I am very pleased to announce the publication of Nenilava, Prophetess of Madagascar: Her Life and the Ongoing Revival She Inspired from Wipf & Stock. Please head right over to the W&S site to get your copy!
And, to whet your appetite, here’s the Preface I wrote for the book:
I first became aware of Madagascar during my childhood through photos of its strange and wondrous animals, and not, like the generation after me, through a Disney movie of the same name that has nothing whatsoever to do with the island nation.
Many, many years after my first glimpses of lemurs and chameleons, in 2013, I met my first Malagasy in person, Toromaree Mananato. She was a participant in the annual Studying Luther in Wittenberg seminar that I have taught every November since 2009 with Theodor Dieter, my colleague at the Institute for Ecumenical Research in Strasbourg, France. Toromaree was present at the behest of the Malagasy Lutheran Church (MLC), where she was serving as the national secretary of the women’s association (and soon to be vice-general secretary of the MLC). When she told me where she was from, I mentioned the animal pictures I’d seen and how I’d always thought Madagascar would be an interesting place to visit. She said, without skipping a beat, “OK! I’ll invite you!” Three days later I had a letter from Rakoto Endor Modeste, president of the MLC, asking me to come and teach a weeklong course at the Lutheran Graduate School of Theology in Ivory, Fianarantsoa.
By this time I knew that there was a sizable Lutheran church in Madagascar, with a membership of at least four million, which struck me as almost as strange and wondrous as the lemurs and chameleons. My first encounter with Lutheran missions to Madagascar came through none other than James B. Vigen, my co-author on this volume. I met him in circumstances that in no way forecast our eventual collaboration: he had just returned from Madagascar and was serving a congregation in the city where my grandmother was dying an untimely death. I was in college at the time; I have a blurry but grateful memory of Vigen’s kind ministrations to my family while we were beside ourselves with shock and grief. Having now lived abroad and repatriated a few times myself, I can only imagine his own disorientation at being back in the United States after eighteen years in Madagascar.
In any event, by the time I was preparing for my visit to teach in Madagascar in the fall of 2014—a trip on which my husband Andrew L. Wilson would accompany me as co-teacher, and also our son and my husband’s parents—I had gotten up to speed on the Lutheranism of Madagascar. It arose in the late nineteenth century due to missions from both Norwegians and Norwegian-Americans. To hear the Malagasy tell it, the principal difference between them was that the former forbade beer while the latter allowed it in moderation! Whatever the inevitable strains between missionaries and locals, the cooperation was sufficiently strong over the succeeding decades to have all but eclipsed a pattern seen much more commonly on the continent of Africa, namely the departure of the recipients of missions to establish independent churches, “African-Initiated Churches” as they are often called. By and large Malagasy Christians adhere to the historic churches that brought the gospel to them: in addition to Lutherans there are many Roman Catholics, Reformed, and Anglicans, as well as assorted other traditions and denominations.
Two things in particular impressed me about Malagasy Lutheranism and elicited further interest. First was the fact that “revival” (fifohazana in Malagasy) was not only well-integrated into a tradition that I thought, based on my own experience, to be anathema to revivalism of any kind, but that the MLC had undergone four revivals already in its short existence—the first only thirty years after the first Lutheran missionaries arrived—and that all four revivals were still alive in one form or another! Clearly, this was not the circus tent or anxious bench of the American awakenings. My notion of “revival” and its relationship to the institution of the church needed serious reconsideration.
And second was the fact that you could not talk about Malagasy Lutheranism or its revivals at all without talking about Nenilava.
Here again I’d heard just enough to know that I should ask about Nenilava when I arrived in Madagascar. Béatrice Bengtsson at the Lutheran World Federation, where Malagasy pastor and scholar Péri Rasolondraibe had recently left a ten-year stint as director of the department for mission and development, told me how he always spoke passionately of Nenilava’s formative impact on his life and work. Others mentioned to me—or maybe they were trying to warn me?—that Nenilava had been an exorcist, and how that was still a major aspect of religious practice in Malagasy Lutheranism. Needless to say, I touched down in Antananarivo anxious to learn more!
It is no exaggeration to say that I felt Nenilava’s presence everywhere. The first and most obvious sign was, in fact, a sign. A plaque at the MLC compound in the Isoraka neighborhood of the capital honors her by her given name, “Volohavana Germaine, Revival Leader,” alongside memorials to other foreign missionaries and local luminaries in the history of the MLC. My family and I were taken to the healing camp (toby in Malagasy) at 67 Hectares that Nenilava founded and saw both where she lived and the current patients in residence at the toby.
