See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

net/publication/358123968

Two histories, one organisation: the case of Zion Christian Church

Chapter · January 2022

CITATIONS READS

0 11,538

1 author:

Lesibana Jacobus Rafapa

University of Limpopo
38 PUBLICATIONS 86 CITATIONS

SEE PROFILE

All content following this page was uploaded by Lesibana Jacobus Rafapa on 26 January 2022.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

 History, Politics and Development Studies

Two histories, one organisation: the case

of Zion Christian Church
Lesibana Rafapa
University of Limpopo
lesibana.rafapa@ul.ac.za

Introduction
The Zion Christian Church (ZCC) and other non-mainline churches in Africa, southern Africa
and South Africa have been documented as Apostolic, Pentecostal, Zionist, messianic, African
Independent or African Initiated Churches (AICs) by writers such as Sundkler (1948, 1976),
Kiernan (1980, 1984, 1991), Kalinga (1982), Landau (1994, 1996, 1999), Anderson (1999),
Anderson and London (2009), Maxwell (1999, 2006), and Muller and Kruger (2013). Some
writers such as Morton (2014) even describe such churches in their early formative years as
Ethiopian. The many features setting these churches apart in their approach to worship include
recognition and utilisation of the oral tradition, of which oral history is a part, alongside
conventional Christian practice. In this article, I analyse oral testimonies, written accounts
and audio recordings whose production was sanctioned by the ZCC in order to examine oral
historical material contained in them. Using this approach, I intend to probe how history
gleaned thus relates with hegemonic accounts produced outside the authority and influence
of the ZCC itself.

First manifestations of a Pentecostalism that severed from the theology of mainline Christian
churches led globally by whites, were in the founding of the Christian Catholic and Apostolic
Church in Zion (CCACZ) by John Alexander Dowie in 1896 in Chicago, Illinois, in a place he
named “Zion City” (Hallencreutz, 1998, p. 584). Evolving from Dowie’s movement, a latter
day Pentecostal movement bearing the name of African Faith Mission (AFM) spread from
Indianapolis in America, and was introduced into southern Africa in 1908 (Maxwell, 1999, p.
244). It is significant for my study that the AFM was originally more a confederal movement
led by a number of somewhat individualist preachers who worshipped together as a
collective without necessarily forfeiting their independence to minister to their own smaller
congregations.

African Initiated Churches have been described as Pentecostal, Zionist, messianic, African
Independent, African Initiated Church or even as Ethiopian by writers such as Sundkler (1948,
1976), Kiernan (1980, 1984, 1991), Kalinga (1982), Landau (1994, 1996, 1999), Anderson (1999),
Maxwell (1999, 2006), Anderson and London (2009), Muller and Kruger (2013), and Morton
(2014). The ZCC is a third generation offshoot of the American-born African Faith Mission (AFM).

The phenomenon of splinter black-led Zionist/Apostolic/Pentecostal churches from the

white-led AFM started in 1909 when Daniel Nkonyane was reported to have many preachers
in Natal and in the Wakkerstroom district originally occupied only by the AFM to which he

73
African Epistemology in the 21st Century

still (partially) belonged (Morton, 2014, p. 28). For some reasons, the split in hegemonically
acknowledged to have occurred only in 1912. This earliest black leader of a splinter church
from the AFM Daniel Nkonyane had Elias Mahlangu and the latter’s brother as some of his
preachers in the AIC he named the Catholic Apostolic Holy Spirit Church in Zion (CAHSCZ). Elias
Mahlangu and his brother in turn split from Nkonyane’s CAHSCZ to form their own splinter
church that they named the Zion Apostolic Church (ZAC), after they had “seceded with about
a quarter of Nkonyane’s flock in the interim period” between the latter’s expulsion from
Wakkerstroom in 1910 and move to Charlestown in 1912 (Morton, 2014, p. 25). ZCC founder
Engenas Lekganyane left the AFM to join the Mahlangus’ ZAC, during this collective phase of
AIC founders splitting from the AFM and from some splinter AICs, that started in 1910. I argue
that there is a quality of this phenomenon that dominant writers on the nature of the formation
of AICs during this era have hitherto failed to characterise.

It is in this very grey area where I see motivation here for the official ZCC position that the AIC
was founded in 1910. If it was in 1910 when the earliest AIC founder Nkonyane was expelled
from and physically left the abode of the AFM (Morton, 2014, p. 25) where Lekganyane and the
others had been preachers and worshippers, it is not farfetched to trace the founding seeds
of their AICs back to this year. From its early years “in the 1910s” the breakaway movement
of black preachers and worshippers including Lekganyane “were often concerned with
establishing isolated, self-sufficient rural ‘Zions’ free of white control” (Morton, 2014, p.
27). So, by 1910 not only had Nkonyane started in 1909 with the early beginnings of his own
church. The others, like Lekganyane, did the same later, which does not rule out the possibility
of Lekganyane having formed his own AIC in 1910. It is an evident pattern that group practice
then was not to start one’s breakaway AIC only after openly moving away physically from the
AIC one currently worshipped in. Continuing worship in the host church typically coexisted
with one’s early independence as leader of a new born AIC, and the ZCC is no exception.

