Mokhukhu

The Zion Christian Church uses no instruments in worship, and mokhukhu supplies the rhythm without them. Men in khaki uniform and heavy boots stamp in unison on hard ground, and the sound of several hundred pairs of boots landing together is the percussion. The singing over it is unaccompanied and antiphonal, a leader calling and the group answering, and the tempo builds over a long period rather than starting at height.

The dress is not incidental. Khaki, a peaked cap, a badge with a star, and boots: this is the uniform of the migrant labourer and the mine worker, the clothing of exactly the men the church drew in from the compounds and the townships of twentieth century South Africa. Jean Comaroff's reading of Zionist practice takes that seriously, arguing that taking the working uniform into worship and using it to make sacred noise turns an emblem of subordination into an emblem of belonging. Whether or not one follows the whole argument, the visual point is unmistakable to anyone who sees it.

Mokhukhu is also a body of people. To be mokhukhu is to belong to the men's grouping within the congregation that performs the dance, and joining it is a step with obligations attached: attendance, discipline, conduct. So the word answers two questions at once. Asked what mokhukhu is, a member may describe a dance or may point at the men doing it, and both answers are correct.

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.