Zulu Pastor Vs. Witchdoctors -2

by Robert R. Schwarz

( Mr. Schwarz is a retired newspaper editor who has made several trips to Africa. This is his second contribution To "Reclaiming Our Heritage." )

( part two of three parts )

" My friend, the Rev.  Khumalo,  and eight  selected  members of his  church prepared  carefully for the exorcism," I continued my report to  friends at the dinner table in my home.

They  fasted and prayed for three days and now, at nine p.m., they knelt  once more.  Then they rose and started their long walk to the  Zulu village,  where Dingane lived. When their feet touched the  dirt floor of the beehive-shaped  hut, the Rev.  Khumalo announced to the 22-year-old Zulu  man: "We have come to pray for you, Dingane,  because you parents are concerned that you are possessed by a demon."  The  pastor was painfully aware that nothing in his seminary curriculum at Ft. Wayne had prepared him for this. "It  was not an easy  night,"  he later recalled .

But  as he looked into the deeply frowned face of Dingane, the Rev. Khumalo  became  more perturbed about the consequences of failing. The news would spread fast  throughout  the 200 square miles of  his  ministry. It was a ministry still in infancy, struggling with  endemic  animism and ancestor worship and  witch doctor death curses which,  when taken to heart by the victim, had been credibly reported to have mysteriously  caused his death . There was the lingering mistrust of Western medicine  and, now,  those Islam  recruiters. . .  Nearly every Zulu family paid homage to a witchdoctor but, paradoxically, also professed the Christian faith. Worse,  Mandla  suspected that at  least 50 members of his  own church—those he saw every  Sunday from his pulpit—were possessed with demons.

Taking a moment to scan the cramped interior of the darkened hut,  the Rev. Khumalo saw  his ministry as being shook every which way  by  an evil  storm  hell-bent on destroying him and his faithful followers. Yet in that moment (as he told me one day in my home)  he had  asked  himself: but  what if tomorrow's news told that the power of the  living  Christ  had been manifested in a Zulu hut and had bested the power of Satan?! What an affirmation  that would be of all  his Gospel message preaching!

But if the news told the opposite?

The Rev. Khumalo began.  He read to Dingane  from  Mark 5: l-20, where Jesus commands several  demons to leave a man and enter the bodies of  a herd of swine. He then  proceeded  with John l:l2 and  l0:l0 and  Romans 3:20  and  6:23 . Finally,   from II Corinthians 5:l7, he intoned  in  Zulu, one of seven  dialects and languages he speaks:  "Therefore , if any man is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things have passed away; behold, new things have come."

Repeatedly, the group asked Dingane: "Do you believe what we're reading?"

"Yes , I do,"  Dingane  kept saying.

"Good," the group would reply. "Your life depends on it."

(Commenting years later  from his  Missouri home, the Rev. Dr.Philip Lochhaas, who  once lectured  on "possession and exorcism"  in a seminary doctoral program when he was executive director  (l965-89) of the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod commission on organizations,  advised: "Demon possession is still true, especially in Africa where the demons make a last ditch effort to keep control."

Dingane's parents  stood in the  dimmed background,  praying silently  and waiting  for  the unearthly  confrontation they hoped would  explain why  their son had been  behaving  destructively for so long . Often they had  asked God in the church sanctuary  why their son kept  losing job after job,  kept shocking and hurting his parents with sudden  outbursts of profanity,  and why, year after year , he had been  complaining  of various body pains—though several medical examinations and a six-month stay in a psychiatric hospital in Pretoria had disclosed nothing?  Only  after Dingane repeatedly refused to accompany them to  Sunday worship service did they suspect   a supernatural cause for their son's  strange behavior.  They sought help from my Zulu friend.

The Rev.  Khumalo and his Christian friends  hunkered down around  Dingane.  They asked him to profess  faith in Jesus and  to ask forgiveness  for all  of  his  sinful behavior towards his parents, friends, and  past employers.  Dingane did.

"But was Dingane now  really free now from whatever evil bound him? "  asked one of my friends.  "Is it  still possible for a demon to control a person even  after his  repentance and  profession of faith?"

I explained—though not to his satisfaction, I'm afraid—that both  Dr.  Lochhaas and his successor at the Synod's headquarters, Jerald Joerz, don't believe  a demon has that kind of power, though theologians from different denominations debate the question today.

"We then laid hands on Dingane,"  the Rev. Khumalo told me.  "The young man's eyes  closed in sleep as if he were dead.  That's when things  started to happen.  This  wretched  Zulu man began to thrash about so violently that it took  all of us to hold him down."

Dingane's body  finally became exhausted from contortions and went  motionless. No one  knew what to expect. There  was no experience, no manual to guide anyone. Who would stand in the gap for Dingane? Everyone felt  a trickle of panic. Suddenly , there was the sense that only absolute faith in the Word of God could help.

Dingane's  mouth opened and voices came out, some male, some female, all speaking in Zulu. "I counted ten," Khumalo  recalled.

The demons'  first words were: "We are sent from  ______." They named  a  village man in whose body they said they  had dwelled  before entering Dingane's body and whose identity the Rev.  Khumalo  asked not be revealed.  The demons claimed they had possessed  Dingane to "punish his parents for their arrogance."   The accusation had no basis, according to the Rev.   Khumalo.

Hour after hour the demons shouted  insults and  obscenities  at Dingane's  rescuers, making it clear that  they had had no intention of giving up their  "home" in Digane.

The  Hades-like  dialogue was surreal,  a  cacophony of primitive sounds that  continued late into the night.  Biblical and other Christian  injunctions  were hurled at the demons ,only to be  hatefully rebuked. The  stifling heat and   trench warfare with a supernatural  force  began to sap everyone's  strength.

Finally, at five a.m., eight hours after  the exorcism had begun, the Rev.  Khumalo  led  his  group in a final prayer. He then commanded the demons to leave Dingane: "In the  name of Jesus,  depart!"  he ordered . "Go where you came from!"

The demons protested loudly—and desperately.  But almost immediately, one by one, they began to leave the sleeping  body of  Dingane.  The Rev. Khumalo  gently slapped  the face of the man, who awoke and asked: "What is happening?"  He could not remember anything about  the all-night  battle for his soul. After he had drunk a cup of water, the group again  asked him to  profess Jesus as his  Savior.

"He did this without any hindrance and then began to jump with joy,"  the Rev. Khumalo said.  As  Dingane  and  his parents  embraced, the group  left to thank God in private.   Was the Zulu pastor ever  frightened?  "I would never be scared of a demon,"  he  said.

Commenting on Dingane's  liberation nine years later, the Rev. Khumalo said: "Since then, he has been a wonderful Christian who now works as a clerk in a machine parts store . "We rejoiced that night,  not in that  kind of deliverance, but rather that  Dingane's name  was  'recorded in heaven ' (Luke l0:20)."

Another more volatile challenge to Khumalo's  ministry was nearing.

***

( to be continued tomorrow )