The Bantu-speaking peoples of the region, Nguni, Sotho-Tswana and others, hold religious traditions organised around the ancestors of the lineage, who remain interested in their descendants and who are approached through the head of the family with beer, meat and speech. Misfortune prompts consultation with a diviner, who identifies the cause: a neglected ancestor, a breach of custom, or the malice of a living person. Axel-Ivar Berglund's fieldwork among Zulu communities documented the internal logic of that system in detail, including the calling of a diviner through illness that only acceptance of the role will cure.
Christian mission arrived from the early nineteenth century and did two contradictory things. It attacked the ancestral cult, polygamy and initiation, and it supplied the literacy, the printing and the organisational forms through which African Christians then founded their own churches. The Zionist and Ethiopian type churches that resulted are enormous, and the largest single denomination in South Africa, the Zion Christian Church, draws millions to its Easter gathering.
The colonial and apartheid periods implicated the churches directly. Dutch Reformed theology was used to justify racial separation, and the same church declared apartheid a sin and its theological defence a heresy in 1986; the Belhar Confession, drawn up in 1982 in the church's coloured sister denomination, made unity, reconciliation and justice matters of doctrine rather than of politics.