Similarly to the way the ZCC’s founding in 1910 is not recognised by history from the Centre, the
establishment of Nkonyane’s AIC is said in academic historical accounts to have taken place
only in 1912. Yet there is evidence that it took place in 1909 (Morton, 2014) in typical hybrid
mode I outline above, which those other than the founders themselves do not seem to recognise
in spite of making accounts of the hybrid belonging I am arguing for. It would not be wrong
for a black Pentecostal leader like Nkonyane to elect to celebrate 1909 as the actual birth of
his church, despite dominant writers from the Centre preferring rather to recognise 1912 as
such. Reasons for dominant history writers to do so, from the perspective of the AIC founders
themselves, seem to claim to monopolise legitimacy to the exclusion of those by the former,
on no valid grounds other than mere arbitrary choice or bias motivated by interests other than
writing the truth. It is the phenomenon of hybrid formative origination pervading AICs of 1910s
births that to this day has escaped the attention of dominant writers. In my view, such a lack
of circumspection on the part of canonical historiographers should not be a justification for
the condescending historical accounts by means of which they have chronicled the founding
of Lekganyane’s ZCC as 1924 as in Morton (2014, p. 56), and not 1910. In a self-defining and self-
describing manner not to be overlooked within a paradigm that abhors othering descriptions
by the Centre, the AIC’s official records and pronouncements have consistently stressed 1910
to be the year of its founding.

74
 History, Politics and Development Studies

Morton, like the others in his category, not only refutes 1910 as the year of ZCC founding.
Without demonstrating how, he also dismisses all records from the ZCC as “hagiographic
and contradictory” (Morton, 2014, p. 56). A similar approach detracting from the scientificity
of Morton’s (2014) disputation of a self-defining voice in the ZCC embracing 1910 as the year
of its founding is seen in the same writer’s trumped up falsification of the ZCC’s own account
of Engenas’s biography. Among the ZCC historical accounts Morton (2014, p. 56) discredits is
the church’s endorsement of Engenas Lekganyane having been a member of the Free Church
of Scotland prior to joining the AIC of the Mahlangu brothers. In order to justify his version as
true and the ZCC’s as disingenuous, Morton (2014, p. 56) charges that Engenas Lekganyane
“was very careful to remove his past association with Lutheranism and Anglicanism, creating
instead a story about being baptized as a child into the Free Church of Scotland.” Yet the
“scant” ZCC accounts Morton (2014, p. 56) claims to have consulted merely highlight Engenas’s
baptism in the Church of Scotland without necessarily denouncing his association with other
white denominations.

ZCC accounts are clear that Engenas was baptised and preached in the Free Church of Scotland,
though not “as a child” as per Morton’s (2014, p. 56) distortion alongside his discrediting
this part of Lekganyane’s biography as a fabrication. The premise the ZCC highlights is
that of a body dabbing baptism in the Free Church of Scotland, and not baptism by total
immersion. According to Maxwell (1999), Pentecostalims (in which Lekganyane believed) was
characterised by “baptism by triune immersion in the names of the Trinity.” By not mentioning
the Lutheran and Anglican churches his parents and fellow Mamabolo villagers became
converts of during colonial turmoil (Morton, 2014, p. 56), ZCC history writing does not deny
Engenas’s family’s involvement with those other mainline churches. It was a generic trait of
Pentecostalism in southern Africa to evolve from mainline missionary churches. Methodism,
for example, “was the springboard for most small independent African churches in the Free
State” (Landau, 1999, p. 326). For Engenas Lekganyane to have belonged to the mission church
is understandable, because up to 1923 the Free Church of Scotland was apparently one of the
dominant faiths in southern Africa, and according to writers like Kalinga (1982), certainly
dominant in the northern province of Malawi. The omission of mainline churches other than
the Free Church of Scotland in official ZCC accounts really does not leave anyone wondering,
considering that the latest of those churches that do not practice baptism by total immersion
Lekganyane once belonged to, is the Church of Scotland. Although Morton (2014) disputes
Lekganyane’s ever belonging to the Free Church of Scotland, Anderson (1999) attests that
the latter was an evangelist in the church when in 1908 he met Pieter Le Roux and the AFM in
Johannesburg.

It is from the latest sauntering in a series of spiritually unfulfilling practices that Engenas
Lekganyane, guided by a calling of the holy Spirit according to ZCC accounts, went to the AIC of the
Mahlangu brothers for baptism because the latter practised baptism by total immersion. Why
insinuations should be made that such a coherent narrative of the ZCC is a wily manipulation
of information is difficult to comprehend. Selection of one out of a series of churches that
shared a common practice Lekganyane sought to rectify fits the narrative of substantiating
why this AIC leader went to be baptised again in the ZAC, in spite of earlier baptisms, and is
no evidence of chicanery. From joining the Mahlangu brothers, later Lekganyane moved on to

75
African Epistemology in the 21st Century

join yet another splinter African Initiated Church (AIC) led by Edward Lion Motaung “whom he
also met in his early Zionist years in Boksburg” before joining Mahlangu’s ZAC (Morton, 2014,
p. 56). At the time Lekganyane left Motaung’s church in 1925 where he was regional leader of
the Limpopo region (formerly Transvaaal) (Morton, 2014, p. 69), he had already significantly
consolidated membership of his own new church from within Motaung’s AIC and the broader
movement. This was to the extent that in 1924 dominant writers of history had conceded that
the ZCC had started to exist (Morton, 2014, p. 69) even before Lekganyane had left Motaung’s
AIC. Morton (2014, p. 69) includes among what he sees as beacons in the growth of then then
new AIC of Lekganyane, its 1938 achievement “to purchase Boyne farm … and transform it into
the renowned ‘Zion City Moriah’.” None of the 1924, 1925 and 1938 developments around ZCC
founder Lekganyane’s life should be mistaken for the year in which the ZCC was born. For me
all these recorded milestones should not deny the ZCC to see 1910 as the year it was founded,
and not 1924 as those other than themselves prefer to say.

