from Research in African Literatures Volume 31, Number 2Hidden Stories and the Light of the New Day: A Zulu Manuscript and Its Place in South African Writing1
Liz Gunner
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South Africa has eleven official languages, yet what does it mean in reality for the literature of the country if so many languages are given theoretical parity but only one is a world language? Virtual eclipse, constant poor relation status for the other ten? Perhaps the recognition of so many official languages provides the opportunity for expanding their interrelatedness rather than agonizing over their pecking order. Perhaps this new, official "Babel" has a key role to play in an emergent national identity, one that does not glibly collapse histories or gloss over past oppression but allows a greater space for different and dissonant voices--different tongues.
Names and naming are an important part of such an identity and they are often intimately related to the realigning of social and political power relations. Names lodged in topography often show the layers of conquest and re-conquest a country or region has experienced; shifts in power relations are reflected in shifting official place names. All over the country there is a sprouting of clusters of signs, notices in languages other than the two former official languages of English and Afrikaans; the holdings of the Free State Provincial Archives, for instance, are now marked in English, Afrikaans, and Sotho; at a less formal level, in a small town such as Ficksburg in the eastern Free State, the Sotho name Maqeleng (formally used officially only for the African "location") is beginning to edge its way in as the official joint name of the town. And in a town such as Harrismith (on which our story touches) the name of Ntabazwe, formerly confined to the African location, may similarly be moving to a more central place. Discourses shift with names; histories that have been submerged are beginning to surface, very much like the body in Nadine Gordimer's novel The Conservationist that floats stubbornly up at the end of the novel refusing its shallow, anonymous grave. The beginnings of a translanguage reciprocity can be seen, posing an alternative to a two-tier model of language in South Africa, where English is the enabling and hegemonic language and the others are marginalized and used for various forms of cultural exotica and as repositories of cultural or regional pride, nostalgia, or ethnic rallying points.
The hidden story and its making, on which this paper focuses, is about such translanguage and transregional reciprocities, as well as about the boundaries and intersections of the oral and written word. The names of the people and places in the story are not--with the exception of the prophet Isiah Shembe, founder of the large Nazareth Baptist Church--well known. The characters who feature in its making are, besides Shembe himself, the Rev. William Leshega, a minister of the African National Baptist Church, and perhaps a Rev. Ross, a missionary of the Nederduitse Gereformeerde Kerk; in the story itself there is, besides Shembe, the Hadebe family, in particular the father, Jonas Nyathi, the narrator's mother, Melika, and the narrator, Meshack. It is in some ways an epic, and like epics it covers a vast territory. In time it stretches over the first three decades of this century. In place, if we include its making, it shifts south from Boksburg in the urban industrializing north, near Johannesburg, to the mountainous region of the Lesotho/Free State/Transvaal/Natal borders--an unsettled, contested region of jostling languages, cultures, and polities--an area of multiple identities; the places here are the town of Harrismith with its adjoining location of Ntabazwe, and the neighboring area of Witzieshoek, a huge spit of rugged land--the name itself a palimpsest of conquest--jutting out into Lesotho. The next place to make a brief appearance is the coastal city of Durban, far to the south and east, with its small neighbor, Inanda, nestling to the north and holding within it Shembe's holy village Ekuphakameni (The Exalted Place). The narrative then swings to the south to another area of multiple identities and histories, Mthwalume, holding within it the Shembe center of Gospel and bordering the land that was once part of the old Mpondo paramountcy of the nineteenth century.
If reciprocity involves a more equal relation between languages it can also initiate a new discussion of what literature is. An important recent collection of essays (largely) on Caribbean "word culture" showed scholars discussing cultural forms that are "somehow between the traditional categories of oral and scribal literature" and indeed "challenging the validity of such categories" (Brown 3). Examining the genesis of particular written texts in the South African languages that retain this intermediate area of "word culture," with forms that do not "fit comfortably into any of the existing literary categories," is one way of forcing a major reconceptualization around notions of the oral and the scribal. Orality has, in the South African context, often been forced into an uncomfortable, cul-de-sac liaison with "tradition" and ethnicity and it is works by historians such as Paul La Hausse and Patrick Harries and studies on the constant refashionings and linkages of migrant and more urban cultures of performance by Deborah James, Veit Erlmann, and David Coplan that have largely forced apart those inappropriate bonds. All the above studies have to a greater or lesser degree engaged with language as the fulcrum of energy driving the emergence of new or changing cultural forms--and often performed rather than written language. At times, however, the boundaries between performed and written are blurred and a particular genre, narrative or song, moves between script and orality and can also be a mediator of ideological shifts and changing perceptions of self and community; the use of praise poetry by the trade unions in Natal in the mid-eighties and after is a case in point (see my "Orality and Literacy"). Generally it is the "other" languages in the new South African language configuration that can show the intersections of orality and literacy and in so doing press for new paradigms of "literature/ litorature" in the new state.
