of plumed neotraditional uniforms, with just a single Western or syncretic outfit. (2) Investigation reveals how broader African cultural nationalism, though it came into full spate only in the 1950s, began striking root somewhat earlier, in precisely such decisions as the AmaNazaretha's founder, Isaiah Shembe, took during his later period (1925-35) to allow traditional sacred dance as appropriate liturgy for the church in Africa.

Throughout the movement's early years (1910-25), women had a special set of uniforms for the processions from which the holy dance emerged (Vilakazi 1986:148), but men wore just the plain white surplice called umNazaretha. (3) Today, dancing in this surplice takes place only informally, at the open or close of the Saturday Sabbath service or the monthly peer-group gatherings of the Church's three constituent units: men, wives, and unmarried women ("princesses/maidens/virgins"). For city and rural dwellers alike, these spontaneous sessions are the chance for some group practice in anticipation of the formal dance at festivals and gatherings, when the "clean" (ritually pure) array themselves in the IsiZulu dance panoply with which this article deals. (4) It is substantially on account of this resplendent suite of African uniforms that the Church has begun to be feted in post-emancipation South Africa as one of the new nation's foremost "storehouses of tradition." (5) (Some years back I met the leader of one of the Church youth dance-teams as he was ordering a new team outfit; adamant that the name of my employer--the Durban municipality local history museum, Inqolobane yomlando wesifunda, "storehouse of local history"--should be printed on the front and back of the T-shirts, he seemed taken aback when I asked whether this was appropriate: "But that's exactly what our church is!")

The Nazarites' neotraditional uniforms are more than this, however: They are a striking example of how quickly symbolic resistance was underway in grassroots churches in the wake of the brutally suppressed anti-poll-tax Zulu Rebellion of 1906. Notwithstanding this, charismatic Christianizers' contribution to the ferment of oppositional consciousness remained largely unremembered through the Struggle Years (roughly 1950-90), when antiapartheid activists condemned AICs as quietist, quiescent, or even, from some viewpoints, collaborationist. Thanks to research on the symbolic dimensions of power in southern Africa (Kiernan 1979, 1991; Comaroff 1985) we have come to understand how opaquely but emphatically political was the use of uniform in the service of an agenda of redoubt, or cultural consolidation, in anticipation of further upheaval.

Isaiah Shembe's program of "cultural redoubt as resistance" was undertaken in the first instance to provide material refuge for the most vulnerable of early twentieth century segregationism's victims around the Durban basin. This made land acquisition Shembe's major concern, but the project of stabilizing the wider society by example called for a congregation organized into the traditional gender-and age-based social categories of men, wives, and unmarried females that today structures many an African church, mainline as well as independent (though less overtly than the AmaNazaretha).

This seeming default traditionalism was not thoroughgoing, however, for according to Isaiah Shembe's son and first successor Johannes Galilee, his father was at first "totally opposed to all forms [of dance]" (Fernandez 1973:42). Later, as his praise poems possibly reflect, (6) it was the arguments of traditionalist converts that persuaded him to reconsider as possibly Eurocentric his perspective on religious dance. His subsequent rereading of Scripture, finding that dance had been important in biblical cultures, decided for him the issue of kinesthetic worship in the indigenization of Christianity in Africa. Beyond strengthening each gender/age group's esprit de corps, holy dances would help declare his faith and church as uncompromisedly biblically grounded.

By some accounts Shembe founded his church around 1912, but accepted dance only after 1919 (Fernandez 1973:42), perhaps even "as late as 1925" (Becken 1965:105). Nonetheless, and whatever socio-cultural climate or circumstances occasioned his somewhat belated volte-face, it seems the congregation's use of ordinary ethnic IsiZulu attire (not the dance uniform later instituted under that name) had met with his formal acceptance much before this. An oral tradition recorded in the early 1960s (Becken 1965:103) shows how, by that time, the matter of hard-line mission attitudes to African tradition in general had become so vexatious for followers that the very birth of their Church itself had come to be regarded as its upshot. In 1910, the year that the Church officially designates as its founding, Shembe, then an unaffiliated roving evangelist still in the habit of handing over new converts to the nearest mission, entrusted a group of around fifty traditionals at Botha's Hill above Durban to the area's American Zulu Mission station. Garbed as they were, admission was refused, which, it is said, precipitated Shembe into forming a founding nucleus to take in other rural dwellers who had suffered similar indignities.

Customary "furs and hide," then, are held to have had a place very early at Ekuphakameni (Shembe's citadel at Inanda, half a day's ride north of Durban), and therefore to constitute one of his Church's keystones. Oral traditions attribute the origin of the festal uniforms to the founder's visionary experience (Papini and Hexham 2002:50-51), and while most men of Shembe's early following were not traditionals but mission defectors (Brown 1995:230-31)--quite conceivably, precisely those who lay behind his initial opposition to dance--at some point they, too, would have come around to his new position opposing the more extreme Eurocentrisms. But for at least a decade (1915-25), traditional men who might have supported his revised stance remained a tiny and probably somewhat silent minority; his early congregation was largely female, made up of widows and orphans, spinsters, abandoned women, and girls fleeing arranged marriages (Muller 1999:12, 19). Concerned primarily with these most disempowered and muted groups, Isaiah Shembe had inaugurated no folk-nostalgic furs-and-hide fantasy, but a "bride [of Christ]" identity, with suitably chaste, tailored uniforms probably modeled on female uniform in other independent churches (possibly the Johannesburg-based African Native Baptist Church of William Leshega into which Shembe was baptized in 1906). These uniforms were worn for congregational processions around the temple following the Ark of his covenant, singing his hymns to a slow bass drumbeat. It seems fair to assume that whenever it was that Nazarite holy dance proper began at Ekuphakameni, it was with the men in fur kilts, their wives in beading and blankets; only later did it draw in the earliest Western or biblical Church uniforms, with these dwindling later yet, largely giving place to the IsiZulu that formerly Shembe and his mission proselytes had only tolerated as the vestiges of sentimental folk dress, but now acknowledged as properly transformative of the sacral ground.

