This chapter is an edited rendition of a series of conversations between Joel Cabrita and Sabelo Mlangeni that took place on the phone, in person and over e-mail, in Johannesburg, Mbabane and New York, between June 2017 and July 2018. Cabrita’s recent work has focused on the history of Zionism in southern Africa—one of the largest African Christian movements in the region with an estimated 15 million adherents—and Mlangeni has a longstanding interest in photographing Zionist communities. Their collaboration has taken the form of two exhibitions of Mlangeni’s photographs of Zionist Christians, at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Cambridge, England, in 2017 and at Wits Art Museum (WAM) in Johannesburg in 2018. The theme of ‘anxiety’—defined here as a state of being existentially and materially unsettled or ‘out of place,’ also akin to a state of liminality—has pervaded many of their conversations surrounding religion and photography in contemporary Johannesburg.

JOEL CABRITA: Sabelo, much of your photography has focused on two areas: Driefontein in Mpumalanga, the small village you’re originally from, and Johannesburg, the city you moved to in 2001, to pursue studying and work. With regard to Driefontein and surrounding small towns, I’m thinking of series like your Country Girls and your recent body of work on Zionist Christianity, Umlindelo wamaKholwa. Series like Invisible Women and Big City were shot in Johannesburg, while Umlindelo wamaKholwa has images taken in both Driefontein and Johannesburg. I’m struck by how your continual oscillation between Driefontein and your life in the city seems to be a productive creative force for you. You never quite belong in either place, but rather than creating anxiety in any stereotypical sense, this feeling of perpetual displacement is a generative and positive dynamic for you and for your work. And I think the title of this volume—Anxious Joburg—captures something of those liminal complexities: of both belonging and not belonging to a city like Joburg, an experience that surely you share with very many of the city’s inhabitants, both historically and in the present day. So, let’s first focus on that somewhat unsettled state of existing between two places and two homes. Leaving aside your experiences in Joburg for a moment, can you tell me about growing up in Driefontein?

SABELO MLANGENI: Yes, I grew up in Driefontein, a village in eastern Mpumalanga. I was estranged from my parents and raised by my aunt from the Msibi family. In fact, for many years of my childhood, I thought that my aunt was my mother. This was only something I realised wasn’t the case in later life.

JOEL: So your childhood home was itself never really a secure place for you, and what we’re here calling ‘anxiety’ seems to pervade even that early experience. I’m also struck by the contrast between your unsettled relationship with your own biological family and how your photography has become the medium for you to explore a sense of the Zionist church as a new family and a kind of new home. Of course, this experience has powerful historical precedents in a country like South Africa, where for many people—displaced by the massive social changes of the twentieth century including urbanisation and labour migration centered in the city of Johannesburg and its many industries—increasingly found new solidarities in the city via the church, whether that was a Zionist church or any other denomination.[1] That sense of the church as a new family emerges very powerfully in your work. For example, many of the photographs in your recent Umlindelo wamaKholwa series evoke your intimate relationships and close ties with your fellow believers in the Zionist church, both in Driefontein and in Johannesburg. How did you come to be involved in the Zionist church?

SABELO: My home church in Driefontein is the Christian New Stone Apostolic Church.[2] My first encounter with them was when I was 17 years old. I remember the moment very well: it was during a church night vigil, or umlindelo. I was born into a Christian family—my family in Driefontein went to the Swazi Zion church—but at this time I was in a very disconnected state with the church. But at that night vigil I especially remember the singing. I was sitting outside the tent at the fire, but when the choir started to sing, I ran in immediately. I left the fire [outside] to listen to them. It was another experience. The singing was beyond... I can’t explain how the singing was. But the strong bond I formed with the church created problems with my family at home. Joining another church outside of the one my family went to was a challenge at home.

JOEL: Given that you titled your series on Zionist Christians Umlindelo wamaKholwa, or the "Night Vigil of the Believers," clearly the night vigil, or umlindelo, is something that is important to you and central to Zionist identity.

SABELO: Yes, there are different ways of viewing night vigils in the Zionist community, the act of waiting. I think we could even relate it to what we’ve been discussing about anxiety and unsettlement. In the moment of waiting nothing is exactly clear, and so we find ourselves between things, between the old and the new, between the night and the dawn. There are those night vigils where people are celebrating something. Or when someone has lost a family member, and then the whole church comes for a night vigil. Also, you have umlindelo, a night vigil where it’s just siguqho [praying and dancing in a circle], people are using umoya [the Holy Spirit] and they are prophesying throughout the night. So there are these different levels of umlindelo. I am especially interested in the Zion church as a community, where people gather like spiritual sisters and brothers. And umlindelo is very central to the creation of this; it’s a time when a community is created by the experience of waiting together.