Translation also has a role to play in pointing up a situation of reciprocity and heteroglossia in South Africa, particularly if it is able to avoid what Gayatri Spivak has called the "tedious translatese" that so often marks "the act of wholesale translation in to English" and give instead a sense of "the rhetoricity of the original," "the rhetorical silences of the original" (182; 181; 183). The availability of translated texts is a way of texturing not only multilingualism but also of marking the different constituencies of knowledge and of power within the history of a particular language. A translation can also help in deconstructing the relation between print and orality in a particular language; it can highlight the role of writing and ideas around "the act" of writing in the history of a group--in the case of what I discuss here--a group outside the African intelligentsia and the elite at the time the text was written, namely, the mid-1930s.
This paper takes the case of one strange and remarkable narrative from the early 1930s written down in one of the "Other" languages, Zulu. It looks briefly at what it tells us about the speaker/writer (because the boundary between the two is blurred), and how it provides a brief glimpse of both a fractured consciousness and a longing for wholeness. It also gives us a sense of another space that writing held in the 1930s--not that of the (largely) published writing of the "New Africans," such as John Langalibalele Dube, the poet and scholar B. W. Vilakazi, or the poet, essayist, and playwright H. I. E. Dhlomo, all of whom were productive creatively and critically, across Zulu and English, between the late 1920s and the early 1940s (see Peterson).
This other space was the writing by those who were exploring the edges of literacy but still felt themselves external to it, and whose work may never have been printed. Such writing is outside any literary canon either in a strictly Zulu or more broadly South African sense, but may have affinities with other written texts or with oral forms. One must ask what sort of voice and space characterized such writing and writers; how does their presence change our sense of that earlier period and our sense of what a new literature of many languages might be?
The text around which I will base my discussion was given no formal title, nor was it conceived by its narrator/author as a literary product. It was a "testimony" (ubufakazi) of church and family history that he spoke and that an unknown scribe took down. His name is not placed in proprietary ownership anywhere on the original copy; rather I have dug it out of the text. When I first read it, I did not know anything about the speaker/ author, Meshack Hadebe--was it an assumed name, the name of a living person? The manuscript itself was written in a rather untidy longhand in a large foolscap-sized hard-covered notebook; it was carefully set out into chapters, sometimes with carefully ruled lines and half-lines under headings, giving the text a feeling of decorativeness, marking it as something special and precious. The book had been kept with other written records of church history at Ekuphakameni, Inanda, and was lent to me by the late Rev. Londa Shembe, when he knew I was working on the history of his grandfather. (See Fig. 1.)
The Testimony of Meshack Hadebe needs to be seen as part of a body of writing--and I mean writing, not print--which may have been set down in order to stave off what John Lonsdale has called "the social amnesia of modernity"; it may at the same time have been a gesture to modernity. Certainly it was part of a wider written remembering carried out by church members who, if literate or partly literate, kept a notebook with hymns copied in it; one that also served as a kind of diary to record sermons, amazing events, signs, and miracles. Only in 1945, when the official church hymnal and prayer book was published, did members stop keeping such notebooks. Many still do keep copies of sermons and note down Biblical texts quoted in sermons.
But what of Meshack Hadebe? It was only in 1995 after seeking out Rev. Simon Khubisa from Gospel that I knew for sure that Meshack Hadebe had indeed been a member of the community of Shembe's Nazareth Baptist Church, at Gospel, near Mthwalume, and that "Yes, he had come with his family as a child from the land of the Basotho" and that "Yes the story he has told here is wonderfully well told."2 As I worked on the translation, trying to feel my way deeper into the meaning behind the meaning, I decided to abandon the earlier title I had given it, of "The Journey" (although I shall return later to the ways in which the text is a journey that disrupts other "journeys"). I called it what I thought was something truer to both text and narrator and to its wider genesis, "The Testimony of Meshack Hadebe." There are a number of ways in which the genesis of The Testimony shows the dual presence of orality and literacy not only in the mid- 1930s when the text was written down, but much before then as well.
