African Pilgrimage

Ritual Travel in South Africa's Christianity of Zion

Retief Müller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317184232
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christianity

Years after the end of Apartheid South Africa remains racially polarized and socially divided. In this context pilgrimage and travelling rituals serve to help those who often find themselves at the bottom end of the social ladder to make sense of their world. This book describes a South Africa that is made up of a number of different fragmented worlds. The focus is on the Zion Christian Church, one of the largest religious movements in southern Africa, and a good example of indigenized African Christianity. Pilgrimage plays an important role in reintegrating some of those fragmented worlds into something approaching wholeness. This book tells the story of how the enduring ritual of pilgrimage is transforming African religion, along with the lives of ordinary South Africans.

PART I
Introduction

Chapter 1
Introduction and Background

Africa has moved into the spotlight as one of the primary locales of Global South Christianity, demanding the attention of Northern observers. Simultaneously, the decline of Northern Christianity has been an alarming development for everyone who considered Christianity an essential aspect of European and European-derived cultures.

During much of the twentieth century secularization was understood as an inevitable process, progressively transforming the world into a disenchanted place, increasingly free from pervasive religious influences. In the West, that might have been well and good for many, albeit not without a certain nostalgia for the loss of the ages-old Christian worldview.

Therefore, the more recent scholarly consensus regarding contemporary Christianity as primarily a non-Western or Southern phenomenon has provided interested outsiders with a new focus. Many observers undoubtedly experienced a measure of relief upon the discovery that Christianity had not disappeared, but merely relocated, geographically and culturally.1

Yet what exactly are the characteristics of this “new” Christianity? Within which conceptual frameworks should it be understood? Questions like these remain only partly answered. Yesteryear’s untilled mission field has become the new Christian homeland and something of an untilled research field for theological and religious studies.

Although there is no lack of interest in contemporary African Christianity, there is a shortage of real in-depth information. Therefore many contemporary studies tend to give broad surveys of movements, rather than detailed accounts. Where there is detail the data is often quite dated.

In this book I attempt to positively address this problem. I focus on the Zion Christian Church (ZCC), one of the largest and most significant contemporary religious movements in Southern Africa. The perspective I present is a cross-cultural one, based on a process of participant-observation.

The Wider Context

One of the complexities of contemporary Africa is the apparent fragility of the nation-state in many parts of the continent. Whether as a result of neocolonialism in the form of globalization, corruption, poor infrastructure, the HIV pandemic, the education deficit, or a combination of these and other factors, the nation-state in much of contemporary Africa is not working as well as it could or should be. The ill health of the nation-state is neither caused by religion, nor will it be cured by religion. Yet, in the absence of public service provision of the kind that is taken for granted in many First World countries, this-worldly forms of religion find themselves catering to needs that could never be considered appropriately religious in the global North. Although this-worldly is potentially misleading in respect to African religions in that matters of the spirit(s) remain very much paramount, the term, even if paradoxical, describes the way this kind of religion functions in reality.

The ZCC is a great example of this-worldly Christianity. The synthesis it has achieved includes aspects of Traditional African Religion. But it also includes an integration or mimicry of some of the traditional ideals of secular modernity. If any church could be said to exhibit a parody of nationalism then the ZCC might be that church. This becomes important when one considers the history of the South African nation-state. Under Apartheid, when scholars such as the Comaroffs, particularly Jean Comaroff, described various aspects of African Zionism, the selective, symbolic cooptation of colonial garments and other visual forms were correctly identified as part of African resistance to the wielders of power.

Serious attention to symbolic action, especially when ritualization occurs in nominally profane situations, is likewise a feature of this book. However, whereas Jean Comaroff wrote about Zionism as part of her wider anthropological study of the Tshidi,2 my book focuses directly on the religious culture of African Zionism. Furthermore, this book covers a wholly different context. It is still South Africa to be sure, but everyone who has lived on both sides of the historical border separating Apartheid from post-Apartheid will know that the Old South Africa and the New South Africa are not merely representative terms of different eras in a country’s history. Rather, these terms are indicative of two different countries, in spite of the fact that they occupy the same geographical space.

The ZCC is one of a few social movements that migrated from the old into the new without showing much in the way of internal transformation. Its structure remains the same as before, centered as it is in the rural headquarters, Moria, and the dynastic leadership of the Lekganyane family. For the ZCC the old adage of the more things change, the more they stay the same, seems to be particularly true. Yet, in going from strength to strength in post-Apartheid South Africa, the ZCC once more eludes scholarly pigeonholes, irrespective of whether it is described from the points of view of symbolic resistance, or political acquiescence in the days of the old country.

