The Legacy of Marthinus L. Daneel

Marthinus (better known as “Inus”) Daneel was born in Zimbabwe, then Southern Rhodesia, on 24th August 1936, the son of Dutch Reformed missionaries at Morgenster Mission near Masvingo (Fort Victoria). He died in Boston, Massachusetts on July 29, 2024, and leaves his wife, Dana Robert Daneel, four adult children and two adult stepchildren.

Inus Daneel spent over fifty years working among Shona independent churches as a scholar, theological training programme director, ecumenist, and environmentalist. Growing up in the Karanga heartland, he became fluent in the Shona dialect of that region at an early age. He had primary and secondary schooling in Zimbabwe, his undergraduate studies at the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa, and his doctoral studies at Vrije Universiteit (VU) Amsterdam in the Netherlands, graduating D.Theol. (cum laude) in 1971. The empirical part of his research involved three years living among African independent churches (AICs) in rural central Zimbabwe, where his fluency in Karanga stood him in good stead. There he studied Shona independent churches and developed strong friendships with their leaders, particularly the founder of the Zion Christian Church (ZCC) in Zimbabwe, Bishop Samuel Mutendi, who soon adopted Daneel as one of his sons.

While completing his doctorate, Daneel was a senior lecturer and researcher at VU Amsterdam, and after that went to work with AICs in Zimbabwe for a decade. In 1972 he founded and directed the African Independent Church Conference (Fambidzano), and the Theological Education by Extension, Zimbabwe, work that continued for seventeen years, even after he took up an academic position at the University of South Africa (Unisa). In 1984 Daneel started another enormous project when he founded the Zimbabwean Institute of Religious Research and Ecological Conservation (ZIRRCON) and was its director for sixteen years until 2000. In this latter project he worked with both Christian and traditional religious leaders. He was Professor of Missiology at Unisa from 1981-1995, after which he became part-time Professor of Missiology at the Boston University School of Theology, as he had married Dana Robert, one of its professors. In Boston he co-founded the Centre for Global Christianity. His legacy lives on there, where his many fine photographs and recordings have been digitally archived (Old & New in Shona Religion), his books digitized,  and where the online Dictionary of African Christian Biography and the Journal of African Christian Biography are produced.

Daneel’s publications were profoundly ground-breaking. His first book, The God of the Matopo Hills, was published in the Netherlands in 1970 and chronicled his remarkably rare encounter (for a white person) with the Mwari (Supreme God) cult in western Zimbabwe. As a result of his doctoral research, Daneel produced the prodigious three-volume Old and New in Southern Shona Independent Churches, each volume a treasure trove of valuable, comprehensive, and first-hand knowledge of these churches. His rich, thick descriptions of AIC rituals and services follow in the very best traditions of missionary anthropology. I do not know of any study of African Christianity rivalling this enormous achievement. No western observer has spent the amount of time that Daneel spent among the independent churches of Zimbabwe, nor with such intensity. It is even more remarkable that his research was conducted in a rural area (so called “tribal trust land”) during the early stages of the second “Chimurenga” liberation war. The first volume, subtitled Background and Rise of the Major Movements, was published in the year of his doctoral graduation (1971) and is dedicated to those AIC leaders (the first mentioned is Mutendi) “whose reassuring trust, goodwill and unfailing aid largely contributed to this study”. Daneel’s method was to be an involved participant observer to whom access to these churches was possible because of his relationships. The volume gives the socio-religious and historical background to these churches, both “Spirit-type” and “Ethiopian type”. The second volume, Church Growth ¾ Causative Factors and Recruitment Techniques, followed in 1974, three years later, where his key themes of “adaptation and transformation” between the “old” and “new” religions is given prominence. The third volume, Leadership and Fission Dynamics, was published in 1988 in Zimbabwe, where subsequent events since the 1960s are traced, including the schisms that followed the deaths of church founders like Samuel Mutendi. These three volumes were followed in 1989 with an equally impressive work, Fambidzano: Ecumenical Movement of Zimbabwean Independent Churches, detailing his work with theological education by extension amongst these churches, a movement he helped found. Altogether, these four books on Shona independent churches total well over two thousand pages, a veritable mine of information and loaded with Daneel’s own interpretations.

It must not be forgotten that permeating and informing these pages was a profound understanding of Shona religion, both “traditional” and contemporary. Daneel was an expert in how to relate the “old” Shona religion with the “new” African Christianity. He was also a keen environmentalist. After the liberation war had ended and in response to the concerns of African leaders about the devastation of the land through deforestation, he founded one of the largest tree-planting projects in the sub-Sahara. This environmental work featured in two further monographs (1998, 1999) titled African Earthkeepers, where ecological concerns become part of the mission of the church and indeed, of religion as a whole. As a measure of his stature among the Zionist churches in Zimbabwe, he was consecrated as an Ndaza (Holy Cord) Zionist bishop in 1991. One of the fundamental convictions of Daneel was that AICs were not primarily a reaction to missionary colonialism and racism, but predominantly missionary organisations in their own right, most of whose converts had never been in other churches.

