CONCEPTIONS OF DISEASE, RESTORATION OF HEALTH AND DEPENDENCY
2. Concepts of Illness and Healing
2.1. The Spiritual Approaches to Illness
2.1.3. The African Independent Churches’ Approach to Illness
2.1.3.2. The Zionist-Type AICs Approach to Illness
While Anderson did not clearly distinguish between the Zionists and the Apostolics, Makhubu noted that these two types of Churches have different types of uniforms,
45 Bengt Sundkler, Bantu Prophets in South Africa. James Clarke & Co.: Cambridge, 1948, pp.247- 248.
46 Erhard Kamphausen, “Unknown Heroes: The Founding Fathers of the Ethiopian Movement in South Africa” in Philippe Denis’ (ed.) The Making of Indigenous Clergy in Southern Africa. Cluster Publications: Pietermaritzburg, 1995, pp.84-91.
ways of worship, and service.49 Having combined their African Traditional Religions and Christianity, what do Zionists believe is the cause of illness? According to James Kiernan who extensively studied the Zulu Zionists in the Durban area:
Zulu Zionists believe that illness, misfortune and premature death are due to the intervention of mystical agencies, commonly called spirits or angels; (umoya yesifo) spirit of disease and (umoya yokufa) spirits of death. The term used for angel (isithunywa) is ambiguous, since it literally means “messenger.” The ambiguity arises in that “messenger”
is capable of either a Christian interpretation (i.e. angel) or more traditional one (that of “ancestor” or deceased parent). Although belief in ancestors has been greatly attenuated, their influence still lingers on.50
“They are like children and we must treat them as such and bring them up with great patience.”51 Those were the words of Missionary Pfitzinger who regarded the converted Batswana Lutherans as children and “crazy”52 because some of them were joining the Zionist churches in the area. He regarded the Zionist activities as heathen (Heidnischen in German) and inclined to promoting polygamy (Vielweiberei). He also wrote that they were using salt to heal mainly those who were hysterical. One of his successors, von Scharrel, in his 1961 Annual Report also regarded Zionism as in opposition to the work of the HMS in the area.53
Just as Western medicine developed within a particular cultural milieu and proved to take time to be accepted by black people in southern Africa, spiritual healing became a force to reckon with as it competed with mission Churches for converts and growth.
Let us consider how Zionists conceived health problems and how they tried to find solutions within their worldviews and changing circumstances. Hennie Pretorius and
49 Makhubu, Who are the Independent Churches? Skotaville Publishers: Braamfontein, 1988, pp.12-13.
50 James Kiernan, The Production and Management of Therapeutic Power in Zionist Churches within a Zulu City. The Edwin Mellen Press: Lewiston, 1990, p.94.
51 1945 Annual Report from by Missionary Heinrich Pfitzinger to the HMS office in Germany, dated January 1946. That document written in German is found in HMS archives in Hermannsburg, Germany in Folder A: SA 42 – 339, 1935 - 1969. “So wie sie jetzt sind, sind sie Kinder, und wir muessen sie auch also solche behandeln und mit grosser Geduld erziehen.“
52 … nicht vichtig sind im Kopf = they are not good in their minds.
53 Annual Report to HMS office in Hermannsburg, Germany, dated 13/01/1962. That document written in German is found in HMS archives in Hermannsburg, Germany in Folder A: SA 42 – 339, 1935 - 1969.
Lizo Jafta provided a description of the Zionist worldview from which healing is conceived and practiced:
The healing ministry is conducted within the traditional African view of the world as permeated by both good and bad spirits. The iminyama (bad spirits) are believed to attack innocent individuals constantly.
Faith healers counter-attack these bad spirits through prayer and iziwasho (potions mixed with ashes).54 To further clarify this point Pretorius and Jafta state that it is believed the source of iminyama is pollution of the air by evil spirits.55
Although not exactly in the same manner as a sangoma and a sedupe, a faith healer also determines the causes of affliction by “smelling-out” or as faith healers themselves say, by ‘propheting’. We discuss Spiritual and faith healing concepts under this subheading because the patients in mission hospitals are taken home for visits only to be taken to another type of health provider. Faith healers would visit mission hospitals in order to provide to their patients some potions generically called iziwasho, which they knew the mission hospitals could not prescribe.
