Elder Shadrock Porter

Founder and Master Teacher of the Israelite Nation Worldwide Ministries.

Guyana

He was born on 29 December 1940 in Grove, a town eight miles outside Georgetown, on the east bank of the Demerara in what was then British Guiana. He was christened at the AME Zion church, and his navel string buried under a physicnut tree by the river.

He was known as Malcolm as a child, later as Nicky, and his grandfather once called him Shady at the water pipe. Shadrock Porter senior, born in the late 1800s, was a senior and well-respected member of that same AME Zion church: an uneducated man with a propensity for history, drama and storytelling, and everything to his grandson.

What his grandfather taught him

The walls of the old man’s house carried pictures of African kings, queens and noblemen, and not one of himself. He told the boy about his own grandfather, who had been a slave; about the Bakra overseers; about the songs of Ezekiel and the wheel and Go Down Moses. He told him they were a special people, that the Jews and the Syrians were his cousins, and, plainly: there are white Jews and we are black Jews, we are supposed to be brethren, it is in the Bible. He told him he was in the Bible, and cautioned him never to forget it.

In the late summer of 1950 he dressed his grandson in fine African garments and took him to meet the young Ibo chieftain King Eze A. Ogueri II of Owerri Province, then visiting British Guiana. Four years later he died, and the fourteen-year-old was left distraught. He had said to the boy: son, you are a very special boy, and one day God is going to show you the way.

Music, and the road to Toronto

Growing up in Albouystown was rough. He found his way out through music, forming a singing group in imitation of The Platters and singing on Radio Demerara. Three lines he submitted to a competition to write the Guyanese national anthem were not chosen; he later modified them, and from them came the Israelite national anthem.

In 1983 he won the Canadian Dora Mavor Moore Award for playing Nick Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. That same year, through his work in music, he met the man who would become his first student.

The ministry

From the first lesson under the grapevine in 1985 he established the Israelite Nation as a spiritual and legal entity in Toronto: its doctrine, its constitution, its pledge, its flag, its coat of arms and its emblem. He wrote the first three Israelite books. He wrote and directed The Journey and Shadow of the Slaves. He is the teaching authority of the ministry, and its doctrine, calendar and identity are established under his authority and rooted in the KJV 1611.

Source: The Bridge, chapter two.