Formalization of IsiZulu and the Move to Tradition

By the early 1930s, Isaiah Shembe had acquired a "Zulu" profile; he was one stanchion in an alliance between the white Union establishment and a black elite of petit bourgeoisie and chiefs. His following comprised many for whom their national, Zulu identity was accommodated in this spiritual home as in no other. But in the holy dance, wearers of old-style North Nguni folk attire were still a minority (Vilakazi 1986:148). The development of a distinctive Church apparel, including greater dance-dress uniformity and the rise of IsiZulu to predominance, took place with the growth and consolidation of Isaiah Shembe's core congregation under his son Galilee after 1935.

Following South Africa's second Native Land Act (in 1936, the year of Galilee's accession to leadership), there was a fresh influx of dispossessed traditional people into the Church, mirroring what had happened after the 1913 Act. During the 1930s and 1940s, the Church's name changed to "Zulu National Baptists" (M'timkulu 1977:29) as it fed into a province-wide groundswell of identity politics, seen in the photographic record as the political elite's accoutering au traditionelle (Klopper 1991:214). For cultural insiders of the day witnessing the Nazarite bricolage, what would have appealed most powerfully, spelling out a biblical creed with African identity, rooted into cultural memory by recent bitter historical experience, was what was immediately recognizable as "Zulu holy dance" (ukusina)--unmistakably the ancestral sacred style, at that time still preserved in some areas. Into the 1940s we can imagine the spread of a wider grassroots awareness that at Ekuphakameni could be found a rite of worship that had boldly broken with mission and derived ("Ethiopian") norms, and no less with the contemporaneous fever of Zion-Apostolic enthusiasms.

At the same time however, Galilee's church began to draw in converts from all three of these other church types. The newcomers, while likely to baulk at a holy dress little distinguished from heathen bests, proved receptive to clean-cut neo-traditional ensembles. Some at least were in any case seeking from their new allegiance exactly what their traditionalist co-converts did, and what no other church could offer: the sumptuous face of an otherwise clandestine patriotism and mystic participation in its morale-lifting national-cultural spectacle. For these same proselytes, the white umNazaretha surplice for the Sabbath meanwhile fulfilled the scriptural injunction of a temple service garment of utmost simplicity.

In the mid-twentieth century's religio-cultural climate of profuse growth of diverse independent churches, potential non-Christian converts to Shembe's Nazareth found that his Church's uniform suite combined the African (dance attire) with the biblical (surplice) in a manner that kept close enough to their traditions for comfort, while articulating clearly a biblically based allegiance distinct and separate from the prevailing alternatives: mission, Ethiopia, or Zion.

Predictably enough, mainline churches depreciated the uniformed dance of Ekuphakameni as a "nativistic relapse." Ironically, however, an anti-Left alliance of Natal chiefs and mission elite with the white plantocracy and Native Affairs Department, dating from the 1920s, had found an apparently conservative Shembe useful to its efforts during the early 1930s to contain a rapidly developing and restive rural underclass. Shembe's church, suddenly respectable, became a popular annual spectacle for the white borough of Durban, on intrepid Sunday outings to watch and photograph or film the--so it was imagined--"unadulterated Native dances." Down in the city this opportunity came only with infrequent one-off municipal gala spectacles, usually featuring exuberantly pagan worker-originated dance forms alongside the Nazarites.

For Isaiah Shembe, this approbative Western gaze, however cracked, affirmed what a tactical success his acceptance of dance had been: His initial discountenancing of it had been influenced by sensitivity to outsiders' censure; now came their approval, vindicating his subsequently defiant prodance stance and, for both sides, bringing his movement out of the political woods. For Galilee on his succession in 1936, one critical objective became securing the numerous concessions that followed from official recognition as a Christian denomination. (7) Times became more trying with the inception and implementation of apartheid, certainly for the young black intelligentsia to which this graduate of (the black university of) Fort Hare belonged; the conflict between the values of "civilized" and "uncivilized" that their fathers' generation had been mediating (Muller 1999:75) was now much intensified.

In effect, Galilee inherited in full the challenge that his father had accepted in bringing resolute traditionalists into the church. Over the middle of the century he had to confront a triad of tendencies that had been latent in early twentieth century traditionalist society and were now fully emergent: ecstatic religiosity (the Zion-Apostolics), nationalistic nostalgia (Zuluism), and the widespread, enduring prevalence of pre-Christian sexual norms and codes, symbolized for many by the urban-originated dance form ingoma. (8) His substantial formalization of the IsiZulu dance uniforms, along with later changes to them, can be read as the outcome of Galilee's awareness of outsider perceptions of how his still-controversial church handled these powerful cultural-political impulses, concentrated in what was probably his majority constituency by the mid-1950s: the traditionalists.

