Goddess Lakshmi and Jo’burg’s pursuit
My visit to the Revelation Church of God’s downtown Johannesburg branch was perfectly stagemanaged. My chaperone, Thembi Tulwana, a public relations officer employed by the church, took me inside just after 8am, the start of the Sunday morning service. She led me to a section close to the front of the large Jewish synagogue turned African Christian church. I protested, not because I would stick out like a sore thumb but because my range of vision would be limited. It turned out to be a useless protest, because whatever spectacle I was expecting to see didn’t materialise.
At face value, the Revelation Church of God, run by the mesomorphic prophet Samuel Radebe, is not unlike the thousands of similar churches on the continent. Perhaps the only distinguishing factor, from what I could see, was its own unique brand of miracle production in the form of filmed testimonials displayed over several screens.
The videos seemed to be the cornerstone of what was roughly a two-anda-half-hour service.
Miracle production seems to be a cornerstone of what we can group as charismatic churches. In this church’s case, videos depict members talking about expelling all manner of foreign items from their bodies, or being led to nefariously buried items (such as bird skeletons) in their yards after consuming blessed water or salt. Shree Lakshmi has 108 names. She can be Shuchi (the embodiment of purity), Padmakshya (beautiful like the lotus), Kantha (the divine consort of Vishnu) or Surabhi (celestial being). A tangible embodiment of prosperity and beauty, Shree Lakshmi is described in scripture as the “very vision of affluence, abundance and auspiciousness”.
Found in bounties of rice, rice and Shree Lakshmi are interchangeable in the spiritual imaginations of some. She provides for us and, in so doing, we are fed physically and spiritually. Wealth is not limited to the material realm in Hinduism. Greed will not invoke the goddess.
As a goddess symbolising wealth, she is always pictured with coins. But this iconography seems to limit the goddess to the realm of material gain, or wealth and affluence.
But Shree Lakshmi’s hands, all four of them when they are in a peaceful state, speak of human psychic needs — dharma, desires, abundance and liberation.
Her red sari is threaded with the finest, softest gold and her skin is golden — like most Brahmic goddesses, she is light-skinned. Sitting atop a lotus, she is pure. The gaze, which over the years ossified into a patriarchal one, has forced Shree Lakshmi into the domestic realm. Her feminine power is only recognised there now.
One man (in videos I watched online) supposedly urinated a caterpillar through his urethra. It was displayed in a bowl while he gave testimony. Another woman expelled a heavy-duty warehouse lock with a steel shackle (supposedly from her vagina). It was also displayed on a dish as she spoke.
The centrepiece of the service I attended was a long insert on an incapacitated Soweto woman who (thanks to the water) had regained her mobility, even jiving for the camera.
Radebe called these videos the highlights of the week, and exited the room for several minutes while they played. Radebe’s sermon, if one can call it that, seemed to complement these videos by its lack of severity.
But what would happen if she escaped these constraints?
To the City of Gold. Gold Reef City. Where we pivot and move at money’s discretion.
iGolide. Your body supposedly vibrates at a higher frequency when its cells come into contact with it. We are golden. We are 0.2 milligrams worth of it.
Her gold jewellery sparkles garishly, signalling “this is a bitch you don’t mess with”. Hoops look fresh, golden too. It all jingles when she walks.
“I am shakti, shakti, shakti,” she repeats quietly. “I am the accessory of God. She wears my smile like a bracelet. I am all gold, all gold. I am divine, all divine,” writes poet Ijeoma Umebinyuo, author of Questions for Ada.
She doesn’t understand how gold became so corrosive. Corrupted by greed and burdensome to carry. In generational trauma’s purse, gold is heavy. She feels your prayers. Shree Lakshmi doesn’t understand how a pure thing collapsed and collapses lives, dreams and what-ifs into the darkness of pain, mined deep. The gold veins stretch and wind underneath the land, connecting here to there — connecting the past to the now. From golden rhinos in Mapungubwe to the dirtier present, the yellow threads do not know boundaries or borders as we do.
Goddess Lakshmi sits in the After a cursory outline of African spirituality, which served to differentiate Radebe’s theological practice from the narrow bounds of orthodox Christianity, and some bouts of singing, praying and shaking hands, a tap on my shoulder signalled that it was time to wait for my lift to interview Radebe at another nearby church property. The tap came just as I spotted a woman standing in an aisle near the centre of the church readying a large bag I assumed was to be used for the week’s collection.
I should have been impressed that Radebe, whom I had left on the pulpit, was seated in his office before my arrival. I wasn’t. My chaperone had taken far too long to locate her car, inexplicably, and was now in the company lotus. She is from the lotus, a divine reminder that the mud feeds the lotus. That the lotus will grow despite — and through — hardships.
As she looks through the entrails of the city, sprawled along its edges — dusty mine heaps, power lines, broken metal things — she sees the land change. She loses a gold tooth as her mouth hangs open in awe. The tooth falls at the entrance to the Chamber of Mines in Marshalltown.
“As Earth Mother, she is a reminder of the inherent ambiguities of life; that those same forces of nature that of two younger men, one of whom deferentially called her Ma Ol’ Lady. I got into the passenger seat of her white E-class Mercedes, and she whisked me to a multistorey property in Salisbury Street. In the covered parking were several men with earpieces — Radebe’s security detail, I assumed — as well as the driver of his Jeep Cherokee.
His maroon robe with golden trimmings was off, revealing a church T-shirt advertising a much-publicised Good Friday event that was being hosted at the FNB Stadium.
Radebe was circumspect and cordial, explaining that he did not suddenly wake up and call himself a prophet. “I was born into the Radebe clan; we have a long-standing history of spirituality. There is a line of prophets. uphold the stability of life and the social order, also ultimately threaten its existence. There is no real separation between the sacred and the secular; all life is sacred, the entire natural world is infused with anima [spirit] and the divine encountered at every turn,” writes Alleyn Diesel, author of The Empowering Image of the Divine Mother and other academic works.
The mundane is also encountered at every turn. Even for a goddess. “Hey Ma. Maaaaaaaami.”
It is a slimy man calling out to Shree Lakshmi. The day is dying and she