Interestingly, writers such as Maxwell (2006, p. 386) remark that the local Zionist/Apostolic/
Pentecostal churches, spawned directly or as third generation by the AFM like the ZCC, have
been “operating in sub-Saharan Africa since the 1910s.” By a description such as this one by
Maxwell (2006, p. 386) the founding of the AIC that Nkonyane started leading from within the
AFM in 1909 (Morton, 2014, p. 28) was in the 1910s. In this way, Maxwell (2006) and others like
him discount the actual spiritual calling of Nkonyane circa 1909 when he already had a great
following from within the AFM, and only recognise the founding of his church as a later event
when he purchased a farm in Charlestown in 1912 and settled his church there (Morton, 2014,
p. 25). I see parallels between such a treatment of Nkonyane’s founding history and that of
Lekganyane. In both cases, 1909 and 1910 are ignored as those of historical inventions, and
only the 1910s for Nkonyane and 1924 for Lekganyane are arbitrarily canonised.

Apart from factors extraneous to the authority and practice of the ZCC resulting in a tension
between the ZCC’s own version of its own history and the versions of academic authorities,
admittedly there are conventional cracks linked to the nature of oral history. It is true that
“most of the early leaders and converts” of AICs such as the ZCC relied primarily on orality in
their own collective memory of history, as Morton (Morton, 2014, p. 22) rightly observes. This,
though, should be mitigated by the presence of written records within the ZCC. It is a distortion
for a writer like Morton (2014, p. 22) to assert a virtual absence of written historical accounts
within the ZCC, in his claim that “only Isaiah Shembe’s Nazarite movement generated
significant amounts of written materials.” In the ZCC, orality has been corroborated with
handwritten historical accounts and in tape recorder and vinyl recordings of praise poetry in
which history is embedded (see Maahlamela, 2017).

However, reasons for the ZCC now living with two conflicting histories cannot be ascribed only
to probable inaccuracies often acknowledged as expected in oral accounts of events having to
do with various narrators’ differing memory and retention capacities (Wieder, 2004). To give
just one example, the consistency with which the ZCC has mentioned 1910 as its birth since the
days of the founding bishop cannot genuinely be ascribed to a possible forgetfulness of some
oral historical informants. I thus argue that extraneous factors like under-identification of
the nature of AICs within the frame of a movement have had a greater role in polarizing the
existing two versions of the ZCC.

76
 History, Politics and Development Studies

Writings from the Centre are flawed further not only by some hollow claims already outlined
above. Perturbing are more unsubstantiated claims, like one dismissing AICs’ faith healing
as charlatan (Morton, 2014, p. 26). After a claim that AICs have historically “used the placebo
effect to heal credulous devotees afflicted with psychosomatic illnesses” (Morton, 2014, p. 26),
no scientific evidence is provided that the faith healing associated with these churches is as
fake as only to convince “credulous devotees” in their millions (Morton, 2014, p. 26). It is hard
to believe that Morton’s (2014) statement intended to convey the same message as Maxwell’s
referring to the AICs’ “preaching of the message of divine healing” (Maxwell, 1999, p. 251).

In this article I analyse testimonies about and preserved by the ZCC, published in the official
newsletter of the organisation in celebration of its 100th anniversary in 2010. Alan Wieder’s
(2004) advocacy for a valuing of “testimony as oral history” for the “cultural context of South
Africa” in which “the testimonies of people on the ground have public legitimacy”, is relevant
for my analysis of ZCC-solicited recounting of historical events, for the reason that testimony
in such a context “brings distinct cultural and political issues and insights to the conversation
because both the horrors of and the struggle against apartheid have a public voice in South
African society” (Wieder, 2004, p. 26). I intend to demonstrate how significant these voices
from below are in tampering description by the other as far as the history of the ZCC is
concerned. I see such officially sanctioned efforts by narrating congregants as serving also to
advance studies in South African church history. What Maxwell (2006) indicts as “institutional
imbalances and prejudices of the historical profession” reflected in case studies of AICs that
“have been operating in sub-Saharan African since the 1910s” needs resolution by self-defining
projects such as this one undertaken by the ZCC. As Maxwell (2006) rightly observes, the
discourse informing description by others in the case studies did nothing to affirm alternative
perspectives. Such alternative perspectives include one highlighted by Landau, that “Africans
can and do act as agents in the making of their own history.” All that the discourse sought in
“distinguish[ing] between African church history and the history of mission” was a furthering
of the imperial repression of self-definition. That is why there is recognition of “Zionism’s
missionary origins” in the AFM, in publications such as Sundkler’s 1976 refined study of
Zionism entitled Zulu Zion and some Swazi Zionists and in Maxwell (1999).

