In a historiography that paints relations between chiefs and women as antagonistic, the history of the Nazaretha Church in Mtunzini, South Africa in the early twentieth century sheds light on conditions that allowed chiefs and women to find common ground. During the era of segregation, Mtunzini was, on one hand, subject to relatively less interference from white go...

Ideas about healing produced challenges to a sense of ethnic belonging as well as a 'Zulu turn' within Isaiah Shembe's Nazaretha Church. This article traces Shembe's evangelism prior to the emergence of the Nazaretha to show that his spiritual autobiography and earliest religious communities offered few indications of an ethnic framework for belonging. Instead, cla...