It is reasonably certain that The Testimony was written down as part of a much wider project of writing and narrativization that Isiah Shembe and his son and successor, Johannes Galilee Shembe, embarked upon. The attempt at collecting an archive of testimonies, thus a formal kind of narrativizing, may have begun only in the early to mid-1930s, but this act is itself related to the acts of writing and reading in a much wider sense, and relates, in my view, back to the role of the Bible as both "Book" and "Word" and the extremely complex links between literacy and Christianity, and particularly literacy and Protestantism, in South Africa (see J. and J. Comaroff; Attwell; De Kock; Hofmeyr; Landau).
The role of African evangelists and lay preachers may well have played a larger part in shaping the discourse of Christianity in South Africa than has been acknowledged. Harvey Graff reminds us that at the time of the Reformation publishing in the vernacular remained a major preoccupation of the Lutheran reformers, but he reminds us also of the "fuller nature of communications linkages and the mixture of media in sixteenth century society. [. . .] Personal relations, printing and writing, oral communications: each played a part, separately and interactively" (134-35). In the South African context, too, intertwined as Protestantism was with colonialism, there was nevertheless not only missionary production and dissemination of "the Word" but also that of lay evangelists and preachers; in some way these may have been similar in their potential freelance role to the "sermon movement and preachers" who were active in spreading the ideas of the Reformation (Graff 135). So too with "the Word" in nineteenth-century South Africa: not only was there a "mixture of media" but also a range of "freelance" preachers and evangelists, often under, or nominally under, a European minister but in fact operating with a great degree of independence, and sometimes formalizing this by actually moving away and starting a separate church. The history of South Africa's "independent" churches is, as Bengt Sundkler first pointed out, centrally linked to the search for a self-imposed and self-controlling hierarchy and autonomy away from the leadership-inhibiting mission churches (see Bantu Prophets).
What the text of The Testimony points to is the differing kinds of textuality produced in the setting up of these churches. Thus a brief look into its genealogy gives some idea not only of a fidelity to "the Word" and the admiration for literacy that carried over into an independent church; it gives a clue, too, to what Albert Gérard calls "the fierce spirit of self-reliance" noted in early Zulu writings--and Gérard is referring, in part, to Isiah Shembe's hymns, composed between 1911 and 1934 (Gerard 109; I. and J. Shembe, Imethetho Nemilando).
What then, within the wide parameters of the Protestant "gift" of literacy and the overarching presence of colonialism and settler racism, was the genealogy of The Testimony of Meshack Hadebe? To find out we need to step back from our text, spoken with such passion and eloquence and written with such diligence in about 1934 in the province of Natal, and move first to the Transvaal and to the year 1902.
In September 1902, a Rev. William Leshega from Boksburg wrote to Sir Godfrey Lagdon, the Secretary for Native Affairs in the newly named Transvaal (Sundkler, Zulu Zion 164-66). The letter, on headed paper of the African Baptist Native Association and stamped with Rev. Leshega's name, was written with a mixture of formality and familiarity; it reminded Sir Godfrey that he knew the writer, who had worked for him eighteen years earlier; the writer informed Sir Godfrey that he had been in the Baptist ministry for twenty-three years, had a congregation of 464 members and 28 evangelists and helpers, that he was attached to the Baptist Union whose superintendent was a Rev. Kelly. He asked Sir Godfrey's help in obtaining a plot of land for his church, in Heidelberg. At the bottom of the letter in large twirling letters was inscribed "GOD SAVE THE KING." When no answer was received within five days, he wrote a polite but firm reminder of his request. Leshega's hopes of appealing across the barriers of race and caste to a common Imperial British loyalty received no encouragement at all and the reply to his letters was a formal and noncommital refusal, with the suggestion that he approach the magistrate at Heidelberg.
At around this time William Leshega linked himself to the American Foreign Baptist Union based in Louisville, Kentucky, with an accredited representative in Cape Town, the Rev. Murff. And by 1906, according to Murff, Rev. Leshega had "15 congregations in the Transvaal and Orange River Colony."3 One, at least, of his congregations was a very long way from Boksburg, and was situated in the isolated "Reserve" of Witzieshoek, tucked away in the northeast corner of the Orange River Colony. Still, in 1906, Leshega was well enough established both in Witzieshoek (where, predictably, the only mission presence was the Dutch Reformed Church under a Rev. Ross) and in the Harrismith location of Ntabazwe to baptize in the river there, and shortly after that to baptize Isiah Shembe, on 22nd July 1906 (Dube 28). Shembe, then only at the very beginning of his fame, was healing and preaching in the Harrismith district and in the adjoining Witzieshoek without attachment to any church.