JOEL: This notion of ‘waiting’—the time of between, or a liminal space—is central to your identity as a Zionist. But it also strikes me that ‘waiting’ is integral to your craft as a photographer. I know that the physical process of developing film is very important to you, and that you value the materiality of it. And ‘waiting’ for the image to emerge is part of this. Thinking more explicitly about photography, by the time you were a teenager you were fully immersing yourself into the new family of the church. How did photography fit into all of this?

SABELO: The time that I started attending church was the same time when I started working with local photographer Mrs. C.S. Mavuso. She was an important figure in the Driefontein community who was a teacher and also had a photographic studio. She photographed all elements of the community, including Zionist baptisms, marriages and funerals. I began assisting C.S. in the studio, first delivering photographs to her clients, but soon starting to assist her in making photographs.

JOEL: So from an early age photography for you was about working from a position of belonging to the community of Driefontein, but also to the churches themselves. You were photographing people that in some sense you were intimately tied to; these were your own communities. But as we’ve already been discussing, belonging is never entirely straightforward. For me, this complex shifting between proximity and distance is encapsulated by this wonderful photograph of you taken in 2009 in Driefontein. In it, you’re standing at the back of a group of Zion church youth after a Good Friday service. What’s especially interesting to me is that this photograph of you was actually taken by one of the church members with your own camera. I read that image as underscoring your conflicted sense of belonging, your continual movement back and forth between observer and participant: between observing the community with your camera, on the one hand, and being part of the community, on the other, and even having the camera turned on you. Maybe we could even see this image as a commentary on the anxiety of both belonging and not belonging to a church.

SABELO: Photography and a strong—even if complicated—sense of belonging to a community have always been intertwined for me. Moving to Johannesburg gave that a whole new dimension. It was in 2001, around May, when I moved to Johannesburg from Driefontein. It was my first time in the city. I was 21. I arrived in Noord Street at the taxi rank and had to go to the house of my father who jointly owned a few bottlestores and taverns in Fordsburg as well as in Booysens. No one came to pick me up and I got a bit lost. I wasn’t scared but I was quite excited. The city was totally different to Driefontein, everything was different, all the buildings. I felt so disorientated.

JOEL: Your journey from Driefontein to Johannesburg echoes a historical connection between these two places in the history of Zionism in South Africa, something that I’ve explored extensively in my own research [Cabrita 2014, 2018]. I describe how Zionist missionaries from the United States arrived in Johannesburg in 1904, and the area around Driefontein was one of the first areas outside of Johannesburg where they concentrated their energies. So the two areas of growth for Zionism in South Africa were originally Driefontein and Johannesburg. The site of the first independent black-led breakaway Zion church was in Driefontein, led by Daniel Nkonyane around the 1920s. And it was due to Johannesburg and its growth throughout the twentieth century as a mining hub that Zionism spread across the region via migrant labour routes.[3] I find it fascinating that your own personal journey back and forth between your two homes—Driefontein and Johannesburg—exactly mirrors the geographical dynamic through which Zionism first took root in South Africa.

SABELO: Yes, we can look at the history of Zionism in a double way: my own personal history between Driefontein and Johannesburg, and also the bigger history of the church between these two places. And, of course, both are marked by an unsettled state. One of the things we’ve discussed at some length in our conversations is that there have always been differences between Zionists in Johannesburg and our church members in the rural areas. We’ll return to that later on in this particular conversation.

JOEL: For the moment, then, returning to your personal trajectory between Driefontein and Johannesburg, why had you come to the city?

SABELO: This was after my matric and I knew I wanted to study. In fact, because of my experience with C.S., photography was one of the things I thought about studying. But at my school in Driefontein, when we received career guidance from our teachers, studying photography was not one of the things they had information on. And I knew I didn’t have the finances to do a course like journalism where we would also have learned about photography. So in my first few months in Johannesburg I was walking about on foot looking for a job and I just happened to pass the Market Photo Workshop. This is when it was one room in Newtown, really like a workshop, right opposite the Market Theatre in the passageway. When I walked in there, they told me they offered classes for beginners, and there was this great excitement for me in finding out I could study photography. It was around R300 to register, and my friends from Driefontein helped me raise enough. I thought I already knew how to make photographs from my time with C.S., but I was surprised to be introduced to totally different ways of making photographs, and also to go deep into learning about the equipment. During my time at Market Photo Workshop it was about going out, making a photograph, coming back and talking about it. It was very practical. Alongside the history of photography we learned in the classroom, photography was something I also learned outside the classroom, in the community I was taking the photographs in.