Here I deal with how perceptions of just two tendencies, Zuluism and "ngomaism," modified the IsiZulu uniforms, since what most concerned Galilee was how these perceptions informed the cold surveillant stare of mainline churchgoers and state bureaucrats. As polarization in South Africa intensified after mid-century, he was forced to take constant account of suspicions on the part of clerics and state officials that he was responsible for both "heathenish regression" (which, for the mission stereotype of African culture, was automatically evoked by traditional attires) and possible "subversive inclinations" among his subjugated people. (9) His father had effectively confronted both these difficulties by the embrace of an expressive domain (dance) whose religious dimension had become obscured--for the mission churches and other AICs by association with city-spawned ingoma and its unbridled "heathen prurience," and for the white state by association with ascendant Zuluist national sentiment. (10) Thus while the sober, dignified dance of the ancestors at Ekuphakameni did offer a tempered alternative to the ecstatic up-wellings in the Zion-Apostolic churches, willy-nilly and undeniably it carried overtones of military elan that might quickly disquiet the colonial magistracy, arousing apprehensions and a tacit blacklisting. (11) Furthermore, in respect of womanhood, its sacred uniforms' "nudity" for young women only broadcast to all Christendom that backsliding was not confined to Africa's less-evangelized regions.

Galilee Shembe well understood that the all-important official recognition of his church depended on expunging the better part of these two tendencies, but a fast-growing membership was not easy to police adequately for conformity with the rules he was formulating (a "Revived Law" initiative from this period shows plainly Galilee's concern that his father's legacy was under threat). (12) Modification of the Church's image became his means of easing the very real dilemma then facing him: of trying to Africanize a liturgy without reinforcing white officialdom's suspicions that he was covertly rallying nationalist feeling over a base of recrudescent "heathen practices."

The Nazarite Girdles

North Nguni male dress is the girdle (umutsha; Fig. 2), comprising a loin cover (isinene) of clustered pendants of worked fur and a rear apron of tanned hide (ibheshu, Fig. 4). Between these may be suspended fur pendants known as izinjobo or imvayizane, which are fuller and often longer (waist to knee) than those making up isinene. Often omitted by traditionalists who may not be able to afford them, they are mandatory for Nazarites and lend to the Church umutsha its distinctive luxuriance. This preserves modesty in the worship, guarding against inadvertent exposure--notwithstanding that the leg-lift of the Nazareth holy dance is restrained, far removed from the ingoma/indlamu style's shoulder-high flail. (For the same reason, dancers cannot omit their traditional Zulu prepuce-cover, umncedo iqhoyi, a bulb woven of ilala palm leaf.)

[FIGURES 2 & 4 OMITTED]

Photographs from Galilee's middle period (1945-65) show men wearing only mid-thigh-length izinene (KCAL n.d.:9), but at some point during his later period (1965-76) the izinjobo were added and became a metonym for the whole male IsiZulu dance group: Injobo. (13) As such they can be seen as the church reclaiming the broader social memory of dance's image from the amnesia of an exclusive association with courtship erotism or parades of arms. Those who gird Injobo are performing neither clan-praise bombastics nor crowd-pleasing antics, but rather a choreography of contemplation and glorification, by which the body is redeemed from a profane tendency in local pre-Christian history to self-divinization, and restored as a frame only--or indeed temple--for the splendors of a post-militarist worshipfulness.

Of Galilee's 1943 edict that made traditional attire mandatory for all church weddings (Vilakazi 1986:86), Nazarites of today say that he foresaw the coming of apartheid in 1949 and understood how its radical separations might be turned to some use. In time, that is, the aloofness of a state committed to the principle of "groups" and "own affairs" would produce a climate of inwardness conducive to Africanist reform of anachronistic custom and tradition, enabling Galilee's move to address deep-rooted male chauvinism, for example, by inculcating an ethos of sacrosanct virginity amongst Nazarite youth, female and male, as prelude to a church-endogamous marriage rule.

The new, fuller male girdle Injobo thus appeared as an aesthetic enhancement of tradition that also expressed and promoted a shift toward biblical views of body modesty. Further to confront his own anxieties that the church, as it indigenized, was being stereotyped as a heathenish regression, Galilee engaged also with the female IsiZulu uniforms: Precisely the same transformation is seen in the maidens' ine(m)be apron of bead fabric.

Wives' IsiDwaba

In their founder's time, Nazarite wives wore for the holy dance the symbols of wifehood in their traditional everyday dress: isidwaba, the skirt made of the pleated hide from a heifer or bullock sacrificed, at the wedding, to the husband's ancestors, and inkehli, the topknot, displaced among the mid-century's modernizing traditionals by isicholo, the trademark Zulu "crown" hat of ochre-dyed string-weave. This basic ensemble, however, leaves the wife's upper body bare. When the costume was "uniformized" under Galilee (at a date as yet undetermined--possibly during the 1940s, more likely the 1950s), the new modesty demanded a wraparound top, isicwayo. This attitudinal shift was probably cumulative, driven as much by women themselves as by any edict from the male leadership: Photographs from the 1940s to the 1960s (Whysalls album nos. 17, 24, 31, 38) show that a range of cotton prints was in use before standardization into today's scarlet blouse with white bead-line pattern and pair of long bead-fabric bands (amagxaba) layered along the hem (Fig. 9). Some variation is seen during the 1970s, but today this uniform is so fully standardized. (14) that the only variation apart from beadwork pattern is in the isicholo (Fig. 11).

