Johane Masowe was an African Christian prophet who founded a religious movement that stretched from Cape Town to Nairobi. Prior to May 1932, he was simply Peter Shoniwa Masedza, a humble shoemaker, working near Salisbury, the capital city of Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). But in May of that year, according to one of the traditions, he fell ill and died. On encountering God, he pleaded for a second chance to return to earth and lead Africans out of darkness. He was sent back to life, commissioned to save Africans from original sin. A heavenly voice told him that he was now Johane, or John of the Wilderness, an African John the Baptist. And so he began a ministry of teaching and healing in the Shona villages of east and central Zimbabwe, and subsequently in South Africa, Zambia, and Kenya.
Soon a new distinctive brand of African Christianity emerged. Masowe’s followers, the Vapostori (Apostles), worshipped barefooted in white robes. The men shaved off their hair, wore long beards and carried staffs. And the women covered their heads with turbans. They believed that Saturday was the Sabbath and worshipped in circles under shady trees, their meetings animated by fiery sermons from prophets and beautiful melodic singing. Nighttime meetings on hilltops were often noisy dramatic affairs with exorcisms, trances, and a good deal of glossolalia. Many similar “apostolic” or “spirit-type” movements appeared in the World Depression of the 1930s, during which mission Christianity went into decline and African Christians regained the initiative. There was a good deal of schism from the original Masowe movement as ambitious young men with new revelations founded their own churches.
In the 1960s and ’70s, it was enormously fashionable to study these spirit-type movements. To historians they represented a proto-nationalism, the early signs of African resistance to colonialism later manifested in fully fledged nationalist parties. To anthropologists they were remarkable examples of African resilience in the face of Western cultural dominance. To scholars of religion they represented an authentic African Christianity. It was with these so-called “African Independent Churches” (AICS) that the future of African Christianity lay, rather than the historic mission churches, Catholic, Anglican, Lutheran, Methodist, and others. It soon became clear, however, that “apostolics” usually eschewed formal politics and in fact were often the victims of nationalist violence. Moreover, as Matthew Engelke’s research shows, AICS were no more authentic than the historic mission churches and were rooted in Western Pentecostal and healing movements such as John Alexander Dowie’s Christian Apostolic Church in Zion from Chicago. The historic mission churches did not wither away with independence, as some scholars had predicted and because the majority of African Christians continued to adhere to them, they once again became the focus of attention.
So it is pleasing that Engelke should revive interest in spirit-type movements. The subject of his study is the Friday Masowe, a group whose members claim connection with the founding prophet but believe that he intended his followers to worship on Friday—and, more controversially, who contend that he rejected the Bible as a source of revelation. Unlike the far larger Saturday Masowe, who worked with the prophet until his death in 1973, the Friday Masowe do not live together in self-contained communities, nor do they have well-established church hierarchies and institutional offices. Instead they are a collection of churches gathered around a loosely connected set of prophets.
Engelke is one of a body of scholars, including Joel Robbins, Fenella Canell, and Webb Keane, who propose an anthropology of Christianity. They argue that Christianity has something akin to its own culture, a set of ideas, rituals, and practices that enable it to be studied across cultures as well as in localized forms. Engelke makes cross-cultural comparisons with movements ranging from Zairian Catholics to American Southern Baptists, and draws upon the work of theologians and philosophers of religion. His perspective is fresh and offers theological insights in its desire to take African spirituality seriously. The Friday Apostles claim that they have no use for the Bible because they have direct revelation from God through the Holy Spirit. Because the rejection of Scripture is a defining aspect of the movement, Engelke makes it the focus of his study. The book explores the conundrum of a group fixated with escaping from materiality but which nevertheless needs representations in words and things to make God present.
After a general section on the way Scripture is understood and read across Africa, Engelke includes two historical chapters. The first explains how the Friday Masowe have come to reject the Bible. Engelke argues that their rejection of Scripture does not stem from a misunderstanding of the words of the prophet or a post-hoc rationalization of schism, but arises from a lack of certainty in the prophet himself during his early ministry. Although I am not convinced by this argument—Pentecostal-inspired preachers like Masowe usually have too much certainty—Engelke skillfully assembles a rich body of evidence to support his case. A second insightful historical chapter narrates the movement’s evolution from the 1930s into the present through the biographies of a series of prophets. We learn how their ministries bureaucratized and how they embraced Western-influenced medical practices, education, and even the print media.
The rest of the book considers how the Apostles organize their lives without Scripture. The first means is by mutemo, a flexible system of laws that address the practical concerns of daily life and encourage church members to take responsibility for their actions. Many of the mutemo do seem to be informed by knowledge of the Bible, but there is an embargo on citing Scripture in church meetings. The Friday Masowe spurn the written text because it freezes God’s word, while they consider the Holy Spirit to provide continuous revelation. For them, a material object like a book, even the Bible, cannot be spiritual.
Other means of revelation are the utterances of the prophets and singing. The prophets speak authoritatively but quietly when possessed by the Holy Spirit, and their words are amplified by others who communicate the message to the audience. Song is a more direct and democratic means of encounter with God. Old standards or new songs can be sung at any moment during a service by anyone. These two kinds of revelation—prophetic utterance and song—check each other and counter the tendency towards a fixity that can come with mutemo.
The issue of ritual healing, considered in the final chapter, brings the conundrum of material representation to the fore. While rejecting the medicines of traditional healers with whom they compete for clients, the Apostles nevertheless feel compelled to give adherents pebbles as signs of their healing prayers. But the pebbles, like the simple cheap cloth from which Apostolic robes are made, “are special precisely because they are not special.”
Engelke’s fresh take on AICS is most welcome but I would have liked to see some engagement with the classic themes of research on these movements. The Saturday Apostles of Johane Masowe are famed for their self-reliance and entrepreneurship. Their transnsational connections have enabled them to profit from foreign exchange dealing, transportation, and retail. Engelke tells us very little about the life-worlds of the Friday Apostles outside their religious communities: how they relate to materiality in their home-life, work, and play. It would have been enlightening to learn how they have coped with Zimbabwe’s economic decline over the last decade. Equally pertinent is the issue of politics. One of Engelke’s key informants was Godfrey Nzira, who before his ignominious downfall had been a stalwart of the ruling party, ZANU/PF. At one rally during the election campaign of 2002, Nzira, had prophesised that Robert Mugabe was “a divinely appointed King of Zimbabwe and no man should dare challenge his office.” The Friday movement’s most famous son is Augustine Chihuri, the Commissioner of Police, who has stood by and watched the rule of law being flouted by militias, war veterans, and party youth, who have illegally seized land and property. It would have been interesting to learn whether such high-profile Apostles had a theology of politics that appeased their consciences to say and do such things.
Nevertheless, A Problem of Presence is an important contribution, not just to scholarship on the African Church, but also to an emerging anthropology of Christianity. After the 1920s and 1930s, the nature of AICS changed considerably. The movement was no longer typified by great transnational organizations led by founding prophets, but by a myriad of smaller, more disparate groups such as the Friday Apostles. Studies of these smaller groups are rare, and by opening up to comparative analysis their singing, healing, and beliefs about the Bible and presence of God, Engelke has made their lives count. To use the historian E.P. Thompson’s memorable words, he has helped rescue the Friday Apostles from “the enormous condescension of posterity.”
David Maxwell is professor of African history at Keele University. He is the author most recently of African Gifts of the Spirit: Pentecostalism and the Rise of a Zimbabwean Transnational Religious Movement (Ohio Univ. Press).
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