JOEL: It sounds like your apprenticeship as a photographer was also an apprenticeship in the city itself—newly arrived from Driefontein, moving around the city and learning more about its multiple communities (and, as a side observation, still supported and buoyed up by your friends in Driefontein, who generously helped you with your new life in Johannesburg).

SABELO: Yes, and after living with my father in Fordsburg for a time, I moved into my own place in Hillbrow, an open space I shared with my friends. Hillbrow was this place where people who were new to the city, people who were immigrants, first thing they arrived, it was straight to Hillbrow. Nigerians were there, Ghanaians, people from the upper part of Africa; later the Zimbabweans came.[4] My friends and I were all paying rent for this flat, and we divided it with curtains. I met these friends in clubs and bars in Hillbrow. But we all went to church together (at that time I was attending the Johannesburg branch in Germiston of my Driefontein church, New Stone Christian Church). We would drink together on Saturday night and on Sunday we’d go to church in the morning, and then afterwards someone would cook dinner or lunch; you go to church and come back to someone’s house and they braai. It was just a fantastic community we had in Hillbrow. And Friday and Saturday evenings we’d have people coming to stay from all over, Daveyton, coming in to party from different parts of the city and they didn’t have a place to stay, so our house would become a place where you wake up in the morning on Sunday and there were an extra ten people in the house. Everyone is here and you don’t know what is what. You don’t have control of things. Anyone can just go to the fridge. It was that kind of environment.

JOEL: I notice these were friends you also went to church with, and, to me, it sounds like a riff on the biblical idea of church: a communitarian space where no one has private property and everything is equally owned and shared. Did you feel that when you moved to the city, you discovered a whole new network of relationships—a new ‘family,’ perhaps—wider than your Zion church from home in Driefontein?

SABELO: Yes, definitely, I remember that I explored a lot of different Zion churches in the city when I first arrived. Sometimes, I’d just be walking in the city and hear something from a building, and go up the stairs. Many of these churches meet in schools in the city centre, that are several-storey buildings. There was one that I went into one Sunday coming from my own church, on the corner of President and End Street. You’re in a Zion uniform, they’re in a Zion uniform that’s completely different to yours. So there’s this kind of barrier. Also, there was a language barrier. This was a church that was almost entirely Zimbabwean, so I couldn’t really understand the things they were talking about. But then there was this moment of siguqho, where they all were singing and they started using umoya. That’s when I had the feeling that we were all united in speaking to a higher power somewhere.

JOEL: The other thing that strikes me from what you’ve said here and about your church in Hillbrow is that the boundaries of what is a ‘church’ in the city become quite fluid, perhaps more so than when you were in Driefontein. Meeting in a school, rather than in a dedicated church building; partying together Saturday night, attending a service Sunday morning; eating and relaxing together Sunday afternoon: everything becomes an aspect of what it means to be in communion with your church.

SABELO: One thing I’ve always noticed with churches in the city is that they are somehow quite open spaces, and that the divide between what is church and what is not church becomes very blurred. Perhaps this also links to this theme of liminality that we’ve been raising throughout. Where does the line between belonging and not belonging to a church get drawn when the boundaries of the church are themselves so open and unclear? For example, there are many churches that meet in spaces that weren’t designed for worship, like churches gathering in the basements of parking buildings downtown. There are also those open spaces like Melville Koppies, or a space that is now gone in Yeoville, right up there on the hill. These spaces are open for people just to walk in and be part of the worship. There’s also that big church between Claim Street and Wolmarans, or maybe it’s Smit. They meet in an old Jewish synagogue, and many people go there with water to get healing there, they use a lot of umoya. If you go there on a Sunday, you’ll find it’s so popular that people are even standing outside. One story is that traffic officers try and remove people waiting on the street and on the pavements because the church inside is so full. But you also find the other extreme: Zionists worshipping in small private houses. When I was living in Hillbrow there was a small Zion church that had services in someone’s flat. That was very new to me coming from Driefontein, to have church in such a small space, and in such a personal intimate space.

