Among the most popular branches of Christianity in Southern Africa are offshoots of the Zion Church, which established itself in the early twentieth century and now claims an estimated fifteen million followers. Bengt Sundkler and David Maxwell laid the foundation for studying the history of Zionist and Pentecostal churches.Footnote 1 Joel Cabrita's The People's Zion constitutes a major contribution to the field. This ambitious study narrates the history of the movement from its origins in Australia in the late nineteenth century to its spread to the United States and Southern Africa.
The first section of Cabrita's book traces Zion's transnational evolution from Australia to the United States. Its founder, John Alexander Dowie, a Scottish-born Congregationalist minister, established his earliest church in Melbourne in the 1860s but broke with Australia's Christian establishment to establish the Free Christian Church in the early 1880s. Preaching divine or faith healing as the path to spiritual and physical health, he attracted an ardent following which was distrustful of the cures and costs of the medical profession. In 1888, after starting a global divine healing ministry, he and his family made their way first to America's West Coast before landing in Chicago in 1893, where he established a Zion Tabernacle at the World's Fair. Several years later he followed up by founding the Christian Catholic Apostolic Church in Zion, Illinois.
Dowie founded Zion City in 1900 on the western shore of Lake Michigan. Preaching a gospel of divine healing, cosmopolitanism, and egalitarianism, Dowie believed that all humans were descended from an Adamic race, and his utopian community attracted a blend of African Americans fleeing the oppression of the American South and working-class European immigrants. It was a remarkable experiment that went against the racial segregation prevalent in American Christian churches.
The heart of The People's Zion (Chapters Three to Five) traces the transatlantic spread of Zion from the United States to Southern Africa where Dowie's egalitarian ethos could not overcome deep-seated white racism. In the aftermath of the Anglo-Boer War, Zion appealed to some whites who promoted the idea of a white race that unified British settlers and Afrikaners. But Zion's call for inter-racial mingling was rejected, especially by Afrikaners, who went their own way and founded the Apostolic Faith Mission, which also preached glossolalia or speaking in tongues.
Zion's most spectacular growth came in the Transvaal and Orange Free States among a small group of land-owning Africans who styled themselves as modernizer self-improvers who valued literacy and schooling. Their belief in divine healing. based on the intervention of the holy spirit, spurned the indigenous diviners and herbalists who prayed to the ancestors for spiritual healing.
One of Cabrita's assertions about African land ownership in the Transvaal needs refining. Although she is correct in stating that Africans were prevented from purchasing land in the Transvaal Republic, they could obtain land in white areas by registering it in the name of a white (such as a missionary or a public official). After the Anglo-Boer War the British wanted to maintain this ‘in trust’ process, but in 1905, Reverend Edward Tsewu successfully brought a court case demanding that he be allowed to register a land purchase in his own name. From 1905 to 1913, Africans in the Transvaal bought over 400 farms.
Zionism also found a home among urban Africans. But Cabrita points out that urban prophets and evangelists broke with the value that Johannesburg's African Christian establishment placed in ‘education, training, knowledge, hierarchy, procedure, and decorum’, for Zionism instead promoted ‘inspiration, revelation, spontaneity, and ecstatic displays of the Holy Spirit’ (196). This brand of Zionism exploded, and churches ranged in size from store-front congregations to mega-churches, such as Engenas Lekganyane's Zion Christian Church in Polokwane (Pietersburg), Limpopo Province, which currently boasts millions of followers throughout the larger region.
In these chapters Cabrita makes a valid historiographical point: that some prominent historians of South Africa omit discussions of religious movements in their studies. They can learn much from Cabrita's thoughtful presentation of how spiritual beliefs can be woven into political and economic narratives.
The concluding chapters of The People's Zion focus on contemporary trends. Migrant workers were critical in spreading Zionist and Pentecostal churches throughout Southern Africa. Cabrita focuses on Eswatini (formerly Swaziland), where charismatic Zionist preachers developed close relations with the Swazi royal family. By supporting Swazi cultural institutions and rituals, they won a patron in King Sobhuza. However, Cabrita shows that more recently there has been an intergenerational realignment as younger Zionists distance themselves from local religious practices and the monarchy, challenge older charismatic prophets, and embrace literacy. Drawing on extensive interviews, Cabrita vividly recounts the intensive discussions and debates over scripture that take place in Bible schools. And she reveals how younger Zionists reject prayers to ancestors and stress salvation and redemption through Jesus Christ.
This review cannot do full justice to Cabrita's pathbreaking research. Every chapter in The People's Zion contains a treasure trove of revelations, and it promises to be the anchor for the next generation of historical studies not only on Zionism, but more broadly on African religious movements.
Further studies will surely include the spread of African Pentecostal churches globally. A decade ago, I read a newspaper blurb about a Pentecostal preacher from Eswatini establishing a church in my hometown in Oklahoma. The story of The People's Zion continues to unfold in fascinating ways.
