Under the Canopy : Ritual Process and Spiritual Resilience in South Africa

The liberation struggle in South Africa has many publicly recognized heroes, but enduring feats of courage also came from unsung heroes and heroines who for countless years kept the faith by drawing from resources beyond empirical knowledge -- the religion and rituals of their African ancestors as well as selected components of Protestant Christianity, the religion of their ancestors' colonizers. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission's final report released in October 1998 details South Africa's brutal history of institutionalized violence and the white government's fight against racial equality. The emergence of African indigenous churches and their rapid growth in South Africa provided a balm for many of the poorest black South Africans. Ritual processes creatively reflected the struggle for freedom amid intense oppression and provided a way for the oppressed to take charge of their lives. In Under the Canopy Linda Elaine Thomas argues that the healing rites performed at St. John's Apostolic Faith Mission Church, located in Guguletu, an African township in Cape Town, was one means by which these poor black South Africans liberated themselves from oppressive systems. The healing rites, and the folk medicine they involved, reoriented the community's focus away from the stress of life under apartheid and enlisted active community support that aided in expelling the aggressive and toxic apartheid system. This study underscores the remarkable ability of economically disadvantaged people in South Africa to use their few material resources to create powerful and transformative rituals that helped them endure and transcend the inhuman circumstances of their lives. Members of St.John's created a community capable of drawing from the disorder of the society around them a purposeful, orderly, and unified outlook at the personal and communal level. The ritual action performed by this community contested the articulation, distribution, and control of knowledge by a white elite and developed new cultural meanings that made sense to the marginalized. The healing rituals were expressions of protest by an oppressed people who transformed the world in which they lived.

Linda Elaine Thomas teaches anthropology and theology at Garrett Evangelical Theological Seminary in Evanston, Illinois, and directs the Center for the Church and the Black Experience.