JOEL: I think of the difficulties that churches like the Zionists and other independent churches have historically faced in gaining access to sites to worship in Johannesburg. The paradox was that the city became many people’s new home (including finding new religious networks there), but at the same time the government was determined to restrict permanent African urbanisation. So this gives us yet another perspective on the anxiety of not belonging in a city like Johannesburg. Legislation affecting so-called native churches was passed in the 1920s that was explicitly designed to halt the spread of independent churches by denying them the right to erect dedicated church buildings. And then there was the legislation of the 1960s that mandated the removal of churches that weren’t ‘recognised’ by the government from urban spaces.[5] So what you describe as this ‘make-do’ character of Zionist churches, using whatever space is available and to hand to worship in (even old synagogues), seems to me a product of the historical and political pressures on Zionist communities in cities like Johannesburg.

SABELO: And you know, even in a dense, built-up city like Johannesburg, the use of open landscapes, open spaces and nature for worship is very, very important. I’ve mentioned Melville Koppies and that hill in Yeoville. You can also think about Wemmer Pan. So, the relation between nature and spirituality is important with the Zion church. And this question of the land also links to the idea of waiting—ukulinda—that we’ve already discussed. I think of waiting in a very open-ended way. How do I relate waiting to a South African landscape?

JOEL: A lot of your work in the Umlindelo wamaKholwa series features borders and boundaries of some description: walls, bushes, fences, or bushes that make a fence, gates. Is that part of what you’re saying about land? Are your depictions of borders speaking to the current anxieties surrounding how access to the land is still so unequal in present-day South Africa, and the way in which many ordinary people are still struggling to stake their claim to territorial belonging?

SABELO: Yes, I’d say so. That’s also why in this work I was experimenting with including borders [around the images] that are both open and closed. They do have a meaning in this work. What does it mean to have these open or closed borders around the images?

JOEL: It brings to mind the 1913 Land Act, when borders were drawn to determine European and African ownership of the land, and these historical borders still influence South Africa today. I don’t know if that’s too much of a stretch, or if that’s where you could go with that.

SABELO: I think that’s how far I was going when I created those borders around the images. There was a moment when I thought to myself, should I close them? Should I have images that are fully closed with borders? But I felt like closing them wouldn’t speak to the past, a time when Africans did have access to the land, when borders weren’t closed yet and things were more hopeful.

JOEL: And, of course, alongside the Zionist communities we’ve been discussing, the city has so many other types of communities who struggle to gain a foothold or are in some sense marginal, who feel shut off from full inclusion, who don’t belong or have a highly unsettled and anxious existence there. I’m thinking here of your first body of work, Invisible Women [2006], that focused on the female street cleaners who remove rubbish from the inner city at night. I recall you told me that you encountered this community on foot, at the time when you were regularly walking home from the Market Photo Workshop at night and coming across a group of women cleaning in the inner city.

SABELO: Yes, seeing these women as I walked around the city at night was my starting point. And while at first I followed many different women around, by the end I was following a single group who were cleaning between Kerk Street and Eloff Street. It’s a very dense part of the city with a lot of street vendors. It was a group of about five women, and they’d start cleaning around seven or eight and knock off at midnight. They all lived in different parts of the city, one lived in Soweto, another in Orange Farm, another in Alexandra. It took about three months for them to accept me. I was constantly showing up and hanging around, and at first they thought I was coming from a newspaper and were a bit suspicious of me. But eventually I had a bond with them, and some days I would leave my camera at home just to spend time with them and help them to clean sometimes. Sometimes they would even have a broom ready for me...

JOEL: In other words, you somehow became a part of their community, albeit in a limited and transitory way. And there is something highly liminal about this community. As the title of your work suggests, they are ‘invisible,’ they are active at night while others sleep, and their labour is almost always unacknowledged and hence undervalued by the residents of the inner city.

SABELO: Exactly. As with everyone else who lived there, my experience was of waking up in a clean city every morning. And we would never ask ourselves, ‘Who are these people? Who are these ghosts, who come when we are asleep and clean for us?’ Because if you go to Johannesburg in the afternoon it is always messy, but you come back in the morning and everything is clean. It reminded me of growing up in Driefontein where we’d all see the role of our mothers: you’d play soccer in the yard, and leave things out like that, and she’d come in the morning and clean and move things around, and then we’d come back. I felt like they were our mothers, our mothers in Johannesburg, cleaning for us overnight. I also felt that there was something important about their work in the present-day city contrasted against the historical reality of Johannesburg when women weren’t encouraged to be in the city.[6]

JOEL: We’re back at the topic of family once again, and we’re discussing your own memories and perceptions of the physical labour that contemporary mothers undertake or are expected to undertake. This is especially interesting to me given your own experience of your mother was so fraught. It also intrigues me that you’re describing these city women in terms of family relationships back home in Driefontein, comparing them to your mothers there. I imagine that surely these urban street cleaners would also have had strong ties to rural areas outside of Joburg. What were their stories?

