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SUMMARY:‘Writing from the Mouth’ Arguments over Literacy and Disciplin
 e in the Early South African Nazaretha Church - Dr Joel Cabrita
DTSTART:20100427T150000Z
DTEND:20100427T170000Z
UID:TALK23879@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Susannah Lacon
DESCRIPTION:In the early twentieth century\, Isaiah Shembe\, the prophetic
  founder of the South African Nazaretha church\, sternly criticized the do
 minant African literate culture of the day as a disruptive\, anti-social f
 orce. The target of his criticism were educated\, Western amakholwa (‘th
 e believers’)\, also known as the izifundisa (‘the learned’)\, for m
 any of them were educated at prestigious missionary-sponsored schools in N
 atal and Zululand. These elite Zulu literates aspired to the privacy of in
 dividual reading and writing practices as a mark of their enlightened prog
 ress. A key component of their claim to ‘modernity’ was their membersh
 ip within these highly individualized reading and writing publics. Isaiah 
 maintained that the amakholwa rhetoric of educated modernity dislocated yo
 ung literates from their obligations to family\, rural areas and communal 
 ‘tradition’. He criticized amakholwa literates as the ‘clever ones
 ’\; a largely young generation of literates\, who\, by virtue of their m
 ission-school education\, sought an atomistic modernity\, unhinged from th
 e obligations and burdens of their collective pasts.\n\nBy contrast\, far 
 from a solitary act\, undertaken in the privacy of a ‘room of one’s ow
 n’\, Nazaretha converts’ reading and writing practices were deeply enm
 eshed in the social landscape of the early twentieth century church. In pa
 rticular\, Isaiah used the power of literacy to discipline his converts. H
 e drew upon scribes to fashion texts which exercised his authority over an
  increasingly educated\, and frequently unruly\, younger generation\, as w
 ell as over a recalcitrant body of ministers. Letters were a particularly 
 important admonitory genre. Written with the assistance of scribes\, these
  documents were the medium of Isaiah’s ‘spoken’\, and frequently sco
 lding\, ‘Word’ to obedient recipients. A popular idiom in contemporary
  sermons was of the miraculous ‘golden letter’\, a magical missive wit
 h which Isaiah commanded unruly youths living in cities to return home to 
 the rural areas\, their families\, and broader social obligations.  In its
  widest sense\, Isaiah’s use of youthful amanuenses to craft texts such 
 as these signaled the prophet’s ability to transform the potentially ali
 enating sphere of modern literacy into an important vehicle of ecclesial a
 nd generational discipline. \n
LOCATION: Faculty of Education\, 184 Hills Road\, Cambridge\, CB2 8PQ in r
 oom 1S3
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