It is evident from some studies of the ZCC and other AICs that the missionary objectives of
original white-led Zionism conflict with the self-affirming ones of the AICs. Lesibana Rafapa
(2013) describes the ZCC mores at the least as abrogation of western Christianity to imbue it with
“Afrikan Humanist values” that have, through history, proven to be the survival kit of Africans
whose identity was being smothered by the alien cultural sensibility of the protagonists
of apartheid. Anderson furthermore highlights this culturally and economically affirming
tenet of the ZCC throughout its existence, in his observation that “The ZCC has emerged from
the fear of a powerful and oppressive regime to attempt to play a role in the radical changes
that have taken place since 1990” (Anderson, 1999, p. 292). In acknowledging that the ZCC has
culturally been on the fringes of power and providing a holistically salvaging message for
the underprivileged, Mafuta (2010, p. 7) characterizes the ZCC culturally as “Empowering its
adherents economically through a religious soteriology.”

77
African Epistemology in the 21st Century

The publication of Gray’s work on Pentecostalism in 1990 evolved studies of African

independent churches to “analyzing the conjunctures between African and Christian patterns
of thought, the absorption of Christian ideas and their relevance to African struggles with
death, disease and misfortune,” according to Maxwell (2006). The ZCC has performed such a
task, among others in its dialectical integration of conventional Christian hymn singing with
the traditional literary form entailing the oral transmission of epic history embedded in praise
poetry (Rafapa, 2013). Such an oral tradition within the context of modern social history as,
to use Prins’s (1991, p. 128) words gives “historical presence to those whose views and values
are disenfranchised by ‘history from above’.” One way the ZCC has used its oral tradition to
preserve aspects of its own history has been by means of aural preservation techniques and
the reduction of oral history to writing.

The place of ZCC oral historical data within the theory of

oral history
Data in the form of testimonies by ZCC members will be tested against possible weak links
within oral historical accounts pinpointed by theorists such as Boeyens and Hall (2009). In as
much as other kinds of data are helpful in triangulating oral historical data, oral historical
data are equally helpful in testing the validity of those other kinds of data. This is why Prins has
remarked that oral historical data “serve to check other sources as they serve to check it.” I will
test the oral testimonies of some ZCC members not only against the ZCC historical accounts
of writers employing ‘modern’ historiography that I have already considered so far, but also
accounts by writers I have not yet discussed such as Mafuta (2015) and Lukhaimane (1980).

In my research approach I do not separate oral history and the oral tradition. Leavy (2011)
distinguishes oral history and the oral tradition, but stresses that oral history “draws on the
tenets of an oral tradition,” for cultures that are amenable to social influences of the oral
tradition. The ZCC is one such cultural group influenced greatly by oral traditions, as my
discussion will show. According to Prins (1991), in oral history stories capable of opening up
for us “the inside of a culture and time … are passed down through the generations.” Such
a view by Prins (1991) of the inseparability of culture and time in the oral transmission of
culture, supports what other commentators on African cultures such as Mphahlele (2002)
refer to as a strong sense of history informing African cultural consciousness. African cultural
communities which constitute the majority of ZCC membership thus include ZCC historical
information in their “pass[ing] down through the generations” “the inside of a culture and
time.” Oral historical testimonies that I analyse do not come from ZCC leadership although
authorised by it in order to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the church. Neither do the
testimonies represent what hegemonic historians have sought to write as ZCC history. I chose
to rely in my research on stories told by rank and file congregants of the ZCC. My approach is
thus congruous with the international oral history theorist Leavy’s view that the strength of the
research approach in oral history is its qualitative emphasis of “participants’ perspectives.”

78
 History, Politics and Development Studies

The intersection of testimony and written history in the ZCC:

written sources
One sphere where the soundness of ZCC oral history can be put to test is in relation to the year
of its origin. On the one hand, ZCC as presented in history from above was founded in 1924,
according to historians such as Lukhaimane (1980), Sundkler (1948, p. 291), and Morton (2014).
On the other hand, the ZCC authoritative oral history indicates 1910 as the year of the church’s
establishment. A close scrutiny of the Pentecostal/Zionist phenomenon in southern Africa
yields helpful insights that might help the reader understand better the version that the ZCC
was born in 1910, and not 1924.

It is important to remember that around 1909 to 1910 when schisms with the imported AFM
became decisive, the different black independent churches and even the hotbed AFM itself
were seen as mere nodal points of a movement that often held umbrella church services
together without experiencing a conflict. This is why writers like Kiernan (1980), Hallencreutz
(1998), Landau (1996, 1999), Maxwell (1999, 2006) as well as Anderson and London (2009) point
to southern African Pentecostalism/Zionism as a movement, and not as a church. This explains
why Engenas Lekganyane would not have had first to secede from the Mahlangus’ ZAC or the
other AIC led by Motaung, before starting to preach to his own followers falling within the
movement and also drawn from it.