The question to be answered is: what makes this movement so attractive to its millions of members, and, furthermore, what is its relevance to the wider society?

This book will describe the key to unlocking the ZCC enigma as residing in its unique ability to integrate and make whole the various fragmented realities that constitute contemporary South African society. New-found democracy has not been a smooth road for the South African nation-state. With it has come many new insecurities, and believable future visions of well-being and stability are in scant supply. Here the ZCC enters the picture presenting a vision of wholeness. The nation-state of course also presents its own vision(s), but it remains economically divided and politically divisive. In contrast, the ZCC provides the community that could sustain its vision.

With the postcolonial emphasis on localization, and with a growing understanding of the importance of local leadership in parts of Africa where the ideal of the nation-state remains forlorn, movements such as the ZCC deserve serious scholarly attention. I am not suggesting that they are in opposition to the nation-state, but rather that they constitute a form of parallel nationality, within the wider context of Southern Africa. This book describes how some of the complexities resulting from such double nationality are ritually addressed.

In addition to the general importance of this subject in terms of Southern African history, there is the wider matter of global Christianity. Being the largest and highest-profile African Initiated Church (AIC)3 in the region, the ZCC could be seen as representative of this wider movement in many respects. Unlike in West Africa, for example, the Pentecostal and Charismatic movements have not been successful in eclipsing AICs in Southern Africa. The more traditional “Spirit-type” AICs, as Daneel calls them, remain dominant.4 This places the ZCC in a potentially prominent position in terms of helping to complete the mosaic which is contemporary global Christianity. This book aims to play a part in providing this badly needed perspective.

Ever since Phillip Jenkins’s groundbreaking book, The Next Christendom, there has been a tendency to see a polarity between a liberal “Northern” Christianity, represented by Europe and North America, and a conservative “Southern” Christianity, located in what used to be referred to as the Third World. The subsequent trend has been to synthesize emerging non-Western Christianities under the rubrics of fundamentalism, evangelicalism and Pentecostalism. The subtitle of Jenkins’s sequel on the subject, Believing the Bible in the Global South,5 well illustrates the issue. Another title in this vein would be Donald Lewis’s Christianity Reborn,6 which seems to hinge on some sort of essentialism, perhaps indicating a return to a more pure state of Christianity. This despite the fact that the actual essays the book contains are generally well nuanced.

When tested against my field research on Zionist Christianity in Southern Africa, these above-mentioned categories make very little sense, and in fact they seem rather restrictive. I am much more in favor of the so-called translation model of Christian conversion as described by the highly influential mission historians Andrew Walls and Lamin Sanneh.7 To their credit, these scholars have emphasized the uniqueness of divergent forms of world Christianity. Contemporary Christian movements are not simply recast in preexisting forms, but understood as new and fresh.

Yet, in certain missiological circles, there is a somewhat problematic tendency to separate religion from culture. From a theological point of view I understand the need to distinguish between the Gospel and culture(s), but in terms of history and phenomenology such a distinction holds no water. To me it seems more natural to treat the religious culture as a coherent whole, and leave speculation regarding what the Gospel might or might not be doing in terms of that religious culture open to the reader’s own interpretation. Sanneh has probably also overstated the role of Scripture in African Christianity. A recent book by the anthropologist Matthew Engelke, featuring Zimbabwe’s Friday Masowe apostolics, has shown how this prominent AIC not only disregards the Bible as unimportant, but actually preaches against its use from a Christian perspective.8 As the following chapters will indicate, the ZCC’s own approach to the Bible is characterized by much ambiguity.

In this book the emphasis is on the religious culture of Zionist Christianity in the context of post-Apartheid South Africa. In what follows the reader will notice that this form of Christianity defies labeling under preexisting categories. More likely, the reader may be forced to reconsider their own notions of what constitutes global Christianity.

Pilgrimage and the ZCC

This book proceeds from the assumption that the contemporary ZCC is best understood from the point of view of what has become its single most distinguishing characteristic, pilgrimage. The ZCC is above all a traveling church. The physical practice of pilgrimage provides the main theme. I believe, however, that the traveling of mostly urban pilgrims to and from a rurally based sacred center should be interpreted within the context of a contemporary South Africa, historically shaped as a patchwork of competing, sometimes conflicting, cultural worlds.9 The physical traveling precipit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• PART I: INTRODUCTION
• PART II: THE LOCAL CHURCH CONTEXT
• PART III: PILGRIMAGE TO MORIA: A SACRED CENTER IN A RURAL PERIPHERY
• PART IV: OUTWARD-BOUND PILGRIMAGE: THE ZCC BISHOP IN THE CENTER
• PART V: CONCLUSION
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index