[FIGURES 9 & 11 OMITTED]

The Nazarite matrons' IsiZulu represents the first-ever true "uniformization" of one regional variant of twentieth century Zulu speakers' folk attire. It flourished when a new, wide availability of industrially manufactured dress materials made possible a modern standard of sartorial uniformity. (15) Combined with the mid-century tendency toward a new conception of modesty, it represents a fruitful syncretization by reconciling opposed civilizational precepts: Rigorous, "regimental" homogenization was positioned as a corrective to the dismissive ethnocentricity of Westerners that makes nakedness the image of the wild/undisciplined. The same was to happen with the IsiZulu of unmarried women ("maidens"), both presenting an African contribution to the localizing of biblical faith against the simple borrowing of foreign forms which the uniforms of other AICs represent (Makhubu 1988:86). As a psychology major, Galilee Shembe no doubt well appreciated how uniform serves to bond a collective: His "neotraditional" dress innovations for married and unmarried women played no small part in making today's dance ground synchrony of the Church's great female majority into so distinctive and stirring a liturgical offering.

This so-called IsiDwaba (the matrons' and maidens' IsiZulu), which is in the fullest sense a uniformization of folk garb, stands in pronounced contrast to the Injobo, which despite the fuller girdle, was then--and today remains--entirely a folk festal best. (16) The politics of race dominion ensured that uniformization of men faced quite different problems: To be sure, leaving female traditional church dress "unmodestized" would have opened Galilee to accusations of backsliding, but much worse would have been to give as much military-style exactness to the Injobo as he had to IsiDwaba. This would certainly have pricked official suspicions about incubating nationalist zeal up at "Shembe's village."

Galilee's nonintervention here followed his father's lead: Though one of prophet Isaiah's hymns (No. 45) refers to his men as "sons of Shaka [Zulu]," in the sartorial domain he had refrained from instituting any equivalent provocation that authorities could construe as subversion or incitement. So, while under Galilee Shembe the Injobo filled out from a slight two-piece into a full girdle, to this day it remains, as originally intended, far from a uniform sensu strictu: A multiplicity of local styles was evident at Ebuhleni over the 1990s, in a variety of available materials including unworked fur and ranched gazelle hide.

The Maiden IsiDwaba

It is not readily apparent just when Galilee carried out his formalization of dance attire in the sphere of the unmarried women, but it seems likely to have been somewhat later than in the case of the wives' uniform, for with the "virgins" as with the men, the move to tradition was probably more complicated. The visual record shows that until late in the founder's day, the suite of "bride" and other non-African uniforms that he had allocated early on for temple processions were being worn in the dance. (17) It is clear from the main source's specific mention of these outfits appearing in the "concluding days" of the July festival (Roberts 1936:106) that in the early 1930s they featured in the main dances, and not, as today, only in the festival's overture (the opening week of the main annual festival in July). Once they had been confined to just this one set of dances in the year, the embryonic "Zulu traditional" girls' outfit moved into central position. This IsiZulu had probably begun appearing alongside the bride uniforms as Isaiah Shembe found himself pressured by traditional families arriving in the church through the mid-1920s to allow their daughters to wear home garb at least in the dance. Brief filmic glimpses (Acutt n.d.) give an impression of some uniformization having taken place by the early 1930s; indeed, for the same reasons as applied to wives' attire, Nazareth maidens' IsiZulu for holy dance could not remain for long "undomesticated," identical with the variegated brassy caprices and vanities of country hussies.

Karen Brown's 1995 thesis suggests that in creating a uniform for the Church's maidens, Isaiah Shembe had naturally to mark off his reworking of their holy dance attire very strongly from what ordinary girls were wearing at the time in the rural district of Inanda surrounding Ekuphakameni: imigingqo, for example--beaded wraparound hip belts worn at least into the 1950s--only partly covered their wearers' derrieres, with often only a very token cache-sex (isigege). Accordingly, at Ekuphakameni the same ethos of biblical modesty that demanded the matrons' top, here at some point put nubiles into short red skirts and the older girls into longer black ones. (18) (The same scheme, following traditional color symbolism-see Ngubane 1977--occurs with the boys' "Scotch" uniforms).

As mentioned, these skirts have together become known as isidwaba, the name of the married woman's full dressed-hide skirt, clearly because they foreshadowed the traditional nuptial girding of this first symbol of Zulu womanhood. (19) One umphathi (group leader) told researcher Geraldine Morcom that before the founder introduced the use of fabric for girls' skirts, they wore attenuated versions of the wife's hide skirt (Morcom 1994:168). Today, by contrast, conceding to modern sensitivities, soft fabric is allowed instead of hide. The red isidwaba is a pleated cotton, the black a polyester with layered fringing, both being demure versions of the micro-skirt of nubile traditionals (udidla)--notwithstanding which, however, a towel must always be worn under the waist-to-knee black isidwaba for modesty, as elders find its lightweight fabric otherwise too revealing.

Galilee's promulgation of this "Nazareth IsiDwaba" presaged the indigenized unmarried women's uniform proper that was to emerge over his middle period (1945-65). (20) At some stage during these two decades, both skirts adopted an identical beadwork ensemble, the three-piece beaded belt set known as imibamba (Fig. 22). This solid, hip-mounted equipage re-presents the imigingqo buttock-clasps in "modestized" form. Nonetheless, the upper body is left unclad, in what to the Western view is an apparent paradox (what is "dressed"?). But given the fundamental cultural dictum here, (21) which Church men related to me so frequently, the logic of this baring is clear: If any unchastity inevitably leaves its visible mark on the body, virgins can be expected to police themselves--and one another--assiduously against the risk of exposure and shaming on the sacred ground.