SABELO: Well, in fact, they were all mothers, one was even pregnant during the time I spent with them. And yes, their children were outside of the city, in their home areas. It was difficult for them. I remember one of the women telling me a story of her daughter at home in Pongola failing at school and she felt her mother’s absence as the reason why she did not get good results. Because her mother was away here in Johannesburg cleaning streets, and maybe the daughter was looking after the other kids. There are just kids at home, and their mother is in the city, working.

JOEL: So this community of women were liminal or anxious in a further sense: they were not only an uneasy part of the urban landscape, largely invisible as ‘ghosts’ who appeared and disappeared during the night, but they were also themselves conflicted about working in the city away from their families at home. Building on that idea, I’m curious to know how you negotiated the experience of being in the city and of geographical distance from your family and your church ‘family.’

SABELO: Well, at the time I was taking photographs for the Invisible Women series I had already stopped attending my Zion church in the city. For some years, I stayed at home without attending any church. I was thinking about many things at the time. Partly it was linked to questions of sexuality. But it was also about my relationship as Sabelo with religion.

JOEL: You mean you had doubts about your faith? That strikes me as really suggestive and important given what we’ve been discussing about the importance of the church as a new home for you. In other words, doubts (another form of anxiety, I would say) continually shadow security, even within the new setting of the church.

SABELO: I still have doubts. I didn’t go to church for some time, even after I rediscovered my faith in around 2008. After then I started attending church again, not my old Zion church from Driefontein, but a different Zion church, Twelve Apostolic Church of Southern Africa Ekuthuleni. And now I participate in church, but I don’t participate in such a way that I want to preach or talk. Before I had no problem to stand up and talk about the Bible and find different ways of explaining it. But this time it’s not something I want to do. I think about Christianity and the disruption of African spirituality. All those pictures that we grew up seeing of Jesus as a white man. Why should the Jesus that I worship look different from me? Another thing that bothers me is the position of women in our churches. I’ve been to so many different Zion churches in Johannesburg, and in all of them, all the prophets, they are mainly focused on the problems that women have, as if it’s only the women who have problems. I find it a little bit disturbing. And in our Zion churches we find more women, yet men still keep the important positions. I notice that when we have a prayer and the men stand up, the women still have to kneel. And I think, why are we still doing these kinds of things?

JOEL: Thinking about how you’re describing your doubts, and your own uneasy sense of belonging to the church, I see a tension in many of your photographs about your two churches linked to your two homes, New Stone in Driefontein and Twelve Apostles in Joburg.[7] Many of your images offer the viewer very direct and intimate access to the faces of the people you’re photographing, emphasising your close ties with your subjects and your privileged access to the community as a Zionist yourself. But I also notice that there are many photographs that hide rather than reveal people’s faces. There are many images with obscured faces, turned backs, indistinguishable silhouettes. Of course, the most striking example of this is ‘In time, a morning after "Umlindelo," where the heads of your three subjects seem to have been cropped off. We can see their bodies up to their shoulders, but not their faces. It’s a very powerful image.

SABELO: Actually, Jo, it’s one of those images where I intended to have a full frame. So I overlooked it for some time.

JOEL: Then this wasn’t deliberate, that the heads were cut off?

SABELO: No, no, it wasn’t deliberate. It’s the end of the film; there are things that are happening when I’m processing in the darkroom and waiting for the results. I’ve always been very committed to the material process and the slow pace of older, more traditional ways of developing images. Maybe for me it’s like the waiting of the umlindelo we were discussing earlier on. Sometimes at the end you have that kind of an image where you weren’t expecting the outcome. But it suddenly opens up or stretches the work in ways you couldn’t have seen before. With an image like this one, you can think of lost identity, because suddenly you have the bodies, but you don’t have the faces, so you can’t identify who these people are. And how does this photograph fit into this whole set of questions that I have about religion? What does it mean? There’s the idea of loss. A loss of identity perhaps. You know, when we think of this whole idea of umlindelo, or ukulinda, this waiting, and how in this process a community is formed, so the church is a community, yes, of course. And to some point you can even think of it as a family. But you also have to think of it as not really a family. So it’s having this family, having this community, but not really. It’s your family, but not your family.

