Religion and History in South Africa

South African Christianity arrived with the Dutch East India Company in 1652 and was for a long time an instrument of settlement, but the more interesting story is what Africans did with it. Mission Christianity produced a literate elite that founded the African National Congress in 1912, and it also produced its own opposite: from the 1880s Ethiopian churches broke away to be led by Africans, and from the 1910s Zionist churches, tracing to a healing movement from Zion City in Illinois, combined Christian practice with prophecy, healing, white robes and river baptism in a form that spoke directly to African religious expectations.

The African Initiated Churches that resulted are now the largest religious formation in the country, and the Zion Christian Church gathering at Moria in Limpopo each Easter is among the biggest annual assemblies in Africa. Beneath and within all of this, the ancestors continue to matter: consultation through a sangoma or treatment by an inyanga is routine and is not generally understood by those who practise it as an alternative to church. Islam came in two streams, with people exiled by the Dutch from the East Indies to the Cape, among them Sheikh Yusuf of Macassar, and with later Indian migration; Hinduism arrived with indentured labourers in Natal from 1860.