As historic guardians of the land, prophets played innovative roles in resistance and adaptation to European colonialism. Many drew valuable inspiration and examples from the Old Testament. Between 1860 and 1900, when Maori were dispossessed of much land, prophets inspired by the Old Testament flourished on the North Island of New Zealand. When settler expansion belied belief that the Treaty of Waitangi would protect them against expropriation, the Maori launched several wars of resistance. Observing European missionaries serving as chaplains in the British army or abandoning their mission stations, many Maoris questioned their sincerity and were drawn to the prophets’ messages. Identifying with the Old Testament search of the Israelites for freedom from bondage, Maori religious leaders concluded that they, too, were a chosen people and had a covenant with God. Maori prophets divided into two camps: those who acted in the manner of tohungas and those who incorporated Christian beliefs. Most of the latter were Christian converts whose followers had turned against the British missionaries. Te Ua had been baptized in the Methodist Church and served as a low-level teacher in mission schools. In 1862 after the angel Gabriel appeared to him, Te Ua founded the Pai Marire (Good and Peaceful) movement grounded in the belief that Jehovah and angels would protect Maori land and force the pakeha back to their homelands. Te Ua cosmology incorporated not only Jehovah, but also Rura and Riki, Maori sky deities, and Ripe, a bird that conveyed divine messages between heaven and earth. Its central ritual involved marching around a sacred pole uttering prayers.
Te Ua also brought in the New Testament by invoking the Holy Spirit of Acts 2: 1-4. His movement started on the west coast of the North Island and spread rapidly around the island. Although he preached peace and reconciliation, some of his apostles, the Hau Hau, adopted a more militant line when war resumed in 1863. Believing the hau, or wind spirits, would shield them from bullets, they carried on an armed struggle against the British for several years. Te Ua, however, remained steadfast in his message of peace; after being captured by the British in 1866, he accompanied Governor George Grey on a tour aimed at persuading rebels to surrender.
Another prophet, Te Kooti Rikirangi, had been baptized and educated at a CMS mission. Although he had publicly sided with government forces against the Hau Hau, suspicious officials charged him with spying and banished him with 300 others to the distant Chatham Islands. In exile the archangel Michael appeared in a vision to Te Kooti, assuring him that the Maori were a chosen people whom Jehovah would deliver from bondage and dispossession. After escaping in 1868, Te Kooti led a guerrilla campaign for many years in Urerewa Reserve before disappearing into a remote area. Never captured, he was finally granted a state pardon in 1883. The religion he founded was known as Ringatu (Upraised Hand), a sign of blessing, and specialized in healing through laying on hands. Believing a new faith to be essential because the missionaries had distorted Scripture to suit colonial aims, Ringatu adopted the new set of Scriptures which God had revealed to Te Kooti. The Ringatu church observed a Saturday sabbath and offered prayers to God but without the mediation of Jesus Christ.
Xhosa chiefdoms on the front line of colonial conquest in nineteenth- century South Africa also spawned prophets. Visionaries such as Nxele and Mlanjeni relied on Xhosa religious precepts to rally their people against European intrusion, while Ntsikana, regarded as the first Xhosa Christian convert and prophet, preached accommodation with colonial power. However, by the end of the nineteenth century Afrikaner settlers and British colonists had conquered roughly 93 per cent of South Africa and consigned Africans to impoverished rural reserves, small pockets of land scattered about the countryside. In 1913 the Natives Land Act virtually froze the land division between blacks and whites, and became a burning issue as thousands of Africans forced off the land migrated to urban centres. Some black religious leaders responded by adopting a strategy of defensive segregation, establishing ‘holy villages’ or ‘New Jerusalems’ in which their devoted followers could find safe havens, even if for a brief time, from European oppression.