JOEL: It sounds like you’re talking about the limits of relationships. And that even the church isn’t all that you hope it to be. Speaking about alienation, what about the act of taking photographs? Did you ever find that taking photographs contributed to your sense of distance from the church and from church members?

SABELO: Well, the kind of photography I’m doing is not the kind of photography where I photograph you today, and then tomorrow I bring back the photographs and you pay me R10 for them. People see you time after time making photographs, and they don’t get to see them. The questions start: ‘What are you doing with our photographs?’ They know what kind of work I’m doing, but there’s always that question. ‘You keep on taking them, and we don’t see the end results of what you do.’ And when people see a camera, they have the feeling that their problems are solved, or that you’re coming to change their lives in a way that whatever issues or problems they have are suddenly going to be out in the world. So you have that kind of responsibility too, while at the same time that isn’t the direction of the photographs that you’re making.

JOEL: I interpret what you’re saying in terms of not being aligned in any straightforward way with the people you’re photographing. Rather than using your camera to ‘represent’ communities, or to use your photography to proclaim your membership of the Zionist community, you’re in a much more complex conversation with what they might mean and represent in your own imagination. It seems to me that your identity as a photographer makes your belonging to your own Zionist church much more anxious than it might otherwise be.

SABELO: In a way it’s even bigger than that. It’s also this sense of not being at home or settled anywhere, not in the church, not in the city, not even at home in Driefontein. The idea of displacement has become very, very rich for me. I’ve recently been working on a series about South African soldiers who were involved in the First World War, and died overseas. Their bodies are still there, in France, rather than at home in South Africa. In Johannesburg, I often think about how for many people it’s a hard thing to think of the city as a home. It’s just a place where we come to work, and we have a home somewhere else. For example, where I live right now on Joubert Street, I’ve been there since 2014. All the people that I’ve met in that space have come and gone, arriving and leaving. Living in a city like I’m doing doesn’t give you a sense of home. In a city we’re continually moving. Maybe we’ve even moving around within the same city. But the fact is we’re not keeping one structure as home.

JOEL: But there are some people who’ve lived in Johannesburg for many, many generations. There are people for whom Johannesburg is home.

SABELO: Yes, yes, of course. But as much as Johannesburg is home, it’s not home like my home in Driefontein was a home that was formed by my grandfathers. Even for people who’ve been in Johannesburg for a very long time. We have people who’ve been in the city, living in one house, for generations, maybe in places like Soweto. But right in the inner city where people are living in small apartments, they’re always moving around.

JOEL: So when people pass away in the city, where are they buried?

SABELO: They go home. People don’t get buried in Johannesburg. Of course, I wouldn’t say that completely. Some people do. But most people go to their villages, where they come from, other towns and even in other countries. There’s one Zion church that meets in a big building near me on Lilian Ngoyi Street; I think during the week the building is used as a crèche for children. These members are South Africans, of course, but their homes and families are in Zimbabwe. When they come out of church, they stand around outside on the street. I’ve been photographing them through my apartment window. I’m thinking about using these images to create a contact sheet. This is when you photograph with film, and then you process it, and there’s a page where you have all the images, but as small thumbnails. So I’d blow up this contact sheet until it was very large, and then I’d do an intervention. I’d cut out some of the images from the contact sheet and leave those open spaces there. And then I’ll present those images that I’ve moved out—maybe next to the contact sheet; maybe somewhere else. And I’d leave these holes right there. Perhaps it’s a way for me to talk about displacement and about the anxiety of a place like Johannesburg.

JOEL: I’m interested to hear more about what that displacement, or double belonging—at home both in Johannesburg and somewhere else, whether within or even outside of South Africa—might mean for churches that are based in the city. It must mean that Zion churches in Johannesburg are always travelling outside of the city on Saturday nights for night vigils for funerals and other occasions?