Spiritual healing should be understood as a kind of healing whose modus operandi involves faith on the side of both health provider and of the health seeker. There are cases when the afflicted health seekers are too ill to express their faith in the healing process. What it means therefore is that Spiritual healing therefore is faith healing in which someone’s belief plays an important role in health restoration. Spiritual healing in the AICs was a convenient development, which can be seen as a way of having a clear separation from the domination of missionaries and mission Churches which denied African ways of health restoration.
There have been many categorizations of the independent Churches in southern Africa. In recognition of the difficulty of a clear-cut categorization of the AICs, Anderson wrote, “Much discussion over terminology seems to show that almost any term used will cause some controversy.”56 The recognition of distinctions also calls
54 Hennie Pretorius, and Lizo Jafta, ‘“A Branch Springs Out”: African Initiated Churches’, in R.
Elphick and R. Davenport (eds.) Christianity in South Africa. David Philip: Cape Town, 1997, p.223.
55 Ibid. p.224.
for the acknowledgement of commonalities. A common feature of the AICs is a concern for the health of their general membership. This concern was observed as early as 1944 by the Lutheran missionary, Pfitzinger, in Botswana when he reported that a “sect” called BaSione (those of Zion) had sprung up in Gabane57 with a “green piece of cloth on the lapel” (gruenes Laepchen im Knopfloch) which could only be the ZCC with its unmistakable character.
In southern Africa, the practitioners of spiritual healing, i.e., the Zionist churches, were preceded by mainline Churches. Writing from a Setswana perspective Staugård noted the overlap between traditional and faith healing:
The independent churches are to some extent alienated from Tswana culture and represent an intermediary stage between the indigenous culture and European (colonial) concepts. The methods for treatment of disease applied by the Faith Healer are different from the methods used by Dingaka. Faith Healers are not primarily health workers, although healing dominates their activity. Rather they might be considered religious workers, who utilize their presumed healing potential in promulgating their faith.58
The relationship between the African and Zionist approaches to health and illness were also noted by Hennie Pretorius and Lizo Jafta:
There seemed to be an intrinsic affinity between traditional African conceptions and Pentecostal religiosity, particularly in the Zionist emphasis on healing through the power of faith and the indwelling spirit, which resonated with the traditional belief that witches, sorcerers, and the spirits of the ancestors caused illness. Yet Sundkler concluded that the beginnings of black Zion were not as exclusively
“African as one might presume or would like to believe.59
Unlike the Zulus and Batswana of the Nguni-Sotho grouping, the Zionists do not have any tribal distinction. They are a plethora of tiny independent Churches with a few large ones like the Zion Christian Church of Moria near Pietersburg (now
57 Gabane was one of the outstations of the Ramotswa mission station of the HMS. 1944 two page report dated January 1945 found in HMS archives in Hermannsburg, Germany in Folder A: SA 42- 339, 1935-1969.
58 Frants Staugård. Traditional Healers. Ipelegeng Publishers: Gaborone, 1985, p.60.
59 Hennie Pretorius and Lizo Jafta’s “A Branch springs out”: African Initiated Churches; in R. Elphick, and R. Davenport, (eds.), Christianity in South Africa. 1997, p.217.
Polokwane), and the St. John’s Apostolic Faith Mission Church of Katlehong near Johannesburg. All these Churches collectively form part of the African Initiated Churches (AICs). They have a strong leaning towards African Traditional Religions (ATRs), as we shall see later in this sub-section.
Before looking at the conceptions of illness and healing of the Zionists during the period under review, we shall take a brief view of the origins of Zionist movement and at the place of healing in that early history.