[FIGURE 22 OMITTED]

The maiden IsiDwaba therefore shows Shembe's church critically engaging tradition for outside (European) eyes, but in so doing being unable to dispense entirely with customary (African) norms and expectations. It was clearly necessary to genuflect before these conventions in order, for example, to reinforce young women's adherence to the new ideal of chastity, built on a concept of sanctified female virginity symbolizing the way of salvation (Muller 1999). Control of a fraying church youth would be regained by sternly enjoining them to revive an indigenous moral code that was figured as having lapsed during the colonization chapter.

The Maiden Inembe

After mid-century, with an expanding congregation caught between the opposed strains of postwar social emancipation in the wider world and resurgent traditionalism locally, Galilee increasingly found the balance between civilizational opposites not easily kept, in either unmarried or married domains. The married women, for example, ventured at one point to modernize (for patriarchs, "throw away") their recently established IsiZulu by abandoning the stiff, coarse hide pleating of the heavy traditional isidwaba skirt in favor of either using unpleated black burlap, for a much attenuated skirt, or--yet more unacceptably--replacing the prescribed garment altogether with ibhayi, a print apron worn by some traditionalists around the top third of the skirt. The response from an unsettled patriarchal leadership was solemn and uncompromising:

   ...[W]e are not accustomed to this
   kind of skirt, which is so uncomfortably
   tight-fitting that a person
   can scarcely lift her leg when walking
   ... This clothing is such that
   when one moves, it seems she is
   wearing nothing. One can easily see
   her shape. But, this is not a maiden,
   this is a woman! What does the
   rule say when a person dresses
   thus? The hide skirt is there, and is
   intended to give the woman her
   dignity (Papini and Hexham 2000:
   140-41, paras. 101-103). (22)

Although this warning seems to have had the desired effect, so that today a skirt of hide is mandatory, increasingly it is, after all, a new form of isidwaba that has become the widely preferred norm: well-cured goatskin, formally disallowed but popular because it is lightweight and soft and has a fine nap with a blacking that does not come off with handling.

Male elders had cause for concern again when unmarried women began unendorsed modifications of the prophetically ordained uniform: During the 1960s, influenced by dress trends in wider society, they began taking their knee-length black isidwaba up almost to mid-thigh. Photographs from the period (23) show that while some skirts remain just above the knee, others indeed go up that high. The orders issued by the leadership putting an end to this were part of the "Revived Law" initiative of (probably) the 1960s:

   Certain women are not dressing in a
   respectable manner. We beg them to
   come under the discipline of God,
   because their manner of dressing is
   not pleasing. Wearing short dresses
   insults the believer shamelessly. We
   are asking them to go back to the
   rule of God in their dressing. All
   these things have been written
   down, and we ask you to adhere to
   them (Papini and Hexham 2002:141,
   paras. 111-12).

I have heard, however, that relapses to the mini black isidwaba began again in the mid-1980s, and observed that they go on, as one vexed evangelist put it, "up till today" (Fig. 23, contrast Fig. 25).

[FIGURES 23 & 25 OMITTED]

Unquestionably this issue--a generation beginning to slip from its parents' hold and "following the world"--lies behind the appearance of an entirely new and standardized item of maiden beadwork in approximately the early to middle years of Galilee's four decades: a large bead fabric panel called by the girls inembe, worn over the abdomen between the waist and hip belts (Figs. 23-25) and made triple or quadruple the size of the traditional isigege (which is most often a panel of bead fabric, but sometimes just a clump of beads). Of course, this expansive modification may well have been in some degree women's own natural development of their beadworking tradition. In affording the Church's specialist beadworkers their largest canvas yet, it certainly has served to showcase their protean artistry: With the availability of new bead types, recent fashions have evolved striking rhythmic intricacy. (24)

[FIGURE 24 OMITTED]

The significant Nazarite dance uniform development since the 1970s, then, has been loin-cover expansion for men and girls, as an aspect of Galilee's "middle way between civilizational oppositions." This was probably best expressed by the maiden torso remaining unclothed while the apron expanded, and rules on the skirt being invented and policed. By actively marking off sacred dance dress from popular rural gala attires, tradition is transformed, re-formed, and reinvented, even as the move to tradition is made.

Throughout the mid-1980s, Galilee's brother and successor Amos Shembe sustained the impetus of the ongoing move to tradition. First, he used Revelation 4:4 ("they had on their heads crowns of gold") to ordain for Sabbath/temple wear, complementing the surplice, the headwear of both male and female householder dance uniforms: Wives should always wear the crown-hat (inkehli), and all males either the umqhele (a tuboid cat-skin coronet with rear fur-tassels) or the larger "casque" of hide panels with whisker trimming popularly known as ikopolo ("corporal"). Then, having himself taken to wearing traditional dress under his gown for Holy Communion, Amos encouraged men to wear the fur girdle (umutsha) under their surplice or with other garb at all times during festival (Fig. 8), with bead fabric wristbands and anklets on the Sabbath, and also as casual wear around the home on weekends. Upon the matrons' dance uniform he bestowed permission for wearing, over the beadwork hatband (umnqwazi), an umqhele of genet fur, with a black globe of ostrich plumage (isidlodlo) at the center (Figs. 9-10). This completed the Nazareth IsiZulu as it stands today, with wide latitude allowed for Injobo's components, but with all of the female uniforms remaining strictly supervised ensembles, modifiable by edict of Shembe alone.