Leshega's baptisms by immersion seems to have made a great impact on the younger man, and he notes (in the Dube biography) that he invited him to his home as his guest "for six days" and then joined his church (Dube 26). There is a photograph (Fig. 2), perhaps the earliest extant photograph of Isiah Shembe, that captures that particular moment of friendship and active evangelical communication between the two men; it shows an older man standing, suited, confident, and wearing a hat; seated is a younger man (Isiah Shembe) slightly stooped, smiling a little shyly, and holding his hat in his hands. The older man is almost certainly Rev. William Leshega and the photo was probably taken in Harrismith in Andrews Studio around 1906. Leshega, standing, appears as the senior, mentor figure; Shembe, seated, the apprentice.
Shembe's success as a preacher in Witzieshoek was so great that Rev. Leshega came down again from Boksburg with two other ministers and, in a fascinating and elliptical suggestion of some sort of gender equality in his church at the time, he also came with "two women ministers" (abafundikazi ababili) to baptize those to whom Shembe had both preached and in many cases healed. Later during the same visit Leshega laid hands on Shembe and ordained him as a minister, authorizing him to "preach to the nations and to baptize in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit" (Dube 28-29).
But by April 1910 William Leshega had been driven out of Witzieshoek. Basically, he had been too successful, had converted too many people; his presence "under no European control" was seen not as a welcome extension of "the Word," but a threat, ill-defined but potent. Rev. Ross of the Dutch Reformed Church, who had engineered his exclusion, grumbled in one of his letters that Witzieshoek had become a "Dumping Ground" for all manner of outlandish preachers and creeds. Predictably, a few months later when Rev. Leshega applied for a site in Ntabazwe Location, Harrismith, on which to build a church for his (by then named) African National Baptist Association, permission was summarily refused by the Town Council. 4 Leshega lived for another seven years and there is no evidence that I know of to suggest that he and Isiah Shembe remained in communication after 1910. Yet on another level the influence of Leshega, and also his violent treatment at the hands of a self-consciously literate bureaucracy of officials and ministers, may have been crucial, because although Leshega may never have been subjected to physical abuse, he certainly experienced the structural violence of a social and religious order that blocked him many times in his efforts to gain legitimacy as an ordained minister and in his efforts to gain land for his church.
Leshega seems, in the course of his fairly long life, to have been a tireless writer of letters and user of print, and he worked, as did the "New Africans" of the 1930s and '40s, across languages. He wrote to officialdom in English but his church paper in 1910 has its text in Sotho. In fact, he must have used Northern and Southern Sotho and probably (the closely related) Pedi in the course of his ministry. Like so many others he must have moved through the great swathe of a more or less common language corridor stretching (in spite of the creation of different "vernaculars" by missionary linguists) from what was then Basutoland in the south, covering the old Orange River Colony, and through to Sekhukhuniland in the northern Transvaal (Delius; Harries, "Discovering Languages"). His texts and his use of "the Word" would have been through Sotho. He would most likely have been using the Sotho Bible printed by the Morija-based missionaries of the Paris Evangelical Mission Society, first available in its complete form in 1878 (Gérard 190; Maake 158). Clearly Leshega, on the one hand very successful, on the other squeezed out by a hegemonic if embattled "civilizing" order, was deeply engaged in the "complex dialectic of challenge and riposte, domination and defiance" in which Mission Christianity was itself enmeshed (J. and J. Comaroff 13).
What Shembe may have taken with him when soon after 1910 he left the "fenced off" religious terrain of Witzieshoek and Harrismith to found a new church was a sense of the power of writing--its organizing, communicative capacity, and a nonconformist passion for literacy--but also a sense of its limitations. This ambivalence is present as well in The Testimony, one of the many texts that Shembe's journey to a new place and space generated.
Meshack Hadebe's narrative is a disruptive, ambivalent yet celebratory, visionary text. It is, in its beginnings, about a journey in search of a prophet, after the sound of heavenly music and "the thunderous beating of cowhide drums that made the earth reverberate underfoot [. . .] reaching to the skies" (Testimony 76); the journey is from the deep interior of the country called simply "the land of Mshoeshoe" to the coastal city Durban, where the prophet whom the family seeks is thought to be. It is a journey fraught with suffering, as it is the time of the "Spanish flu" of 1918-19. The land the family travels through is alien--Meshack Hadebe refers to it as "a wilderness I did not know"--and they exist on food stolen from the Boer farms across which they have to travel. It is also intersected with a visionlike dream of baptism and the prophet which sends them on with new hope:
Kwathi sisezintabeni ezinye, uMama waphupha iphupho. Wabona ephakathi kwesixuku sabantu abaningi abagqoka izingubo eziningi ezimhlophe. Kukhona umuntu owayemude kunabo, emuhle, egcwele usizi kodwa, uma embheka. Uthi leyo nsizwa yona, yayingambethe okumhlophe, yabe imbethe ingubo ende emakhwifikhwifi enomdweshu omude, ohula phansi.
