Athambile Masola (University of Cape Town, South Africa) –  Intshumayelo and the religion of imagination
April 24th, 2025
4 PM South Africa Standard Time/ SAST (GMT +2) 

Abstract: The black church in black working class communities has often been the site of disdain. In this lecture I want to consider the black church as a site of possibility. By centering intshumayelo (loosely the sermon) as a poetic, cultural and spiritual device, I consider the ways in which the rituals in a black Methodist Church in Khayelitsha have prophetic value which speak to the lived reality of the people who attend the church. Borrowing from Hortense Spillers’s lecture “Fabrics of History: The Rhetoric of Sermons and the Problem of Black Culture” I adopt an anthropological posture as a congregant in my own church and revisit a sermon delivered in January 2025 by umama uNodala. The singularity and the particularity of this specific intshumayelo is significant purely for my subjectiveness. It is intshumayelo which moved me by its poetics of possibility and imagination in its aim of edifying a community rendered as a social problem. The historical and spiritual idiom of intshumayelo allows for spontaneity insofar as it relates to the divine and the material in a singular moment. At the heart of ukushumayela (to preach) are the remnants of ukubonga (oral praise poetry) which also relies on the divine and the material conditions of black life.

Bio: Athambile Masola is a writer, researcher and an award-winning poet based in the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Cape Town. She has a PhD from Rhodes University. Her debut collection of poetry is written in isiXhosa, Ilifa (Uhlanga Press, 2021). She is the co-author of the children’s history book series, Imbokodo: Women who shape us (Jacana Media, 2022) and Together Apart: The story of living in Apartheid (Jacana, 2025) with Dr Xolisa Guzula. In collaboration with Makhosazana Xaba she was involved in collating a collection of Noni Jabavu’s columns from 1977, A Stranger at Home (Tafelberg, 2023). She is the co-editor of Inyathi Ibuzwa Kwabaphambili: Theorising South African Women’s Intellectual Legacies (Mandela Press, 2025) together with Babalwa Magoqwana and Siphokazi Magadla. Her research focuses on literary and intellectual histories of black women. She is also interested in the African language newspaper archive of the 19th and early 20th century.

Upcoming VLS events (more details TBA):

May – Gilbert Caluya (Deakin University)
June – Siddhart Soni (University of Southampton)
July – Rosemary Overell (University of Otago)
August – Hsuan Hsu (University of California)
September – Lisa Calvente (The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
October – Camilla Mørk Røstvik (University of Aberdeen)
November – Dianlin Huang (Communication University of China)
December – Sarah Bufkin (University of Birmingham)
January 2026 – Danzhou Li (Shenzhen University)

Abstracts and links to the recordings of the past talks can be found here