Southern Africa

Southern Africa is the historic range of the San peoples, and their religion is the oldest continuously attested in Africa because it left a record on rock.

Tens of thousands of painted and engraved sites survive across the region, from the Drakensberg to Namibia, some of them very ancient and some painted within the last two centuries. The dominant modern interpretation reads much of the imagery in terms of the trance dance, still practised in living San communities, in which healers enter an altered state through hours of rhythmic dancing and singing, draw out sickness, and travel to deal with the dead and with the game. Figures with animal features, bleeding noses, and postures matching those described by healers appear repeatedly, and the eland, an animal of exceptional ritual importance, is the most commonly painted large mammal.

The other principal source is textual and unusual. In the 1870s Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd recorded many thousands of pages of narrative, in the language of Xam speakers imprisoned in Cape Town, taken down verbatim with an interlinear translation. That archive preserves a mythology of the early race, of the trickster Kaggen, and of the origin of the moon and the stars, from a people whose language is now extinct.

Mathias Guenther's comparative study warns against treating San religion as a single system, since practice varies considerably between groups.

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.