"Whites Cannot Be Influenced": A Legal History of the Nazareth Baptist Church

When Isaiah Shembe died in 1935 leaving his will unsigned, leaders of the Nazareth Baptist Church accompanied Shembe’s personal lawyer, D. G. Shepstone, to the Pietermaritzburg High Court to defend the founder’s wishes. It was neither the first nor last time that white secular judges decided the spiritual affairs of this African church. Johannes Galilee Shembe, Isaiah’s successor, frequently went to court on church business. When he died in 1976, his lawyering son, Londa Shembe, was embroiled in a bitter legal battle with his uncle Amos over the leadership of the church. Since then, legal cases have multiplied, as have church factions, clandestine political maneuverings, and even assassinations and petrol bombings.

Using magistrate’s records, church documents, and oral interviews, this paper traces the history of Shembe’s church and its dealings with state and local authorities through a century of legal disputes. It argues that church leaders – especially those at Ekuphakameni – saw the western legal system as a useful weapon in local power politics dominated by chiefs and ruling party bureaucrats. At an ideological level, church leaders justified litigation as a necessary means to preserve and protect the traditions of the founder, Isaiah Shembe, who himself used the courts. At a practical level, judicial power restrained chiefs from meddling in church affairs and protected church lands from state confiscation. In this respect, church litigation tapped into a longstanding tradition of liberal South African lawyering, which opposed colonial policies of segregation and later apartheid. Neglected in the theologically-oriented scholarship on the Nazareth Baptist Church is the importance of its legal history and, in particular, its leaders’ reliance on western courts to bolster their autonomy and resist control by local or foreign despots.