Uthi uMama, "Ngibone phakathi kwalaba bantu. Sahambahamba nabo safika emfuleni omgemkhulu kakhulu nje [. . .]" (Ubufakazi Is.1.10)It so happened that when we were in a very hilly part Mother had a dream. She saw herself in the midst of a crowd of many people dressed in white robes. There was a person present who was taller than them, fine-looking but with a look of great compassion. That young man's garment was not white, he was dressed in a long robe that was speckled and striped, long and dragging on the ground. Mother said, "I saw myself in the midst of these people. We went on and on until we came to a river, a great river [. . .]." (Testimony ch. 1.10)
In its trajectory from the interior to the edge of the country and in its Biblical, visionary impulse, the narrative of the journey is both like and at the same time deeply unlike missionary narratives that converge around the trope of the journey, and as the Comaroffs point out, differ significantly from other European nineteenth-century travel narratives. Those of the missionaries were set in an "assertively personalized epic form" (J. and J. Comaroff 171). Moreover, the overland trek from the coast to the interior was the essential passage into the African reality (Beidelman 1982:63 cited in J. and J. Comaroff 172):
[T]he only secure path over uncertain terrain was the so-called Missionary Road, a chain of established stations that proclaimed a new moral topography in African soil. [. . .] The stylized narratives of these overland travels reveal an important dimension of the evangelical enterprise: a pervasive belief in the author's passage itself as emblematic and hence worthy of record. For his was an odyssey of sacred and imaginative incorporation, bringing the "regions beyond" under European gaze. It re-enacted, at least in spirit, the greatest of all Puritan journeys--a Pilgrim's Progress across the worldly wilderness to the Celestial City. (J. and J. Comaroff 172)
The journey of Meshack Hadebe and his family works against the classic missionary narrative by charting something completely different, namely, a move to another kind of Christianity as it encodes the journey over an alien and conquered land where the family eats the stolen produce of Boer farms to stay alive. The "Celestial City" which they do, eventually, find is not the haven of the mission in a pagan wilderness but Shembe's village of Ekuphakameni, a space of healing, a refuge, a New Jerusalem, carved out of the small amount of freehold land available to African purchasers in the outer Durban area. What is more, it is situated right next to land owned by another unpredictable figure, the Reverend John Langalibalele Dube who had started his Ohlange School in 1901 with no missionary backing or subsidy (Hughes 250).
The Testimony is at moments both biography and autobiography and it is set on what could be seen as a number of fault lines. One is that of the borderline between orality and literacy that it sets out to bridge. Yet it often does so in such an ambivalent way that while on the one hand it asserts the urgent need to document the amazing experiences the writer has been part of, on the other hand, it simultaneously asserts the incapacity of the written word to contain and delineate these experiences. Perhaps it "aspires to the condition of literacy" (Barber 6) without fully believing in it? What we hear most clearly is the speaking voice, doubting even as it sees itself being transformed into words on paper. Writing, and its visible representation, pieces of paper, would in the end provide an artificial closure, and the whole truth remains outside the entrapment of paper. It is, the text implies, the lack of closure of the spoken word of orality that can handle this vastness best. Thus at a point well into the testimony when the focus has shifted far to the south to the community of lovingly named places and people around the place known as Gospel, Meshack Hadebe, has described Shembe's saving of a young girl bitten by a mamba. Shembe, at this point in the narrative, has danced into the compound where the healed girl is, and she stands up and dances with him and his followers. Hadebe continues:
Izindaba ezenziwa uShembe ngoNkulunkulu wakhe ziyamangalisa, ayekwenza ngaphambi ngamehlo ethu. Singeze sakuqeda neze kungaphela wonke amaphepha omhlaba nabalobi bangasangana amakhanda ngobuningi bezimangaliso zakhe. Lapha sithathe izihlokwana nje, iyosina idedelana madoda! Inkulu lendaba, iyinkinga futhi. (Ubufakazi Is.9.6; 122)
Indeed the miracles that were performed by Shembe on behalf of his God are amazing, things that he did right in front of our very eyes. We can't possibly describe everything, it would use up all the pieces of paper in the world and the writers' minds would go crazy with the sheer number of the miracles. Here we have just picked out the main bits--you can dance and still give room to others. Men! It's a big, big thing and it's a great mystery as well. (Testimony ch. 9.6; 123)
If The Testimony both sits on and half-crosses the borderline of orality and the written word, it rests on other fault lines as well. In some ways it is "literature" and in other ways it is part of those other writings that exist in the shadowy hinterland beyond--sermons, diaries, fragmentary accounts of events written down and set aside unfinished, and so on. My guess is that Meshack Hadebe's testimony is only one of a number of narratives that press on the body of accepted literary forms and interrogate the boundaries of what the conception of "literature" should be in South Africa now, in this postapartheid era still looking for definition.