[FIGURES 8 & 10 OMITTED]

Consummating the Founder's Legacy

Acculturative movements of the last century in Africa have invariably struggled to reconcile sharply disparate civilizational values and precepts. This indwelling conflict was felt nowhere more keenly than around the sore issue of dance, held in the Western view to be, in small-society or cultic contexts, primarily a sex-oriented rite (until, that is, the recent realization that sacred dance is nearly universal, and the not-unrelated understanding of the Jewishness of Jesus and of the early Church).

In the early 1960s, Galilee Shembe was stressing that Church dance "by no means has the old heathen purpose of exhibiting oneself to the other sex" (Becken 1966:105). It is unlikely he was much believed by the ecclesiastical establishment, state officials controlling church registration, or indeed any outsider. When a recent researcher asked a Nazarite girl about the dance-ground siting of the maiden phalanxes adjacent to the Injobo, she was told explicitly that "during dancing, this is where girls are chosen by their husbands," forcing for her the conclusion that "Dancing is unambiguously focused on marriage (since) in all other contexts ... the marriageable categories are kept apart" (Morcom 1994:214-15, emphasis mine). Such an outsider deduction--that girls of marrying age are "on show" at the dances--is certainly somewhat encouraged by the style of the maidens' dance, which to the Western eye that misses its studied, meditative quality, appears more a type of chaste parading or demure self-presentation than a dance proper.

To outsiders, therefore, the Nazarite dance and its IsiZulu uniform have at first sight seemed unmistakable signs of a "neoheathenism"; indeed they may have contributed much to the pioneering scholar-missionary Bengt Sundkler's famous early judgment of Zionism in toto as a potential "bridge back to heathenism" (1961:297). But making sacred dance the only authorized arena for youth pair-matching was already a marked break with what prevailed in customary life. What was not clear to Sundkler was that uniformed dance was necessary not so much to "re-traditionalize" as to secure an all-important church endogamy. The Church's very self-reproduction called for courtship and marriage observances that could reliably protect against what all Zionist churches fought: contamination of the cleansed and sanctified by a promiscuous, fallen everyday world. As Muller stresses, "Perhaps the most dangerous form of pollution to the Nazarite community as a whole was that brought on by the loss of control of the fertility of young female virgins" (1999:64).

Her argument that the church's very keystone is control of female reproductive power by the exaltation of virginity as spiritual ideal is well attested by the appellations given two items of the maiden dance uniform. First is the nickname for the new "maxi" lap-apron detailed above: ine(m)be, from a plant used in a traditional fertility treatment. Second, there is the moniker for Amos Shembe's early-1980s contribution to the enhancement of the maiden isidwaba skirts, for both of which an identical extra beadwork set was ordained: three thick, heavy, densely plaited "chains" of looped beadstring--one dark blue, one red, one yellow--to be worn about the waist between the second and third imibamba belts (Fig. 22). Their name, izincu, is the plural of the generic term for the traditional Zulu "love-letter": ucu, a beadwork love-token exchanged by courting couples. And sure enough, when girls are given by their fathers at the Ebuhleni citadel's festival betrothals of affianced couples, bride confers on groom the token of her virginity, the Nazarite version of this ucu, a long twined double string of pure white new beads, worn wound several times around the neck, then sashwise down to a folded handkerchief pendant on the hip or the injobo. Amos Shembe's new maiden beadwork "love-letters" have been so named because, surely, they symbolize the commitment of the Nazarite "princesses" (Amakhosazane) to be chaste "brides of Shembe" until they become the brides of men. The complementary amanebe lap-covers, meanwhile, are those men's assurances of fertility, while the torso-framing imibamba belts serve to disclose to elders' scrutiny the self-conduct of the individual pre-courting adolescent in respect of these sacramental vows.

It helps to remember that for many African readers and discussants of the Bible, Hebrew religion was imaged in scripture as oriented overwhelmingly to community reproduction (most often, pointedly, under conditions of historical adversity). The Nazarite founder embraced the holy dance on discerning that biblical cultures, just like those of pre-contact Africa, had been founded not on any Hellenistic style of world-negation and denial of the body but on principles of "human flourishing." Inevitably this breakthrough entailed a momentous "Judaizing" challenge to the Western reading of scripture, with major implications for an African church liturgy, and for restoring the ancestral promise of a kinesthetic worship.

Galilee Shembe inherited his father's "Hebraizing" project, but found himself tasked, at a time when Zuluism was in the ascendant, with the trick of balancing pressures for a no-holds-barred move to tradition from his ministers and the increasing number of chiefs who were finding a spiritual home in the Church, against countervailing expectations of greater orthodoxy (or at the least, a much-diluted version of "the African") from the Euro-Christian mission-descended quarter and the officialdom whose endorsement he required to get his church registered. (25)

Today's IsiZulu uniforms reflect Galilee's inspired navigation of this difficult terrain. At Ebuhleni under the leadership of his brother Amos from 1979 to 1995, the Church has become widely known as one among KwaZulu-Natal's deeper "storehouses of local history" from which African cultural renascence may now draw. Changes to its dance dress over the last half-century suggest that moves to tradition among similar religious collectives might also pivot on creative material interventions, as these help drive home their message and mission to a growing and ever more heterogeneous urbanizing populace, and specifically to a post-liberation youth whose increasing media immersion and literacy is liable to be fast making them indifferently "post-religious."