Again, right from his first encounter with Motaung’s church nothing would have prevented
Lekganyane from identifying and preaching to his own followers from it – at the level of a
multidenominational movement. This feature of the AIC movement of the 1910s actually
accounts for even the likes of Morton (2014, p. 69) acknowledging that Lekganyane started his
own church (which event they opt to associate with the year 1924) while still a preacher within
Motaung’s AIC (which happened before 1924). What the writers of academic history fall short of
is to attribute such an overlapping transition from worshiping in one AIC to founding another,
to this fluid feature of the Pentecostal movement. They have only stopped at conceding to the
decentralised nature of the movement at the secondary level in allowing the independent
existence of some denominations, albeit with a distinct central leadership of the movement
at the primary level of the AFM.

It makes sense that in their formative stages the nascent AICs cloned this feature of the mother
AFM by being mini-movements wherein leaders of other denominations would freely worship
and preach within some breakaway churches even when already identifying themselves as
heads of different new AICs they had started to consolidate. This is similar to the way the AFM
too started diffusely as a movement, and not as a single church. Pertaining to this premise
of the white-led AFM, Maxwell (1999, p. 250) remarks that it was only in 1908 when the broad
Pentecostal movement evolved from the fluid state in which it arrived from America, to
coalesce into a nuclear church.

From the perspective of ZCC oral tradition the watershed incident signaling the beginning
of the ZCC is Engnenas’s prophetic “vision and calling” of 1910. The ZCC Family Bible, an
authoritative publication sanctioned by the current ZCC bishop and his Church Council

79
African Epistemology in the 21st Century

endorses 1910, consistently with other oral sources sanctioned by the church. Reliance on
testimony in recording church history has characterised the ZCC. This is not to deny that
handwritten notes by some leaders listening to the bishop’s sermons and addresses have also
been used. These personal historical snippets jotted down by ordinary men and women within
the AIC do help validate or dispute some of the oral testimonies, for a more reliable account of
the ZCC to be distilled. Views of oral historians such as Derek du Bruyn attest to the significance
of such additional history material ‘from below,’ as in his observation that even “relatively
unlikely sources such as personal documents” are crucial in oral history research” because
“oral evidence should not be seen as the only source of information.

It is clear that oral testimony has been at the disposal of both Lukhaimane and Motolla, about
Engenas’s spiritual experience of 1910. The reliability of oral historical sources here is no more
questionable than what Hallencreutz (1998) describes as the combined “oral sources” and
“significant finds in regional and national archives” hegemonic historians like Bengt Sundkler
relied on in documenting case studies of black Pentecostal churches and their leaders, because
“all stories … [recall] certain events and forget others”, to use Landau’s words. True to what the
oral history theorist Michael Frisch highlights as the craft of oral history, the ZCC authoritative
recorders of the church’s oral history do post-positivistically document testimonies of bona
fide ZCC members as they “connect individual experience and its social context” as well as
use the past today “to interpret their lives and the world around them.” Internationally, oral
historians since the 1970s have adopted such “post-positivist” approaches to the discipline of
oral history.

A parallel to this conflict between hegemonic history and the history from below is seen when
the ZCC marks 1967 as the year in which the current head of the ZCC became bishop at the
age of 13, following his father’s passing on in the same year. Mafuta has documented 1975,
and not the ZCC-sanctioned 1967, as the year in which the bishop ascended to the ZCC throne.
His reasons are straightforwardly that, ‘formally’ the bishop had to reach the legal age of 21
before he could be installed. Yet ZCC oral history holds that the present ZCC bishop became
head of the church after his father bishop Edward Lekganyane ordained him as directed by the
Holy Spirit in 1967 soon before the latter’s death.

Current ZCC bishop Barnabas Lekganyane’s spiritual anointing into headship at the age of
13 is as prophetic a historical incident as Bishop Edward Lekganyane’s death, once more in
the frame not informing or disregarded by hegemonic history. An oral account by Samuel
Lebudi recalls how in 1967 while attending the September congregation in Moria, the Holy
Spirit informed him in his sleep that Bishop Edward Lekganyane was going to die and that
the former had to return to Moria on the next Thursday where he did “hwetša Mong wa ka a
tlogile ra ba boloka ka Mokibelo” (found that my Lord had indeed departed as prophesied
in my vision and we buried him on the Saturday). Interestingly, there is a different discourse
diametrically opposed to such oral historical discourse. For a historian like Allan Anderson,
Bishop Edward Lekganyane had no succession planning nor immediate heir, because he
had a “premature death from a heart attack in … 1967.” Anderson, like the rest of hegemonic
historians, recognises 1975 as the year of the current ZCC bishop’s enthronement and not 1967.
Within such a discourse from the Centre, Bishop Edward Lekganyane did not prepare himself
and his followers prophetically for his death. From the point of view of a writer such as Morton

80
 History, Politics and Development Studies

(2004), such facts are as unreliable as fiction and belong in fabricated “hagiography.”