Soon after my arrival in Birmingham in 1995, I was asked to speak at a faculty meeting at Selly Oak on my personal pilgrimage in mission. I reflected there on the profound impact that Daneel had had on my own life and thinking. We had some things in common. My parents and grandparents were missionaries in Zimbabwe, where I also grew up. I had been introduced to a paper Daneel had given in Harare by a friend who had attended this lecture in the late 1970s. When Daneel took up his appointment at Unisa in 1981 I was a struggling part-time, third year BTh student in his department and a Pentecostal Bible school teacher in Soshanguve (near Pretoria), trying to plough through what seemed an insurmountable amount of study whilst juggling my work duties. It did not take long for me to be fascinated with his grass-roots approach to research and theology in Africa, that resonated with my own situation at the time. He supervised my masters research degree and my doctorate. I remained under his mentorship and tutelage until I completed my doctoral dissertation in 1992. I had been his student for the best part of a decade, and there were indeed many lessons to learn. The following are just a few of the many ideas that I found inspiring.

Daneel taught us to treasure the vast riches in the African religious and cultural heritage and the need to be sensitive to that in mission in Africa. He emphasised the enormous missiological relevance of the AIC movement together with its potential resources for academic research. His sympathetic approach to loaded terms like “syncretism” and “heathenism” further influenced the approach of his students. More than anyone else, this unique combination of Afrikaner Reformed and Zimbabwean African missiologist provoked those who knew his work to strive for academic excellence and meaningful missiological reflection and interaction. He constantly stretched our horizons with his profound observations, and his practical experiences stimulated a desire to probe further. He was no armchair academic, for his prodigious writings were solidly built on his empirical research. During these years at Unisa he was involved in ground-breaking theological education for Zimbabwean AIC leaders (Fambidzano) and the massive tree-planting project reflecting his lifelong ecological interests. His academic output was already legendary, and I eagerly absorbed, and sometimes unconsciously reproduced, as many of his ideas as possible. So much of what he had written about Zionists and Apostolics in Zimbabwe paralleled my own Pentecostal perspective, and I began to realise that there was far more in common between these AICs and western-founded Pentecostalism than most would admit. His own passionate defence of “Spirit-type” churches, of which the ZCC is one, and his trenchant criticisms of misinterpretations that had been so common since Bengt Sundkler’s ground-breaking Bantu Prophets, coming as they so often did from misunderstandings of African cosmology (Daneel 1974:347), were to profoundly influence my own writing and the direction of my research. Here follow some of the principles I learned from Daneel’s Old and New.

Daneel has given invaluable and comprehensive detail on the adaptations made by southern Shona churches to traditional customs, a significant source of attraction (1974:103, 117, 139). He observed that God’s messages are often transmitted through the ancestors in these churches (1974:142), that “the manifest content of dreams leaves little doubt as to the Church which a person is supposed to join” (1974:151), and that this was particularly true of “Spirit-type” churches. He found that prophetic healing was the single most frequently mentioned factor for people joining “Spirit-type” churches (1974:186), particularly in the case of the ZCC, the largest church denomination in southern Africa. Because of the significant number of second-generation Christians now in these churches, the ongoing healing offered to members and new recruits made healing one of the most important factors in their continued expansion. It was this insight that later led me and others to consider healing as a main attraction for the spread of Pentecostalism in Africa.

For Daneel, Zionist prophets are people of immense importance. They are the messengers who hear from God and proclaim his will to people and the seers who have divine power to receive the revelations of God pertaining to the complaint of the enquirer, especially sicknesses. Like diviners, they are usually expected to “see” the complaints before they are uttered by the sufferers. They are healers par excellence, the ones to whom the faithful must go when they or their loved ones are afflicted in any other way. Their healing practices are expected to be effective and to bring actual healing to the patients. They are the ones who must pray for and dispense holy water and other symbolic healing objects as the need arises. They are also people who are expected to give direction and counsel for all kinds of problems, and in a few instances they are believed to declare the will of the ancestors. The prophet is expected to be available to fulfil this comprehensive prophetic function at any time. Prophesying is an essential aspect of the ministry in these churches. As Daneel (1988:25) put it, “It is the accepted way in which the Holy Spirit reveals His will for a specific situation”. In this sense it formed part of pastoral care; for the many different problematic situations encountered by African people are brought to the prophets for their assistance. They make known the will of God for a particular situation and through the Holy Spirit help bring relief. In these churches “it is taken for granted that this form of communication between God and [humanity] belongs to the essence of Christianity” (1988:27). Prophets often exert a moral restraint on people. Sometimes the prophets initiate a process of reconciliation, such as Daneel (1974:307) had observed in Zimbabwe, in which both the afflicted and the ones accused of afflicting were counselled within the church fold. The prophetic advice may have been the beginning of a truly African solution. Finding the cause of the suffering is very important in this context, and this type of prophetic diagnosis may not always be wrong. The diagnosis may produce a psychological catharsis which may benefit the afflicted in relation to the real fear of witchcraft. The spirit world of African traditional thought constructs in its own cosmology the built-in fears and threats that demand a Christian response. The African Christian prophet attempts to give this response, particularly in the healing sessions, when the nature and the cause of the disease are given at the same time. Diagnostic prophetic activity is probably the most common type of prophecy in these churches.

