The Zion Christian Church holds one of the largest annual religious gatherings in the world, when as many as a million members travel to Moria, near Polokwane in South Africa's Limpopo province, for the church's Easter pilgrimage. What visitors and members alike describe first is the sound: massed unison singing from congregants dressed in the church's uniform of khaki and green, backed by a brass band whose marching hymns have become one of the most recognizable sonic signatures of any South African religious movement.
The church, founded by Engenas Lekganyane in 1924, built its worship music from within the same South African black choral and popular traditions that shaped township music more broadly, then remoulded that material for congregational devotion. Scholarship on the church's music, notably Lesibana Rafapa's academic study of its popular songs, reads this remoulding as deliberate, familiar musical language turned toward the work of gathering, uniting and marking out a distinctly Zion Christian congregation from the wider array of South African independent churches that share its Zionist and Pentecostal roots.
The church also maintains named performing bodies devoted to this repertoire rather than leaving it to informal congregational singing alone. Male and female choirs carry the vocal tradition, and the brass band, marching ahead of the bishop at Moria, carries the instrumental one, together forming the musical practice this entry's second article turns to as a documented, commercially released body of recorded work.