Yet The Testimony is itself something of an enigma. The main body of the text lovingly charts the establishment of the place known as Gospel, through Shembe's power as a healer, a caster-out of demons, a man of miracles, a prophet, a "man of heaven," as he is often called in Hadebe's testimony. There is a sense of a proselytizing narrative voice, one growing in confidence as Meshack Hadebe tells of a community's history structured around certain key events from the early 1920s through to the mid-1930s, events that are themselves part of the wider narrative of the church.
The reader, or listener, is presented with a kind of seamless intertextuality; there are references to the genesis of certain hymns in the (then unprinted) church hymnal. Sometimes a chapter recounts central events of church history, with loving attention to names and places: if Ekuphakameni is the New Jerusalem, the discourse around the southern space of Gospel knots the experience of this other region into the wider church narrative; it also maps into this wider discourse the districts around Gospel where Shembe traveled and evangelized, parts known loosely as EmaMpondweni (the land of the Mpondo). The very name, like so many of the names now coming into wider circulation, marks an older identity, in this case the region's nineteenth-century existence as a part of the old Mpondo paramountcy. Events such as the chasing out of the itokoloshe (poltergeist/ spirit), the pool that gushed out from bare earth--both of which feature telegrammatically in Isiah Shembe's izibongo (praise poem) (Gunner and Gwala 66-79)--become the focus of a chapter. These events, which are emblematic of the church's identity in cyclical as well as linear time (see Connerton) are central to this main section. Also important in this large and central section is the strong Biblical underpinning, with exhortations to the reader or listener to "let us read" texts from both the New and Old Testament; as in Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, the Biblical references are seamed into the general narrative suggesting an intimate day-to-day knowledge and love of "the Word." There is also in the chapter where Shembe heals a former detractor, an appropriation and refashioning of particular stories, especially those relating to the prophets Elijah and Elisha. Meshack Hadebe points out the similarities as he tells his story:
Ukuzwakala kwalezi zigqi kusikhumbuza indaba eyenzeka kuMprofethi wasendulo, uAhija, owezwa izigqi zomfazi kaJerobowamu, iNkosi yabaJuda, esuka ekhaya uMprofethi ele eShilo. Funda Incwadi yamaKhosi 1:14 v 26. (Ubufakazi Is.3.12; 95)
The [fact that Shembe heard] those footsteps reminds us of what happened to the Prophet of old, Elijah, who heard the footsteps of the wife of Jeroboam, the king of Judah, as she was leaving her home and the prophet was far away at Shilo. Read the book of Kings 1:14.26. (Testimony ch. 3.12; 96)
Even in this central section, however, there are other pressures. Meshack Hadebe twice registers doubt. Thus in the chapter containing one of the prophet's best known deeds, where a pool is dug from the dry hard ground, there is at one point a crescendo of praise to Shembe, but there is also, close to it, a note of disbelief. When Shembe points to a rock where his followers are to dig and claims:
"Okwathi mdla sidala lo mhlaba sinoBaba, ngalithatha mina lelo dwalo, ngalifaka lapha," . . . [Uqhubeka uMisheck] Mina, Misheck Hadebe, ngadlinza ngenhliziyo ngathi, le nto yimbi ngoba akusilo iqiniso.Ukwazi kanjani lokhu ukudalwa komhlaba? Akujulile na?[ . . .] Ngaqhubeka nomdlinzo wami ngathi, bekungcono uma into enganaqiniso njengale uyikhulume kithina sodwa thina 'maNazaretha akhe. Hawu! Kube kubi ngoba nampa baningi kangaka abantu abangakholwa sobayini kambe na? Bayothini nje abantu le nto ingasenzeki na? (Ubufakazi Is.8.4-5; 111-3)
On the day that we made the earth, we and Father, I myself took the broad, flat rock and put it here," [Meshack then continues] I, Meshack Hadebe doubted in my heart and I thought, this is a terrible thing because it's not the truth. How does he know about the creation of the world? Isn't this a deep mystery? [. . .] I thought it would be better, if something is not true, if he were to speak privately to us Nazaretha people. Hey! It's going to be awful because there are so many non-believers here and what will they think of us? What'll those people say if it doesn't happen? (Testimony ch. 8.4-5; 112-4)
The next moment he is mysteriously reprimanded. The language in this part is rich and tense as if the speaker is striving in memory to catch the precise moment of contact between doubter and prophet: "Ngibuqamana naye mina, ngiqoqa yonke into eyamabibi ethempeleni. Kwathi lapho ngiyothi phaka amehlo, ngahlangana naye engibuka ngamehlo ayehlaba egcwele ulaka" (Ubufakazi 113) "I was a fair distance from him, picking up bits of rubbish in the temple area. Suddenly our eyes met and his were stabbing and angry [. . .]" (Testimony 114). Soon after this the pool does, in fact, appear and the doubt serves as a device that foregrounds Shembe's mysterious power.