Daneel consistently pointed out both the similarities, but especially the contrasts between Zionist prophets and traditional diviners. This he often did in reply to western critics who had claimed that the prophet and the diviner were one and the same. On the contrary, wrote Daneel, the similarities that exist between the two explain why “the diagnostic prophecies have such an appeal for the afflicted Shona” (1974:224). The parallels are seen in the preliminaries, whereby a “state of trance” is sometimes induced in the warming-up atmosphere of singing, clapping, dancing and stamping. Because the prophecy is seen in terms of an African’s own orientation it is very meaningful. Daneel (1974:224-5) pointed out that the difference between traditional divination and prophetic diagnoses lies in the “medium through which the extraordinary knowledge is obtained”. The diviner relies on divinatory slabs, bones or spirits, or some other means, whereas the prophet invokes and speaks on behalf of the Holy Spirit. The important point is that both concentrate on “the personal causation of illness”, which is the question foremost in a person’s mind. The prophet seeks to witness to the power of the risen Christ through the Holy Spirit, thus providing a remedy more effective than traditional rites. Daneel (1974:228) argued that the prophetic diagnoses and prescriptions point to confrontation and change rather than to a preserving of the old order. Shona prophets “ultimately emphasize their dependence on the Holy Spirit as the real revelatory agent” (1974:232), and they often confront the ancestors.  Because of this fundamental difference, in Daneel’s research any similarities of method between prophets and diviners remain outward forms with radically differing meanings.

Daneel discovered that healing from illness undoubtedly played a major role in the life of Zionist members in southern Africa. The use of healing symbols is one of the central and most important features of the church’s life, and the Zionist healing methods bear “direct parallels” to the practices of traditional diviners (Daneel 1974:232). The most common symbol used is that of water, which is “blessed” or prayed for by a minister or prophet for use by the congregants, either as a healing potion itself or in large quantities to induce vomiting. It is only the prayer which makes the water efficacious. As in traditional healing methods, a patient must expel the “death” that is in the stomach to be healed. The vomiting is believed to get rid of both physical sickness and spiritual defilement. The water is seen to represent cleansing and purification from evil, sin, sickness and ritual pollution ¾ concepts carried over from traditional thought. Members receive holy water, which is then taken home and sprinkled as a ritual of purification or protection or is drunk or washed in for healing purposes.

Daneel (1974:233) observed that the similarities between the symbolic healing objects and those of traditionalists are similarities of form but not of content, and they are “primarily the visual symbolic concretization of the Divine Power, which in itself has no medicative effect.” Nevertheless, Daneel (1974:233) warned of the possible danger of misinterpretation, noting that in some cases this was due to “the inclination of the Shona to identify the symbolic object with that which it represents in the ritual context” (1974:338). This is particularly the case (as is true of all varieties of Christian expression) when with the passing of time, members observe certain rituals because they have become traditions of the church, and not because they really understand their symbolic significance. In these instances, the forms remain unchanged while the meaning has become obscured. But this problem is by no means peculiar to the AICs. All types of church members throughout the world tend to attach magical interpretations to symbols so that their meaning is obscured.

Inus Daneel was one of the greatest missiologists of our time. His natural curiosity, close-up, insider perspectives, and above all his practical involvement in African religion have made his unparalleled and unique research the quintessence of all AIC studies. This standard may never be achieved again. His holistic love for rural Africa and its environment and his pursuit of excellence for himself and his students undergirded by an evangelical faith will always be for this disciple at least, both daunting and inspiring. For this I will be forever grateful.

By: Prof. Allan H. Anderson

REFERENCES

Daneel, Marthinus L. The God of the Matopo Hills: An Essay on the Mwari Cult in Rhodesia (The Hague: Mouton, 1970)

–––, Old and New in Southern Shona Independent Churches, vol. 1: Background and Rise of the Major Movements (The Hague: Mouton, 1971)

–––, Old and New in Southern Shona Independent Churches, vol. 2: Church Growth: Causative Factors and Recruitment Techniques (The Hague, 1974)

–––, Old and New in Southern Shona Independent Churches, vol. 3: Church Leadership and Fission Dynamics (Gweru, Zimbabwe: Mambo, 1988).

–––, Fambidzano: Ecumenical Movement of Zimbabwean Independent Churches (Gweru, Zimbabwe: Mambo, 1989)

–––, African Earthkeepers, vol. 1: Interfaith Mission in Earth-Care (Pretoria, Unisa: 1998)

–––, African Earthkeepers, vol. 2: Environmental Mission and Liberation in Christian Perspective (Pretoria, Unisa, 1999)

Sundkler, B.G.M. 1961. Bantu Prophets in South Africa. Oxford: Oxford University Press