Once we got to Fianarantsoa and had a week with students, I asked them what, if anything, they knew about her. Everyone had a story! One told me how she had arranged the match between his parents, which I later learned was one of her many ministerial interventions in people’s lives. Nearly all the students I met were shepherd-exorcists (mpiandry in Malagasy) in the Ankaramalaza revival tradition—only later would I meet church leaders who came from the other strands of revival—and they talked joyfully of the kind of ministry they did, which most certainly included exorcism. My husband and I attended two worship services that included the spiritual work (asa in Malagasy) that characterizes the mpiandry of Ankaramalaza. One of the services took place at a prison and was attended by about half the male inmates (and a very bare minimum of security guards). The other was a standard weekday worship service, at which the mpiandry made me, along with the rest of the congregation, recipient of the exorcistic action!
The fascination with Nenilava stayed with me, but I did not expect to visit Madagascar again after that. My family moved back to the States from France, and then from the States to Japan, and there is a limit to the number of countries and churches one can keep an eye on. However, even after leaving my full-time position at the Institute for Ecumenical Research, I have remained a consultant to the International Lutheran-Pentecostal Dialogue and taken part in its annual meetings. And so it was in this capacity that I made my second trip to Madagascar in the fall of 2019.
In retrospect I can see that my first trip was nonstop shock at the new: from the poverty to the exorcisms to the, yes, strange and wondrous animals. I’m glad I had the opportunity to visit a second time, because it allowed me to see differently and, I hope, to understand better what I saw. And it certainly helped that the very reason our dialogue team chose Madagascar as a destination was because the MLC subverts both Lutheran and Pentecostal expectations about the boundaries between our theological traditions and worship practices. To Pentecostals it said: a church can be charismatic and also confessional; to the Lutherans it said: a church can be confessional and also charismatic. During this second visit, I attended several more worship services led by mpiandry from the Ankaramalaza revival that Nenilava founded, and I found in the MLC bookstore a French translation of Zakaria Tsivoery’s biography of Nenilava. That was the seed of the book you are reading today.
If you have made it this far into the Introduction, then presumably you have sufficient curiosity to overcome the bewilderment and alarm that inevitably follows Westerners’ contact with these rather typical practices of African Christianity. As Jesus pointed out, you know the tree by its fruits. While the potential for and reality of abuse certainly exists wherever great power, and especially great spiritual power, is at work, the fact remains that Nenilava’s ministry and its outgrowths have done enormous good—good as defined by the gospel of Jesus Christ.
For this reason, Vigen and I have undertaken to bring, for the first time, a detailed account of Nenilava and her revival to an English-speaking audience. While some books and scholarly articles deal with her in passing (see the Bibliography), ours presents the first English translation of the closest thing we have to a firsthand account of her life and work, namely the aforementioned biography written by Zakaria Tsivoery, a pastor of the MLC to whom Nenilava entrusted her story. I made a complete translation of the French text into English and sent it on to Vigen to see if he’d be interested in coediting a volume about her, centered on this text. He had a copy of the Malagasy original and, in reviewing my translation, discovered certain liberties taken in the French translation. As a result, Vigen ended up going through my entire translation line by line to make it adhere more closely to the Malagasy original, and that is the version presented here.
Tsivoery’s account ends in the early 1970s, but Nenilava did not die until 1998. Therefore, to supplement the biography, Vigen scouted out primary sources in Malagasy to bring the story to its conclusion, which he reports in the second section of this book. In the third section, he expands the story to include the Ankaramalaza revival more broadly and its impact on the MLC, Madagascar as a whole, and the church throughout the world. We hope this book can serve as the primary source on Nenilava and the Ankaramalaza revival for the anglophone audience.
However, given what I’ve already reported here about Nenilava, a mere recounting of the facts as they have been passed along is insufficient. A further step needs to be taken toward interpreting those facts for a Western readership. Therefore, in the final section of this book, I will take up a number of neuralgic issues raised by the history of Nenilava: questions about evil spirits, miracles, healing and sin, emergent offices of ministry, and implications for Christians in the Western world.
But, for now, you should simply enjoy the ride through Nenilava’s astonishing life story!