Routledge

Chapter Notes

Chapter 14 Shembe Hymns

  • Ebuhleni, the current church headquarters of Shembe's followers, is located inside Inanda, just north of the city of Durban. It is home to Paradis, an open-air temple where the congregation prays and sings. The tree canopy of the open temple and the sounds of birds resemble the vision of heaven Isaiah Shembe received.
  • Services are held at 9 a.m. and 6 p.m. every day. Men and women enter the metaphorical gates of heaven separately. Women divide into wives and virgin girls and kneel as they enter.
  • Girls wear the white imiNazaretha and drape their heads in white shawls; married women wear the traditional top-knot adorned with Nazarite beadwork. Men wear bands of furry animal skin around their heads. All bring a prayer mat, hymnbook, and a Zulu Bible.
  • Congregants sit around Shembe according to age, marital status, and sex. The Morning Prayer was written out by Isaiah Shembe and printed by Galilee, and resembles the structure of the Wesleyan Liturgy.
  • The hymn singing style characterized by a slow, thick texture of voices is known in Zulu as izihlabelelo kwakwaShembe, meaning the sacred songs of the place of Shembe. The repertory of hymns composed by Shembe is known as izihlabelelo zamaNazaretha. Singing may be accompanied by electronic keyboard or organ, or, when there is sacred dance, by long trumpets and large drums.
  • Members tell many narratives about Shembe, and professor Muller discusses three narrative types. The first type tells of Isaiah Shembe's ability to raise the dead (especially deceased children) to life, often through singing. The second type recalls Shembe's power as a healer (especially of women who have trouble conceiving or giving birth). The third type tells of the overwhelming power of Shembe's own singing voice.
  • Wesleyan hymnody is a recognized inspiration for Shembe's hymns, but composition is described differently in European and Nazarite traditions. While European composition is based on writing, in Shembe's narrative the body is the site of creation.
  • Shembe received his first hymn in 1910, when he arrived at KwaZulu Natal and received a second in 1913 on Nhlangakaze. He received many more songs in compositional visions between 1920 and 1935 (the year of his death), often delivered by a girl's voice.
  • The rhythm was usually the most important part and the aspect of the song that stayed with him after the vision. This, along with the importance of the body and voice (over writing) for composition and the female voice as the vessel of transmission set his composition apart from Christian hymn writing.
  • Virgin girls have a special relationship with the leader of the church, and this is paralleled in their role as vessels of song and in his own voice which was said to like that of a girl. The isihlabelelo were previously defined as the songs a mother sings to her children, and, metaphorically, Isaiah takes the voice of a woman and sings to his/her spiritual children.
  • Three women received additional songs from him after his death, and Galilee continued to add to the repertoire between 1936 and his death in 1976. He also received songs in visions, but written on a chalkboard (he was a teacher) rather than sung.
  • Galilee collected the hymn repertoire as well as Isaiah's miracle stories, prayers, sermons, and letters into a single book and published it as a hymnal.
  • Shembe negotiates disparate religious and cultural backgrounds in his song texts: he sanctifies the landscape with names from the Bible and reconfigures biblical narrative to intersect with local experiences.
  • Shembe and his son Galilee conceived of worship in both a European congregational format (called inkhonzo and focused on the book) and as African sacred dance (called umgido and undertaken with the body as the vessel of spiritual power).
  • In inkhonzo hymns are performed in a fixed liturgy read from the book. In umgido they are sung from memory. One cannot fully split these into ‘European’ and ‘African’ practices, however, as sitting before a preacher had precedence in pre-colonial Zulu traditions and dancing is part of worship in Old Testament Psalm texts.
  • Amos Shembe, Galilee's brother, had Bongani Mthethwa introduce organ accompaniment in the 1980s in order to modernize the sounds of izihlabelelo to keep the interest of the next generation of Shembe youth.
  • Adding a fixed-pitch instrument forced worshipers to follow the organist, curtailing though not eliminating individual freedom and flexibility.
  • New adaptations of Shembe's hymns to more contemporary gospel sounds and musical technology have since appeared, amplifying the sounds of worship.
  • The hymnbook opens with a picture of Isaiah Shembe, whose image is believed to have a healing capacity. The magic of the image relates closely to the extraordinary experience of an ancestor or Shembe himself appearing in a dream.
  • Worshipers do not read hymns straight through the way many Europeans are accustomed to, but sing the lines in seemingly endless cycles of repetition. This repetition helps to articulate a sense of rhythm, the most sacred musical quality.
  • A leader intones the ‘main’ melody-words-rhythms and the congregation joins in, with the women singing particularly distinct ‘embroideries’ of the leader's song. Each individual voice finds its own place in the ritual fabric and utters the inspired words of Shembe, creating a dense, overlapping, slow, repeating rhythm.
  • The experience of hymn singing is different every time and depends also on where in the congregation one sits and which voices one is able to hear.
  • Participation by as many worshipers as possible is also a goal for umgido dance. The true power of dance and song repertory lies in threading one's voice or movement into the larger fabric of communal singing or dancing.
  • Dance is not just entertainment, but invokes the presence of the ancestors. Its rhythms unite the living with the dead, and it is a form of prayer in that one dances before God.
  • Dancers, drummers, and horn players concentrate on achieving the same rhythm, following the leader of the song and dance.
  • Walking the path to Nhlangakaze earns one an imprint of the mountain on one's feet that makes possible admittance into heaven. Those who climb the mountain sing along their route, and walking and singing are conceptually connected because both trace a path (the word for melody literally translates as ‘the way/path of the words’).
  • The ‘path’ a song takes usually involves ascent, leveling out, and descent, a process that is mirrored in the contours of Nazarite beadwork on items such as hats.