To the prophets, Zion Cities functioned as natural extensions of Zionist and Pentecostal religious teachings—gathering places for their followers devastated by land shortages. Ignatius Lekganyane, the prophet-healer who founded the Zion Christian Church in 1925, made Moriah (near Pietersburg (Polokwane) in the northern Transvaal) the centre of an annual Passover festival that now attracts millions of his church’s adherents. Moriah was considered the church’s central sacred space free from white domination and interference, while each local congregation developed its own sacred space. Isaiah Shembe applied the same concept of sacral space, using church offerings to purchase 38 acres for his principal sanctuary, Ekuphakameni, centre of his healing ministry and site of an annual three-week assembly in July. To his amaNazaretha faithful, Ekuphakameni was both an earthly Zion and a court of heavenly worship. Shembe bought more than twenty other parcels of land and rented them to individuals. He instilled a disciplined work ethic embedded in a church liturgy that advised: ‘Never be idle. It is a sin to be lazy. A busy person is like a dog which survives by begging food from human beings.’ Shembe’s mission directed his preaching at Zulu traditionalists hostile to the Christianity of mainstream missions. With his acceptance of polygyny and the authority of parents over children as well as husbands over wives, Shembe appealed to Zulus anxious to uphold patriarchal values. He presided over his followers like a Zulu chief, meting out punishments and choosing when to hold ceremonial dances. Housing at Ekuphakameni resembled a traditional pattern of Zulu royal residences with separate spaces for men and women and maidens ‘secluded’ in an area much like the isigodlo.
The ministry of other religious leaders, such as A. A. S. Le Fleur, stressed the search for land. In 1861-2,3,000 Griquas had trekked to Griqualand East with Le Fleur’s father-in-law, Adam Kok, only to see their fortunes ruined by white land speculators and settlers. In 1889 Le Fleur saw a vision of God directing him to collect Kok’s bones and reunite the scattered Griquas. Known among the Griqua as Die Kneg (Servant) and for his predictions, he served a five-year gaol term for an abortive rebellion against white rule.
By the First World War he was advocating self-help schemes for his people. In 1917 he trekked with about 800 people from Griqualand East to Touws River in the western Cape. Although his plan to develop a prosperous farming community failed dismally and his followers dispersed, he escaped conviction for defrauding them. Retaining his reputation as the Griqua’s ‘New Moses, he continued his quest to uplift the community. He worked through the long-established Griqua Independent Church and eventually founded a settlement for his followers at Kranshoek, near Plettenberg Bay, that is still a site for pilgrimages. Resentment over lost lands also fuelled the Samuelite movement which emerged among the Seleka Rolong at Thaba ’Nchu, an African reserve near Bloemfontein that allowed private land ownership. After Samuel killed his brother Tshipinare in 1884 during a dispute over the succession to their father, Chief Moroka, Samuel went into exile, settling eventually with his supporters at Motsiloje in north-eastern Bechuanaland. More people joined them after passage of the Natives Land Act. Although reclamation of lost land was never a realistic prospect, around 1923 Henry Morolong, an independent preacher, fuelled millennial expectations that Samuel was soon returning to vanquish Tshipinare’s supporters at Thaba ’Nchu.
The South African government suspected the political implications of these ‘movements’ but did not aggressively confront them as it did in the case of Enoch Mgijima, who, like the New Zealand prophets, identified his followers with the Old Testament Israelites. When Halley’s comet blazed across the sky in 1910, he had a vision of an impending war that would come from the East. Shortly after the influenza pandemic arrived in late 1918, another vision led him to call his followers to await the end of the world at his holy village, Ntabelanga (Mountain of the Rising Sun), in Bullhoek location in the eastern Cape. Although the Israelites claimed they were gathering to observe their annual Passover festival, local officials worried that many were building permanent dwellings. Lacking the manpower to enforce the law against the disciplined, uncompromising defiance of the Israelites, they called in the national government. Neither inducements nor threats would budge the Israelites, who proclaimed they were following the dictates of God, not the state. Officials, in their turn, suspected a plot to organize a wider rebellion. What else could explain Israelite men with knobkerries and ceremonial swords performing disciplined drills in martial formations before and during services? Misinterpreting these established features of Israelite ritual as preparation for warfare, officials decided to expel the Israelites from their holy village, lest their resistance damage the image of European invincibility. Eight hundred police with rifles and machine guns suffered only light casualties during the twenty minutes required to overcome the assegais and knobkerries of the Israelites at the battle of Bullhoek on 24 May 1921, where 200 Israelites perished.