Moria, Easter and the Largest Church in the Region

The Zion Christian Church was founded by Engenas Lekganyane in 1910 and has been led by his descendants since. Its headquarters at Moria in Limpopo is the destination of an Easter gathering that draws crowds counted in the hundreds of thousands, one of the largest annual religious assemblies in Africa, and mokhukhu at that scale is the church's most visible public act.

The church belongs to the family of African Initiated Churches, bodies founded by Africans rather than by missions, which took shape across southern Africa from the late nineteenth century onward. They combined Christian doctrine with forms of worship, healing and discipline drawn from local practice, and they were regarded with suspicion by mission churches and by the state alike for most of the twentieth century. That history is part of why a dance matters here: mission Christianity in the region generally taught that dancing had no place in worship, and the AICs decided otherwise, deliberately.

Scholarship on these churches has changed its terms over the last forty years. Earlier accounts often treated them as syncretic or as compensations for political powerlessness. Allan Anderson and others have argued instead that they are best read as Christian bodies making their own decisions about worship, healing and authority, and that describing their practice mainly as a reaction understates how much of it is a positive choice. Mokhukhu reads very differently under the two descriptions, and the atlas follows the second.