A Faith-based Response to the Precarious Work-Life of Black People through Six Days of Labour, One Day of Rest in Ibandla lamaNazaretha

Abstract

This study explores work and rest within the religious and cultural life of Ibandla lamaNazaretha; a church founded by a Black South African prophet Isaiah Shembe (1869– 1935) in 1910. Known for its synthesis of African traditional values and Christian doctrine, the church expresses its theology most vividly through Izihlabelelo zamaNazaretha (the Nazarite Hymn Book), a body of hymns composed by Shembe himself. These hymns continue to shape the moral and spiritual imagination of amaNazaretha. This offers guidance on how to live including how to work and how to rest. Grounded in ethnographic fieldwork, archives, ethnomusicology, sound, active participation and life history interviews with Shembe followers, this study further examines how these teachings are understood and practiced by followers. It shows how they resonate within the broader context of ongoing social and economic precarity faced by Black South Africans in post-1994. The study argues that precarity, as a human condition, is re-imagined and in some ways subdued through the conceptualisation of rest that is not leisure, in relation to work that is not labour. Focusing on Shembe’s teachings, I demonstrate how his conceptualisation of work and rest transcends conventional understandings tied to productivity, economic value, and individual leisure. Instead, Shembe offers an alternative framework in which rest holds spiritual, communal, and ethical significance, serving as a form of resistance to material precarity in the Black lived experience. Ultimately, the study seeks to cover the gap that straddles between religious praxis and the meaning of work and rest, particularly as it relates to faith, dignity, and liberation in Black life