In the penultimate chapter doubt features again. Here there is a lack of confidence that the four young men who go from the church to try to heal the sick wife of a neighboring chief, Nkosibomvu Luthuli, can actually succeed. This time the doubt is expressed in the racy dialogue between the four young men, and the doubter--not Meshack on this occasion--is put in his place by the others: "Mdluli Mlitha simply said, Hlongwane, just be ready and don't be a nuisance!'"(Testimony 128). Here too, doubt foregrounds the eventual success of their enterprise: the healing of the sick woman whom no other groups, using either prayer or traditional methods, have been able to heal. Nevertheless, the doubt remains. Neither is the portrait of Shembe contained in the narrative unproblematic or one-dimensional. He is "the man of God," the "chosen one of God," "he who was of heaven"; but he is also, in a remark of a skeptical Wesleyan, "an Msotho," in other words, an outsider in terms of language and community. Thus there are, even in the main body of the narrative, fissures, cracks, and contending consciousnesses.
It is in the outer, encircling "skin" of the first and last chapters that we see another story very different in kind from "the fruit" within. The outer narrative is (like Shembe's own earlier path) a journey by outsiders, "foreigners," towards the harmonizing center. In its opening sentence it captures the motif of periphery and center, alien and known:
Kwathi ngonyaka ka1919, kwafika umuntu wezizwe owabangowokuqala ngqa kubantu bezwe, owafika Ekuphakameni evela ezweni lakude le oSuthu, kwaMshoeshoe. Lo muntu wayengakwazi uikukhuluma isiZulu, nelelodwa izwi lesiZulu ayelazi, kodwa wamuzwa uNkulunkulu ekhuluma naye le oSuthu. (Ubufakazi Is.1.2; 75)
It was the year 1919, a foreigner appeared, who was the very first foreigner to come to Ekuphakameni, coming from the country far, far away there where the Sotho people come from, the land of Mshoeshoe. That man was unable to speak Zulu, he didn't know one single word of Zulu, but he had heard God speaking to him when he was there far away in the land of the Basotho. (Testimony ch. 1.2; 76)
Besides neatly inverting the typical missionary narrative, the outer narrative, in its trajectory from country to city, also situates itself in one of the major prose motifs of South African literature of all languages (except perhaps Afrikaans), one of the main topics of song in Zulu and Sotho, and situates itself within one of the major strands of South African economic and cultural history. "The foreigner," Petros Nyathi Hadebe, father of Meshack, and his family arrive in the bustling, unheeding city of Durban in 1919. It is, so the text tells us, when things are at their worst for the family that a man approaches them, gives them a name and "a little piece of paper," "and on it was written: Rev. J. L. Dube, Ohlange, Phoenix, Natal." Here, writing serves a different purpose from Meshack Hadebe's general bigger project mentioned earlier. It communicates hard information, an address, which leads them to the prophet whom they are seeking and about whom their mother has dreamed. The "little piece of paper" enables them to move through the dislocation of the modern city to a new territory in spatial and spiritual terms. Thus in this gesture to modernity, the "little piece of paper" is recognized as being--almost--as significant as the visionary dream; and in the project of telling as a whole, both the paper containing the narrativized experience and the revelation are seen as interdependent if not entirely equal in value.