[This article was accepted for publication in February 2002.]

(1.) According to Pretorius and Jafta's new typology of southern African Zionism (1997:219-20), the subset of "Zion City" churches comprises the large-scale incorporative movements which Sundkler (1961, 1976) characterized as typifying the Zulu language-area--perhaps because typically they nucleated around charismatic "prophet kings" who had managed to acquire lands and build theocratic centers where productive relations among the faithful were reorganized to form viable collective estates (Comaroff 1985:256). The great majority in "Zulu Zion" today, it should be noted, belong to the more numerous and evanescent city-based "small band" or house congregations, the "Zion-Apostolics."

(2.) For this male ensemble of sun-helmet, kilt, and boots, known as "the Scotch"--the only "non-African" holy dance uniform worn throughout the year, except on the Church's January pilgrimage to its holy mountain--see Papini 2002.

(3.) The surplice, with slightly different male and female versions, is named for the Shembe creed UbuNazaretha ("Nazaritehood"), a version of the ascetic vow of Yahweh's militant warrior elite in the struggle against Canaanism detailed in Numbers 6.

(4.) "IsiZulu" is the term applied to not only the language, but also anything "in the Zulu way." Nazarites wear their "neotraditional" dance attire not only for holy dance, but also for home ceremonies such as comings-of-age and weddings (Fig. 1), though not in the identical form seen in the holy festival or gathering.

(5.) On March 31, 2001, for example, to conclude an African Renaissance conference in Durban, State President Thabo Mbeki attended a King Cetshwayo Award ceremony honouring local heroes, including Isaiah Shembe, with plaques set into the pavement in front of City Hall. Making up the great majority of the crowd, and much enlivening the occasion, was a host of several thousand white-gowned Nazarites in the presence of their current leader M.V. Shembe, son of the founder's son and second successor, Amos Khula Shembe.

(6.) Praises (izibongo, "praise-poems") are a genre of southern African oratory that celebrate, on public occasions, great people's characters and deeds. Shembe's praises include "Dancer, they kept forcing him to dance, the ministers, white and black" (Gunner 1984, vol 2:27, 33, line 132), which I take to allude to the allegations heard in the church oral history (and at least one white sympathizer's writing) that mission churches spurned his overtures and requests for "instruction in faith" from them. Such closures of any opportunity for dialogue no doubt opened Shembe to Africanist influences within his congregation. One source reports it was his earliest traditional followers who caused the prophet to seek divine guidance concerning traditional dress and dancing (Tracey 1955:405; n.d:30).

(7.) In November 1950, Galilee submitted an application for government recognition, as he was finding it "difficult to get recognized and approved registered sites in the rural locations which are controlled by the state" (National Archives, Pretoria: file NTS 1431, 24/214 Part 2:141PP). He states that he had "interviewed [sic] the Secretary for Native Affairs," but did "not know how far the matter has been investigated'--little imagining that this official inertia was to outlast him.

(8.) In the late 1940s a debate smoldered in the Native Teachers" Journal on the topic of "The Preservation of African Music and Dancing" between proponents of "Primitive Bantu Dancing" and its opponents. The latter sought its removal for "laxity in the matter of sex" and "practices that stimulate and minister to the baser elements in man" (January 1949:100-101). The former supported its promotion in schools because "It has degenerated since the days of old, [thus] this is just the stage at which it needs our attention and control, for it will otherwise gallop downwards." The same writer adds, "Mr. Shembe and his people have tried to build up typical Bantu dances, which are appreciated for their cleanness and dignity, as well as for their enjoyable rhythm" (April 1949:187-48).

(9.) White Natal had a long-standing belief in the "menace of Zulu militarism" dating back to the Zulu king Dingane's raid on the early settlement of Port Natal (Durban). Sensitive to this aspect of the colonial psyche, Isaiah Shembe established as cardinal precept that all political affiliation and activism was to be "left at the gate [of the holy places]." Galilee's successor and brother, Amos Khula Shembe, maintained this quietist approach to politics through the party-political violence of the 1980s in KwaZulu-Natal.

(10.) It helps to remember that the grand military spectacles of the Zulu kingdom were transformations of the dances of the region's first-fruits ceremonies: In all areas under Zulu dominion, no chief was permitted to hold his own ceremony; all were obliged to attend the "great feast" at the Zulu capital that came quickly to resemble a grand parade review, with sophisticated military maneuvers akin to Western-style parades and processions. Religious rite, that is, had become military pageant, and the ukusina dances, having once been a matter of "worshipping with the body," as one elder put it (Webb and Wright 1982:153), became the arena for inter-regimental rivalry and competition, with -sina itself as a result coming to mean "to do better than, to surpass" (Webb and Wright 1982:326).

(11.) Such apprehensions are heard from, for example, the magistrate of Hlabisa in Zululand, following the murder of a policeman by a Nazarite in September, 1942: A. H. Astrup declared, "There is no doubt in my opinion that the Shembe sect is both political and nationalistic in origin" (letter to Chief Native Commissioner, September 21,1942; National Archives, Pretoria: file NTS 1431, 24/214 Part 2). Such convictions gave rise to a hostility later expressed by the magistrate of Verulam, who complained about "diabolical, unjust enrichment under the cloak of religion," and concluded that "the Shembe religion is entirely self-created to suit the private interests of the founder and his successors, and is nothing but a shocking fraud" (letter to Chief Native Commissioner, October 6, 1949; National Archives, Pretoria: file NTS 1431, 24/214 Part 2).

