A Not-So-Zulu Zion: Healing and Belonging in Isaiah Shembe’s Nazaretha Church

Ideas about healing produced challenges to a sense of ethnic belonging as well as a ‘Zulu turn’ within Isaiah Shembe’s Nazaretha Church. This article traces Shembe’s evangelism prior to the emergence of the Nazaretha to show that his spiritual autobiography and earliest religious communities offered few indications of an ethnic framework for belonging. Instead, claims about healing helped to integrate Shembe as an outsider in Natal, South Africa, and led to the emergence of the Nazaretha as a new denomination. Nazaretha strategies for acquiring space to enact their healing mission pushed the congregation towards greater engagement with the resources of Zulu-ness in the 1910s and 1920s. At the same time, their healing mission encouraged them to welcome anyone who sought God’s healing. This led to sustained engagement with Indians in particular, some of whom attributed their restored health to Shembe and converted to the Nazaretha faith. Healing, then, drove complex – and seemingly contradictory – processes; using it as a lens more fully accounts for how Shembe himself and, later, members of the Nazaretha Church understood shifting parameters of belonging.