John Alexander Dowie founded the Christian Church in Zion, with its headquarters near Chicago, USA in 1874.60 Dowie's representative came from the US and baptized converts in Wakkerstroom, South Africa in 1904. Zionists commonly taught:
Threefold baptism by immersion; the belief in divine healing and rejection of medicine and doctors; taboos against alcohol, pork and tobacco; the wearing of white robes and green and blue coloured cloaks, cords and turbans; holy sticks; Sabbath observance; holy dances; purification rites and various degrees of accommodation with traditional African customs.61
Let us now look at the early Zionists’ conception of illness and how they administer
"divine healing", apart from the influence of Western doctors and medicine. As the sub-title above suggests, the healing referred to as spiritual, is meant to exclude the use of physical medicine. This section will help us to understand why, later, the Zionists objected to the presence of mission hospitals. A number of good scholars emerged with excellent studies on the Zionists: among them Bengt Sundkler, Martin West, and recently Stuart Bate, top the list. I want to look at what Bate wrote because he approached the whole subject of healing from an angle rarely dealt with in connection with AICs and healing. Bate called the churches that emphasize a healing ministry, “coping-healing Churches.”62 Their healing services are defined as “a community exercise which attempts to move a group of people through a series of transformations which is then experienced as 'healing’.”63
60 Kevin Roy’s “Zion in Africa” in Today Magazine. May 2000, p.28.
61 Today Magazine. May 2000, p.30.
Another interesting aspect of coping-healing Churches is the presence in some of them of isigodlo, a hospital-like set up at the home of a prophet-healer.64 Patients come with a variety of illnesses like, “epilepsy, mental confusion, anaemia, a bruised or sprained leg, alcoholism.”65 The healing process with hospitalized patients is characterized by induced vomiting in the morning, drinking blessed water, washing at the river and prayer by laying-on of hands. Other forms in coping-healing Churches are counselling and prayer.66
Bengt Sundkler67 has devoted space in his famous book Bantu Prophets in South Africa to illness and healing among Zionists. Sin is regarded as a source of illness by Zionists. Sundkler further states that (like the Nguni-Sotho traditionalists) the ancestors and ubuthakathi (witchcraft) are often regarded as sources of disease.
Martin West made the same observation in his book Bishops and Prophets in a Black City.68 He mentioned a prophet-healer who identified the following sources of illness:
sin, the devil directing demons, witches and sorcerers. Sorcerers are said to employ the power of the Devil to cause harm. The Zulus and the Tswanas do not regard harm as coming from the Devil. This source of harm is one of the few beliefs that Zionists did not import from traditional religion into Zionism. It is a Biblical teaching that Satan caused Job to suffer a variety of diseases and mishaps.
In a section on the making of a faith healer or prophet (moprofiti in Setswana), Staugård described in this way the Botswana situation which is not dissimilar to that in South Africa:
Moprofiti—the Faith Healer—is distinctly different from the other traditional healers. For various reasons discussed later on in this chapter, he is, however, still considered a true, traditional healer. The Faith Healer is a leader of one of the independent churches in Botswana. In order to rise to leadership in an independent church a candidate must above all be able to heal. In most cases the Faith
64 Martin West uses this term because he argues that according to his observations prophets and healers are not different.
65 Bate, Inculturation and Healing. Cluster Publications: Pietermaritzburg, 1995, p.46.
66 Ibid. p.48.
67 Sundkler like others was more a Christian missionary rather than an anthropologist. This does not mean that their contribution in anthropology in general and healing in particular is less significant.
68Martin West, Bishops and Prophets in a Black City. David Philip: Cape Town, 1975, p.100.