SABELO: Yes, of course. Take the example of the event at Wits Art Museum on the Saturday in July where four Zion choirs came to sing.[8] Two of the choirs were from my Joburg church (Twelve Apostles) and from my Driefontein church (New Stone). That evening, the Twelve Apostles choir went to Ermelo for a night vigil. Babe Msibi, the pastor of Twelve Apostles, is from Ermelo. He has a house in Rosettenville, where he lives with his wife. But his family lives past Ermelo in a very small place whose name I can’t remember. And, in fact, the evening before they came to sing at Wits Art Museum, they had come from Newcastle, where they had another night vigil for a funeral. And New Stone had a funeral for a church member’s brother, so they all travelled back from Joburg for the night vigil in Driefontein. If I think back to the time when I was living in Driefontein, of course we always had trips to Joburg for church occasions. But, really, it was the church members in Joburg who were making a lot of trips to us in Driefontein as well as in other rural places. In the city, as much as you’re part of a church in the city, you are coming from somewhere. So if something happens at your home, you go home.

JOEL: If members of Zion churches in Johannesburg are always going away for weekends and funerals and significant events, they must spend a lot of time travelling with church members. That must be a significant part of Zion identity. And you know, a lot of the times when we speak on the phone, you’re always about to go somewhere with the church, or have just come back from somewhere. The time travelling with the church seems like one of the significant parts of being a Zionist, that you’re travelling together and that you’re on the road a lot. And in fact, many of your photographs are about travelling and this experience of being on the road with your spiritual brothers and sisters... it sounds like another variation on the liminal space of the umlindelo, the night vigil, the time of waiting, or of being in between two states.

SABELO: Ja, because when we look at other Christian churches like the Born Agains and the Charismatics,[9] they’re different to Zionists in that they don’t have all these services and ceremonies like imilindelo. One thing about the Zion church is that we support each other through the vigils when someone passes away. Almost the whole year round, the church’s calendar is full with things that are happening. It involves a lot of money, and this is something that people sometimes get frustrated about. It’s so much money that is used in our church specifically for travelling. And of course, when we get to the place, you also have to buy presents for the person, and in most cases the person with the job is expected to give more money.

JOEL: So what would a present look like?

SABELO: For example, this time for the pastor’s wife, for the ceremony of her coming out of mourning, they bought a very expensive couch. Or it could be a fridge and cupboards. Maybe all the members contribute R20. But those who are working are expected to give more. You have agreements between yourselves. If anything happens to my parents, to my brothers, to my sisters and they pass away, each church member will contribute R20 as a support.

JOEL: Do you find that you struggle with mixed allegiances in being torn between your belonging to two different churches, one in Johannesburg and one in Driefontein? Does this cause any kind of tension or conflict between you and your two churches? Is there a sense of competition or rivalry between the two of them, both fighting for your loyalty and your support?

SABELO: Well, that can sometimes be the case. But when both choirs from both my churches [Driefontein and Johannesburg] were in Johannesburg for the concert at the Wits Art Museum exhibition, something amazing happened. When New Stone from Driefontein saw the beautiful cloth sewn by Londiwe from Twelve in Johannesburg, they called me saying they wanted Londiwe to make them new uniforms [for church] because she sews so wonderfully.[10] This is so beautiful. This is something I really want to see. And maybe they’ll even meet up outside of Johannesburg. Twelve even has a branch in Piet Retief, which is very close to Driefontein and to where New Stone meets.

JOEL: Sabelo, this seems like a lovely and hopeful way to end our conversation. Much of what we’ve been talking about relates to things that could be construed negatively: anxiety, displacement, dislocation, liminality, not belonging. Our discussion has especially focused around the fraught complexities surrounding home and belonging, whether to a city like Johannesburg, a biological family in Driefontein, or to a Zion church that is continually moving between sites. But what you’ve just said about your two churches coming together through this event at Wits Art Museum in Joburg is a reminder that occasional moments of togetherness, peace and belonging do emerge from the midst of all these displacements that so characterise a place like Johannesburg. I suppose the point is that the movement between belonging and not belonging (or between anxiety and peace) is such a productive one. The two states are inseparable; perhaps they actually constitute each other in some mysterious way. Thank you so much for the privilege of having these rich conversations with you over the last months.

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Notes

[1] Belinda Bozzoli’s Town and Countryside in the Transvaal (1983) is a classic treatment of the wide-scale migration of Africans to work in the new mining metropolis of Johannesburg. See also Charles van Onselen’s New Babylon, New Nineveh (2001). For a treatment of new religious affiliations in the city, see Deborah Gaitskell (1983). Wilhelm-Solomon et al. (2016) offer a contemporary perspective on the intersections between migration and religion in the city.