There is, another text that, unlike this one, is well-known, one that attempts to bridge the often separate terrains of orality and literacy and to which this short narrative that I have called The Testimony of Meshack Hadebe can be compared. The text is Sol Plaatje's Mhudi, written in 1917 but not published until 1930. Like Meshack Hadebe's account, it traverses great swathes of the South African land; both texts establish a home for those who have been homeless; both accept the validity of the dream in the psyche of African experience in South Africa. Recall for instance the prophetic dreams of the central character, Mhudi; recall also the way in which the text of Plaatje's novel recounts the praise songs to Mzilikazi and allots so much space to the formalities of public debate in the new Barolong capital of ThabaNchu. The narrator of The Testimony (with the help of the unknown scribe) commits his story to paper and the written word in spite of his dubious faith in its ability to convey the whole story.
There are, though, fascinating differences as well between the two texts. Mhudi is a fictional discourse on the nation, and rarely one that places women as national subjects at, or near, the center of that discourse. It is also about success, in that it points to possibilities both of good government by African subjects and of racial harmony at a historical moment when African subjects in the South African state were dispossessed--he text being completed four years after the 1913 Native Land Act. The Testimony, on the other hand, is a far more fractured text; the outer encircling story is about a journey to a new home and community and then, in the final chapter, its total negation. Thus Petros Nyathi Hadebe, the family head who had taken his family on the long journey to the east in search of the prophet, at the end "falls away" from the church and from "home" and wholeness and returns to Lesotho. He does, the brief final chapter tells us, return to his faith shortly before he dies, but, the text also tells us, "[o]nly one girl was converted, one solitary girl" (Testimony 132).
Finally, it is the written word, in the form of a letter, that binds together the two far distant points of this narrative--Inanda, the freehold area on the edges of Durban, with its holy village of Ekuphakameni and its "Almighty God Jehovah," and far-away Lesotho to which Meshack Hadebe's father had returned. After his death, we are told in the final sentence, "[t]he girl wrote to the children of Nyathi and told them about her conversion" (Testimony 132).
It was Barthes who insisted in 1968 that the power of writing lies in fact with the reader. But what happens to a text--a handwritten text--which has had few readers? And why was this account not taken further and printed by Isiah Shembe's church, in the late 1930s when the prayer- and hymnbook was first published? It was possibly because of the sheer economic difficulties of production--the lack of capital and expertise to translate the precious written manuscript into a more public form. It may also have been because it is in some ways a dislocating or fractured narrative begging more questions than it ought to. It is perhaps too dialogic for a church's text. I would like to think, though, that it is a text begging to be read now--at this complicated juncture in South African history.
NOTES
1.An early version of this paper was first given at the July 1995 Conference of the Association of University English Teachers of South Africa (AUETSA) held in Pietermaritzburg at the University of Natal. A shorter and earlier version of the present paper is in the proceedings of the "Afrika und das Andere" Conference, held in Berlin at Humboldt University in October 1996. This version is in Afrika und das Andere: Alterität und Innovation (ed. Heike Schmidt and Albert Wirz, Hamburg: Schriften der Vereinigung von Afrikanisten in Deutschland, VAD e V. 17, 1998, 189-99). The present article is printed with permission from the editors and publisher.
Much of the final work on "Hidden Stories" was done while I was Oppenheimer Research Fellow at the Centre for African Studies, University of Cape Town, from July to November 1997, and my thanks go to the Centre for its generous support while I was based there. Thanks also to Brenda Cooper and Sarah Nuttall for reading and commenting on earlier versions of the paper; also to Eddy Maloka for our many discussions while I was at CAS, and to Abner Nyamende and Dumisani Nduli for painstakingly and generously checking my translations and helping with queries regarding the Zulu text and orthography. My grateful thanks also to Rev. Simon Khubisa of the AmaNazaretha Temple at Gospel for much help in understanding Meshack Hadebe's story and its place within the wider frame of Isiah Shembe's extraordinary life. My thanks also to Barbara Harlow for reading and commenting on a late version of the paper, during her stay at Pietermaritzburg; and to Derek De Bruyn of the Free State Archives in Bloemfontein for his solicitude and help when I was using the Free State Archives in August 1997.
2. Rev. Simon Khubisa to Liz Gunner, Ebuhleni, Mathabethulu, Inanda, 27 July 1995.
3. The information on Rev. Leshega is from the Transvaal archives, SNA/92/NA3643/09 and SNA/15/NA 2058/02.
4.The information is from the Free State Archives CO 619/2324/1 and CO 618/2324.
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