Isaiah Shembes Hymns and the Reflections on Black Liberatory Thought

I locate this paper within the broader reflections on decolonial scholarship. I look at how the Shembe community, through the message conveyed in the church’s hymnals, by Isaiah Shembe- a Black South African prophet who founded Ibandla lamaNazaretha in 1910- construct their own identity. I look at this as a form collective solidarity in the context of the growing inequalities in South Africa. I argue that it is predominately through the research methodological training in the social sciences, received in neo-liberal Universities, that is extractive towards Black communities, that liberatory African knowledges and practices have been marginalised. In most cases the communities lived experiences are theorised in ways that fit in the Western logic. This is often alienating towards the communities studied. This further produces no sincere benefits in terms of social justice for the communities who continue to live under gruesome and extremely precarious conditions. In addition, the implicit tendency by the black elites, to pick up global political paradigms, born of struggles outside of Africa which are used to theorise and formulate the intellectual content of our struggle, like the wave of the decolonial paradigm, which as Mkhize (2020) argues only gives us words to describe our grievances but does not provide a method on how to resolve them. Here, coloniality remains at the centre and whiteness becomes the daily focus. I thus read Isaiah Shembe’s hymnals as literary text that offers African knowledges as liberatory practices that open possibilities for Black identity construction that moves away from the western discourses.