[2] This organisation loosely identifies itself with the Zionist Christian tradition. Rather than being a single church, the Zionist movement in southern Africa is a decentralised federation of thousands of different churches, many of which practise some form of healing prayer. The single largest Zionist organisation in southern Africa is the Zion Christian Church (ZCC) with approximately six million members.

[3] Usually thought of as a religious movement entirely local to southern Africa, in fact the Zionist church had its roots in a late-nineteenth-century Protestant faith-healing movement centred in the small industrial hub of Zion City, located on the banks of Lake Michigan just north of Chicago. Under the leadership of the charismatic preacher and healer John Alexander Dowie, Zion’s faith-healing teachings circulated the world, largely thanks to the dissemination of the movement’s popular periodical Leaves of Healing, as well as through the work of missionaries from Zion City. Although Zionism took root in other areas of sub-Saharan Africa (most notably in the Gold Coast), it was within the post-South African War Transvaal that Zionist faith healing most spectacularly flourished among Africans and—for a limited phase only—white Afrikaners and Britons (Cabrita 2018).

[4] For a historical perspective on Hillbrow’s changing demographic composition from the 1970s onwards, see Alan Morris (1999), or see AbdouMaliq Simone (2004) for a more recent treatment of Hillbrow as a hub for local and international migrants.

[5] The Native Churches Commission passed its recommendations regarding independent black-led churches in 1926, including outlining the almost always insurmountable criteria churches had to fulfil in order to access the right to construct a dedicated church building (Cabrita 2014).

[6] Throughout the twentieth century, white urban administrators allied with conservative African patriarchs to keep African women domiciled at home in the rural areas across southern Africa, thereby hoping both to discourage permanent African settlement in cities such as Johannesburg and to avoid the perceived undesirable consequences of a female urban population emancipated from the supervisory control of fathers and husbands at home (Simelane 2004; Bonner 1990).

[7] This and all future references to ‘Twelve’ or ‘Twelve Apostles’ denote the Twelve Apostolic Church of Southern Africa Ekuthuleni.

[8] Mlangeni’s Umlindelo wamaKholwa was exhibited at Wits Art Museum from 26 June to 28 October 2018. On 28 July, four choirs from four different Zion churches based in Johannesburg and Driefontein performed a concert in the WAM café in response to the photographic exhibition.

[9] ‘Born Again’ and ‘Charismatic’ refer to a variant of Protestant Christianity loosely identified with Pentecostal theology and characterised by an emphasis on speaking in tongues, faith healing and the so-called prosperity gospel.

[10] Londiwe Xaba, a member of Twelve Apostolic Church of Southern Africa Ekuthuleni in Johannesburg, designed and made two Zionist altar cloths (iladi) as part of an installation for the exhibition of Umlindelo wamaKholwa at Wits Art Museum. 

References

Bonner, Philip. 1990. “Desirable or Undesirable Basotho Women? Liquor, Prostitution and the Migration of Basotho Women to the Rand, 1920–1945.” In Women and Gender in Southern Africa to 1945, edited by Cherryl Walker, 221–50. Cape Town: David Philip.

Bozzoli, Belinda, ed. 1983. Town and Countryside in the Transvaal: Capitalist Penetration and Popular Response. Johannesburg: Ravan Press.

Cabrita, Joel. 2014. Text and Authority in the South African Nazaretha Church. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

———. 2018. The People’s Zion: Southern Africa, the United States and a Transatlantic Faith-Healing Movement. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Gaitskell, Deborah. 1983. “Housewives, Maids or Mothers: Some Contradictions of Domesticity for Christian Women in Johannesburg, 1903–1939.” Journal of African History 24 (2): 241–56.

Morris, Alan. 1999. Bleakness and Light: Inner-City Transition in Hillbrow, Johannesburg. Johannesburg: Wits University Press.

Simelane, H.S. 2004. “The State, Chiefs and the Control of Female Migration in Colonial Swaziland, c.1930s–1950s.” Journal of African History 45: 103–24.

Simone, AbdouMaliq. 2004. “People as Infrastructure: Intersecting Fragments in Johannesburg.” Public Culture 16 (3): 407–29.

Van Onselen, Charles. 2001. New Babylon, New Nineveh: Everyday Life on the Witwatersrand, 1886–1914. Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball Publishers.

Wilhelm-Solomon, Matthew, Lorena Lunez, Peter Kankonde Bukasa, and Bettina Malcomess, eds. 2016. Routes and Rites to the City: Mobility, Diversity and Religious Space in Johannesburg. London: Palgrave Macmillan.