Healer will claim that through a revelation in a dream he has been chosen by God to perform healing. A substantial number of Faith Healers have a close relationship to another Faith Healer. As a Faith Healer is chosen by God and given his power to diagnose and treat diseases, he considers questions on formal training irrelevant.69
Prophets and faith healers do not use traditional medicine or Western medicine but water, ashes, sashes and items of western origin like petroleum jelly and Epsom salts which are common prescriptions over and above prayer to God. Prophets and the faith-healers are in agreement with the African traditional healers as to the causes and sources of disease. With regard to power and control by healers, we shall look at the Zionist traditional concepts in the Zion Christian Church (ZCC), the St John’s Apostolic Faith Mission church and the Nazareth Baptist Church. Zionist traditional health systems regard impurity and demons as the cause and source of illnesses. In the ZCC there is a strong belief in the danger of pollution and impurity (go tshilafala in Sotho). Every worship service or gathering in the ZCC commences with the purification of the faithful and even non-members.70 This concern for pollution and ritual cleanliness goes beyond the ZCC’s circles into other AICs of a Zionist-type, as Ashforth noted with regard to prophet-healers:
Most of the healing procedures that are today spoken of as ‘traditional’
whether self-administered or directed by a professional healer such as an inyanga, involve, among other things, one or another of these, purification methods in order to remove harmful pollutants and invisible agents from the body.71
In Zionist churches, water is used to cleanse people of pollution as well as tools and dwelling places that have been contaminated with evil or impurity. Blessed water has many uses for ritual cleanliness, protecting against sorcery and witchcraft, and obtaining good fortune like employment, and abundant harvests.72 Similarly, ZCC and St. John’s Apostolic Faith Mission Church members live in constant fear of ritual impurity, contamination from bad spirits and sorcery. Linda Thomas found in her
69 Frants Staugård . Traditional Healers. Ipelegeng Publishers: Gaborone, 1985, p.54.
70 Adam Ashforth, Madumu: A Man Bewitched. David Philip Publishers: Cape Town, 2000, p.145.
71 Adam Ashforth, Witchcraft, Violence and Democracy in South Africa. University of South Africa:
Pretoria, 2005, p.158.
research on the St. John’s Apostolic Faith Mission church in Guguletu near Cape Town that water was prescribed for cleansing in the healing processes. She described the healing process of the country-wide Church thus:
The healing process at the St. John’s embodied a tapestry of converging signs, symbols, speech, and actions that called on the sick to build upon the faith, belief, and life-changing experiences of members who believed themselves to have been restored, in order that the ailing might be healed. The mysterious power of community charisma flowed through the priest-healer, whose culture and history secured a lively past, including a cult of the ancestors who influenced the present. The power of the priest-healer, the gathered community, and the ancestors together manifested a holy alliance of African and Christian symbology. The signs and symbols and faith and action of St. John’s adherents brought into existence a liberating pattern of healing and transformation.73
When dealing with healing among the Zionists, Sundkler observed during a service of the Shembe Nazarite Church74 in Ekuphakameni, KwaZulu-Natal headquarters, that an invitation that was made to adherents to reject the use of Western medicine. “Do not waste your money on medicines. Come here and you will be healed for nothing.”75 Indicating that no connection exists between Zionists and medicine, Sundkler further wrote, "The aversion of the Zionist prophet for anything connected with umuthi is reflected in his reaction to ukuphothula (completion of training) rites, which he regards as demonic." Sundkler concluded his observations on the Zionists’
aversion to biomedicine with the idea that since a traditional herbalist has power to induce hysterical possession by manipulating medicines, “Zionists draw the conclusion that medicine is not a cure of disease, but the cause of demoniacal possession.”76
For healing to take place, sin, especially of a sexual nature, has to be confessed.77 Apart from the confession of sin as a prerequisite for healing, items of Western origin like soap, Epsom salts, petroleum jelly, castor oil, and cords made of wool, are used
73 Linda Thomas, Under the Canopy: Rituals Process and Spiritual Resilience in South Africa.
University of South Carolina: Columbia, 1999, p.59.
74Both Sundkler and Roy regard this church as of Zionist nature. pp.49 and p.32 respectively.
75 Bengt Sundkler, "Bantu Prophets in South Africa." James Clarke & Co.: Cambridge, 1961. p.187.
76 Ibid. p.226.
77 Ibid. p.211.
by Zionists as purgatives for the patient. In a consultation between patient and prophet-healer the treatment is similar to the one given by West: “She prays for them, administers holy water, prescribes protective cords of colours to be tied round parts of the body and uses a variety of other substances."78 Substances used are those mentioned above which are of Western origin and do not posses inherent healing qualities in them. It may then be enquired how Zionists provide healing. Stuart Bate addresses this question in his book Inculturation and Healing.
Bate concludes by saying that the healers involved in the coping-healing ministry insist that what they do is healing. Among his respondents, some were healed but others deteriorated. The latter left disillusioned because of the expectation created by the healers.