Within ZCC orature however, not only was Edward’s death not without proper succession
planning. It also fits in the pattern of ZCC bishops bidding goodbye to the ZCC leadership and
preparing thoroughly for their own deaths. Repeating similar oral accounts by many more ZCC
oral sources, Lesufi (ZCC Messenger, 2010, pp. 35-36) recalls Engenas’s 1946 statements that in
1948 he is going to die, “sepela” (“go”), and “fa bahu selalelo gore ba tsene legodimong” (“give
holy communion to the deceased in heaven so that they may enter the kingdom of God”). It
is known from ZCC oral history also that before his death in June 1948, Engenas visited some
congregations, among them the Alexandra township branch, and told his ministers that he was
going back to Moria to rest and they would never see him again. If in his reliance on memory
research participant Lesufi is accurate about 1946, it means Engenas started as early as then
to prepare for his 1948 death. It is also possible that such farewell messages by Engenas to his
ministers happened in the 1948 months before June when he died. This precedent marked
what is now accepted tradition in the ZCC, that a sitting bishop prophetically reveals his own
dying time and prepares succession in time.

Hegemonic historical vantage points contradict official accounts of the ZCC about the AIC’s
number of annual conferences. One example is Anderson’s enunciation that millions of
Lekganyane’s subjects “come annually to give allegiance” at the Moria headquarters (my
emphasis). This is the result of a lingering effect of history from above homogenising ZCC
and historically white-led Pentecostalist praxis. It is true that during its early 20th century
ramifications from hubs such as Wakkerstroom in South Africa into all of southern Africa,
as historians like Maxwell (1999) indicate, there existed a phenomenon known as “AFM’s
annual conference in South Africa” during which congregants descended onto Johannesburg
from Zimbabwe, Malawi, Lesotho and other southern African states.” Understandably, there
are echoes of this in the ZCC’s praxis of its branches permeating mainly southern African
states today continuing to converge at regular intervals on its headquarters of Moria in
South Africa. However, the ZCC distinctively holds annual conferences as opposed an annual
conference. Apart from the annual Easter conference mistakenly thought to this day to be the
only ZCC conference each year (see for example a news report of the Sowetan newspaper of
30 October 2015, p. 18), the ZCC annually holds yet another conference at the beginning of
Spring and its New Year in September, for sanctifying the new year. That is why the current
ZCC bishop, Barnabas Lekganyane, in his 2010 September conference address reminds the
ZCC pilgrimages not to discard the ZCC tradition of bringing along seeds to Moria for blessings
“As we consecrate the New Year.” Such a tradition of the ZCC genealogically conforms to the
original collective feature of AICs, of “collective support against the ravages of poverty,”
about which Landau (1996, p. 263) gives the example of Pentecostal/Zionist religious leaders’
“critical concerns with rain, cattle and environmental fertility.”

History from above does not recognise Barnabas Lekganyane’s ZCC reign as beginning in 1967.
As if the ZCC never weaned itself from its progeny, this kind of history associates the ZCC with
one annual conference. Such deficiencies point to gaps in ZCC academic history. The situation
justifies focus on alternative sites of history such as the oral testimonies that are the focus of
this paper. Now I turn more fully to oral testimonies on these and other watershed dates in the
history of the ZCC.

81
African Epistemology in the 21st Century

The intersection of testimony and written history in the ZCC:

oral sources
Interesting aspects of international oral history theory can be identified within the oral history
practice of the ZCC. Together with hegemonic historical accounts of the Pentecostal/Zionist
movement, I use oral history theory as a matrix within which I test some of the ZCC’s contested
versions of its own history. In this way I read memories and combine them “with other historical
sources to find out what happened in the past,” a useful function that received sharp focus for
the first time during the “Post-Positivist Approaches to Memory and Subjectivity” of the late
1970s. My assumption is that events recounted by research participants who have interacted
with collective identity in the form of cultural practices of the ZCC, become what Alan Wieder
values as “deep stories of individual and collective identity.”

A research participant named Frans Ramalepe, whose oral narrative was also published in
the ZCC Messenger, recalls that he was baptized as a member of the ZCC on 6 January 1924 by
“Bishop Engenas Lekganyane ka sebele” (Bishop Engenas Lekganyane in person) in the Monono
river together with twenty other people. This was after the ZCC and Engenas Lekganyane were
introduced to him by Titus Ralephenyo, “gomme ke yena ke mo lebogago kudu ge ke le mo ZCC
gobane o ba a bolela ditaba tše botse fela ka ga Bishop Engenas Lekganyane” (“and I am very
grateful to Titus Ralephenya who turned me into a member of the ZCC, for he always opted to
tell me only good things about Bishop Engenas Lekganyane”).

It can reasonably be said that in his testimony Frans Ramalepe’s facts are richly accompanied
by what Thomson has described as oral history’s “conscious and unconscious meaning of
experience as lived and remembered.” While clearly conscious of the information he is
giving that he was baptized in the ZCC in 1924 by Engenas, what the research participant
may be unconscious of is the messianic regard he has for Engenas, bespoken by the emphasis
in “ka sebele” (“in person”). The informant is consciously informing the researcher for the
ZCC Messenger newsletter of his gratefulness to the fellow member who introduced him
to Engenas and the ZCC. However, there is an unconscious meaning he gives by the silent
part of the reason he gives for such thankfulness “gobane o ba a bolela ditaba tše botse fela
ka ga Bishop Engenas Lekganyane [for he always opted to tell me only good things about
Bishop Engenas Lekganyane].” True to the historian Paul S. Landau’s description of history as
stories that recall certain events and forget others, clearly both Titus Ralephenyo and Frans
Ramalepe are purposefully selective in their representation of the messianic leader Engenas
Lekganyane and the ZCC.

