Rituals of Fertility and the Sacrifice of Desire: Nazarite Women's Performance in South Africa.(Review)

Rituals of Fertility and the Sacrifice of Desire: Nazarite Women's Performance in South Africa. By Carol Ann Muller. (Chicago Studies in Ethnomusicology.) Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. [xxiv, 316 p. + 1 CD-ROM. ISBN 0-226-54820-1. $26.]

In 1910, the black South African prophet Isaiah Shembe formed what is today one of South Africa's oldest and largest indigenous religious groups, the ibandla lamaNazaretha (Church of the Nazarites), now a million strong. By appropriating, reinventing, and fusing aspects of Western mission Christianity and Nguni custom and cosmology, Shembe forged a body of cultural and religious truth that, in a particularly repressive and debilitating social, economic, cultural, and political environment, his followers found empowering and affirming.

In this insightful, sophisticated ethnography, Carol Ann Muller focuses particularly on the experiences and ritual practices of female Nazarites. In lucid prose lightened with touches of humor, she addresses contemporary theoretical concerns in anthropology and ethnomusicology as well as in gender, religious, and African studies. Neither apologetic nor self-righteous, she reflexively addresses her complex positioning in South African society with regard to the Nazarite community, establishing an authorial voice that is confident without being arrogant and imbued with respect for her subjects.

Structured from the general to the particular, the book moves from an historical analysis of ibandla lamaNazaretha, though a broad overview of Nazarite religious culture and expressive forms, to an in-depth analysis of the ritual practices of young virgin girls and married women. Muller explains the rise of Isaiah Shembe and the establishment of his religious empire as a response to the sociopolitical struggles and suffering of Zulu peoples at the hands of the mythical Shaka and his descendants, Afrikaner trekkers, and British colonists. In the early twentieth century, Shembe provided material, economic, cultural, and spiritual alternatives for his followers, many of whom were particularly disaffected by societal upheaval: orphans, widows, wives ejected from polygamous households, and those dispossessed of their land. Muller analyzes the hybrid set of religious and cultural practices established by Shembe in relation to space, time, anti ritual attire--parameters that defined the boundaries of the Nazarite c ommunity through clear, ritualized distinctions between self and other, purity and pollution, cyclicity and linearity.

The two primary forms of Nazarite worship are (1) inkhonzo, the structured liturgical service incorporating ...