(12.) See Papini and Hexham 2002:125-144 ("Reminder of the Statute").

(13.) Before or after the temple prayer that precedes the holy dance today, the overall dance-leader of Injobo unfailingly delivers a five-minute caution to everyone--especially newcomers--that these are not ingoma dances. This forewarning not only underscores the Nazarite insistence on appropriate outfits kept immaculately, it also primes dancers against the temptation to bouts of ingoma-like expressionism, for, as a holy dance, ukusina makes line synchrony everything and any solo embellishment superfluous.

(14.) The traditional short cloak of hide (isiphika) was substituted by a black fabric cape (ingubo/umtsheko) made today of Lycra, enlivened by several large red-and-blue wool-string pom-poms. Amos Shembe, who succeeded his brother Galilee in 1978, formalized two more items: a broad, grass-weave cummerbund (umbamba/isifociya), a quintessential maternity symbol worn traditionally as support after giving birth; and isiheshe, a collar of whitebead openwork (Fig. 10).

(15.) Though the level of the Zulu army's regimental discipline is legendary, its degree of non-parade uniformization is hard to determine. Inquirers such as Knight (1995) have offered no conclusions.

(16.) Being the best-wear of traditional male householders, Injobo is the Church's least standardized and homogeneous dance uniform: izinjobo for one, while mandatory, are very diverse and shields are variously patterned. Those who can afford it wear accessories such as the cape collar of leopard fur (amambatha), sometimes with ostrich-feather edging; hide-and-fur armbands (amakhono); rear girdles (imigingqo/izindidla) with relief-pattern panels of hide (obheshwana); fur sashes (imisonto); feather head-ornaments (amahunu/izidlodlo), and so on; even raptor or vulture wings (amanqe) are occasionally seen attached to the shoulders.

(17.) The record is unclear on exactly how many there were, but five are seen today: three originals ("the veil," "black-and-white," and "pink"), plus a Scotch (introduced by Galilee to match the male version introduced by his father) and the umjafeta (said to have been the very first of the girls' uniforms; see Muller 1999:173, for an interpretation of their meaning).

(18.) It is unclear just when pubescent Nazarite girls were divided from their older sisters to form two age-sets, nubiles (othupane; see note 19) and marriageables (amakhosazane, "princesses," also intabayepheza, "Mountain of Abstinence"; see Muller 1999). Nguni tradition distinguishes three subsets: itshitshi (teenager, nicknamed ijongosi, "young ox fit for inspanning") became injuba when of marriageable age (also iqhikiza, from "to frizz the hair," since at this age hairdressing may begin); then on betrothal inkehli (or ingoduso), signifying the traditional dressing of the hair (ukukhehla, originally in a topknot, today in an ochered string weave hat) that denotes for both sexes the approach of wedlock.

(19.) However, the name isidwaba is not applied to the nubiles except when specified as "red (isidwaba)"--they are usually either othupane, "shorties," after their wearing of shorter skirts than their elder sisters (another possible derivation is the grass pad, umtabane, worn in the umgonqo confinement at menarche; Morcom 1994:167) or amazamuva (lit. "those coming up from behind") after the custom of Galilee selecting from the dance those ready to move up to the black isidwaba of full maidenhood. He would say "uyizamuva" ("she has come to maturity"), hence the age-subset of amazamuva (the late Minister Sheleni Ngubane, personal communication, 1992).

(20.) An apocryphal item of Church lore says that Isaiah Shembe "created the maidens' uniforms firstly for amasheshakungena, the children" (Sheleni Ngubane, personal communication, 1993), suggesting that at the outset he considered "nakedness" to be appropriate only for the youngest. There is also a written record that he believed the Church youth would in time inevitably adopt Western attire: "I let the old people in the kraals wear their umutsha and blankets, but their children will wear European dress" (Roberts 1936:43).

(21.) To Zulu, firm female buttocks, thighs, and breasts are signs of innocence and chastity, so their being visible testifies to virginity, while their concealment signifies its loss (Krige 1968:174).

(22.) Papini and Hexham 2002:140-41, paras. 101-3. For an idea of how the "move to tradition" is expressed today, Morcom (1994:183) was told by H-J. Becken that in 1989 Amos Shembe rebuked the matrons for behaving like girls in exposing their chests and shoulders, which should be properly covered. To atone, they collected funds and bought him a Mercedes Benz.

(23.) Durban Metro Local History Museums collection, photographs by Barend van der Merewe.

(24.) Today it is perhaps most significantly in respect of Zulu beadworking that its dance uniforms make the Church a "storehouse of tradition." For traditionalists, tough economic straits have meant cheaper plastic beads becoming widespread for making ornament and garment, but the purist Nazarites persist with glass bead for headbands (iminqwazi), wristbands (izingusha), and ankle bands (amadavathi) as well as amanebe of girls--for everything. that is, except the ornamental panels on matrons' grass-weave cummerbunds and the centerpiece of headbands, for which the common large plastic beads (amaqanda, "eggs") are used (Figs. 20, 23).

(25.) Galilee's struggle was finally consummated in the early 1980s when his successor Amos had the Church registered under the Reformed Independent Churches Association (RICA), unaffiliated to mission-Christian bodies.

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