There are historically recorded bad things some people did spread about Engenas, among them
adherents of mainline and the relatively normative white AFM, including the propaganda that
one of his sons died and, believing that the son was Jesus Christ, Engenas kept him unburied
for three days egotistically imagining that the child would resurrect which of course never
happened. None of the ZCC oral informants recalls such an event. One may reasonably explain
it as one of the many ways Southern African colonial rulers of the time mocked what Maxwell
(1999) describes as the conjoining feature of African Pentecostalism of “divining whilst in a
state of ecstatic possession by the Holy Spirit.” We should remember that “Pentecostal tongues,

82
 History, Politics and Development Studies

groaning and moaning were uncapturable discourses” (Maxwell, 1999) for outsiders to black
independent Pentecostalism of the times of Engenas Lekganyane. For the reason the language
barrier, those on the side of dominant authority have been rampant in spawning propaganda
that to this day continues to harm the image of AICs like the ZCC. There is the practice of
prophecy within the ZCC in which, according to Anderson (2009) “responses to the working of
the Holy Spirit amongst ordinary African people” makes prophets “behave ‘abnormally’ with
jerking, jumping, snorting, and various other contortions of the body … experienced in biblical
times” Maxwell (1999). ZCC prophets share such prophetic manifestations with the rest of the
AICs Maxwell refers to.

The research participant named Frans Maselesele’s oral testimony preserved in writing in
the same ZCC Messenger, attests that he came to know of a man from GaMamabolo, whose
name was Engenas Lekganyane of the ZCC, through acquaintaces called Jonathan Kgatla
and Phineas Mogale (ZCC Messenger, 1985). After gaining confidence in Engenas Lekganyane
and the ZCC, Frans Maselesele joined the ZCC and was baptized in 1923 in the Norwood Dam
in Johannesburg by a priest of the ZCC called Petrus Lekganyane. This testimony refutes
Anderson’s (2009) claim implying that at any stage only the ZCC bishop had ministering
authority and the ZCC prohibited “ministers and local prophets” from exercising authority.
Similarly, multiple testimonies dispute Maxwell’s (1999) view that during Engenas’s leadership
of the ZCC “healing was his sole province, intended to boost his charismatic influence.”

In her oral tale published in the ZCC Messenger, Maria Masango talks of bishop Engenas
Lekganyane arriving in her father’s homestead in Tshwane circa 1942 accompanied by
two ZCC priests Silas Mahlatji and Lota Lemao for all three of them to lay hands on the sick.
She also recalls Engenas and ZCC priest [moruti] Senona one-day arriving together at the
Riverside, Pretoria, ZCC branch collectively to heal a physically disabled man by faith. In one
more testimony Daniel Lesufi (ZCC Messenger, 2010), who was brought up in the household
of a ZCC senior minister for the Sekhukhune district by the name of Mokgopi, testifies that
during Engenas’s ZCC leadership circa 1938 and before the former was baptized in 1943, he
worshipped also at a branch led by reverend Raphahlelo who together with other ZCC ministers
practiced faith healing assisted by prophets. These practices were authorized by Engenas from
his headquarters in Moria.

Concerning historiographers’ claim that Engenas Lekganyane founded the ZCC in 1924, the
research participant Frans Maselesele states unequivocally in the published oral account
that as he was baptized in 1923 he was informed about the principles of “kereke ya Engenas
Lekganyane” [“the church of Engenas Lekganyane”] (ZCC Messenger, 2010). It is important to
state that the ZCC issues baptismal cards and certificates, which members have to refer to in
any official information they give. Members who submitted handwritten, sometimes verbal
testimonies in the presence of a church official, would have to produce such credentials.
Probably meant to assist ZCC officials editing the oral information for publication with veracity,
all informants’ portraits alongside their published accounts are captioned with their names,
dates of birth and dates of baptism, probably triangulated with information in the members’
government issued identity documents. An official circular had been issued the previous year
in preparation for the anniversary celebrations, inviting members who had history of the
church in their memory and personal notes to avail themselves to church leadership. Possible

83
African Epistemology in the 21st Century

inaccuracies regarding dates, names, places and circumstances associated with memory
can reliably be said to have been minimized or stamped out in this manner. Besides, the
2010 volumes containing reproduced oral history do have innumerable incidental overlaps
told through the mouths of different research participants, greatly assisting both the ZCC
authorities and myself to cross-check consistency.

These and other informants are able to speak of encounters with the ZCC of Engenas
Lekganyane in 1923 and 1924, and not with the Zion Apostolic Faith Mission (ZAFM) of Motaung
which Engenas Lekganyane is documented in accepted written history to have been part of
until 1924. Both Lukhaimane (1980) and Mafuta (2010) document in their formal university
studies of ZCC history, that Engenas Lekganyane joined the Apostolic Faith Mission (AFM) of P Le
Roux in Johannesburg around 1908. Both historians agree that when Mahlangu left to form his
own independent church the Zion Apostolic Church of South Africa (ZAC) after he and Engenas
had initially belonged since 1908 to normative AFM led by P Le Roux, Lekganyane joined him.
The two worked together until Lekganyane joined Motaung’s Lesotho-based AIC of which he
became overseer until he left to form the ZCC. For these and other writers, Engenas’s rupture
with Motaung happened abruptly in 1924, marking the founding of the ZCC. According to this
discourse of the Centre, the founding of the ZCCC was not through Engenas’s calling in 1910. For
the ZCC to recognize 1910 as the birth of the organization makes sense from the point of view
of what I have already pointed out as a hitherto overlooked aspect of the AIC founding process.
From such a vantage point, the 1910 birth of the ZCC was a sequel to an initial double belonging
typical of other AIC leaders’ gradual amassing of their own church membership during the
bridge period of continuing to preach under a host AIC founde, while simultaneously mapping
out and consolidating one’s own independent AIC.

The oral testimony of Daniel Lesufi (ZCC essenger, 2010) does explain how together with his
followers Engenas held joint church services with Mahlangu while visiting Johannesburg. That
is the meaning of Lesufi’s words “Engenas a re ba ye go rapela le bona” (“Engenas permitted
fellow worship with the Mahlangu group”). This should be much late, after the ZCC founder had
already been to Motaung’s church and openly left the position of Northern Transvaal Overseer
as soon as the ZCC congregation he had marked out needed his undivided attention. Hence
mentioning by the respondent Lesufi of a distinctly-ZCC congregation of Engenas joining a
worship service of Mahlangu’s church much later than his first encounters with the latter. Here
it can be seen that Engenas and Mahlangu together led their heterogeneous congregation in
the historically known spirit of Pentecostal churches sometimes meeting under the banner of
the Pentecostal movement. Such behaviour by the two leaders strengthens arguments about
the confederal nature of worshiping with fellow leaders and members of the Pentecostal
movement even while owning and leading one’s own AIC. Earlier we scrutinised evidence
of such a phenomenon in the case of breakaway AIC leaders in the early formative stages of
their new churches. The present example of Mahlangu and Lekganyane followers worshiping
together in ‘movement’ spirit indicates that such a fellowship continued even in later stages of
independence when newly invented AICs were already at the crystallised stage.

Lesufi gives the cause of Mahlangu’s and Engenas’s congregations stopping to share worship
services as clashing visions about World War 1 (1914 – 1918) that the two independent leaders

84
 History, Politics and Development Studies

both had. Lesufi explains that one day Mahlangu shared his dream about Germany defeating
England. Engenas contested, citing dreams in which the Holy Spirit had revealed to him the
victory of England and her allies over German forces (“Mahlangu o ile are … o bone Majeremane
ba fentše ntwa yeo … Engenas … a re Maesemane a tla fenya ntwa”) (ZCC Messenger, 2010); after
giving this account Lesufi declares that “Kereke ya Sione ga e tšwe go ya ga Mahlangu” (“the
ZCC was not born out of a split from Mahlangu’s church”). Interestingly, such an oral historical
declaration concurs with what dominant historians have stated – that Engenas founded the
ZCC after splitting from Motaung who hosted the former post the former’s earlier sojourn in
Mahlangu’s ZAC. I see this as affirmation of the credibility of versions of history told orally from
the grassroots and based on lived experience.

Historians’ agreement on 1924 as the founding of the ZCC thus prove to be true only when
boundaries between the original AFM and fissured African independent churches are
presumed to be neat, and dissociations among the myriad AICs themselves are believed to
have been prompt and immediately discrete. Such a stance is against both oral and normative
historical evidence, showing that such neatly etched borders did not exist. This is the significant
facet of AICs Maxwell (1999) describes accurately as “early interdenominational.”

According to the ZCC Family Bible (1995) with a preface written by the current bishop, “Rev.
Engenas built a church in Mamabolo” in 1924, after the founding of the church and before the
present Moria could be the ultimate headquarters of the ZCC. The front cover photograph of
the newsletter containing these testimonies is the ruins of the Mamabolo church building.
The authenticity of such archaeological evidence is captured well by writers such as Du
Bruyn (2013) in his assertion that, “Sources other than oral testimonies include not only the
more conventional and accessible archival records, newspapers and photographs, but also
… buildings, ruins and even the historic landscape.” What this implies is that, before 1924
Engenas’s followers were there and worshipped in the open.

The ZCC feature of holding church services in the open continues to this day, even in the
presence of a network of church buildings across its branches mainly covering southern
African states. The ZCC Family Bible chronicles years in which the current bishop built and
inaugurated ZCC church buildings in places like Atteridgeville and Mamelodi (ZCC Messenger,
2010). However, similarly to the building of the Thabakgone ZCC church structure in 1924, the
affected ZCC congregations of Atteridgeville and Mamelodi cannot rightly be said to have
started worshipping under the aegis of the ZCC only in the years in which the buildings were
erected and subsequently opened officially by the current ZCC bishop. In this way, rather
than support 1924 as the birth of the ZCC, the history and artefact of the Thabakgone church
building rather thickens evidence disproving this.

Before he was joined by Lekganyane whom he appointed overseer of the Transvaal (Limpopo)
as already mentioned, Edward Lion Motaung broke with the imported AFM and later returned
and was himself recognised as “AFM overseer for Basutoland.” Motaung later seceded
once more, this time to form his own Pentecostal church active mainly in Lesotho in 1921.
Lekganyane founded the ZCC while still “overseer” for Motaung’s AIC, as I have already
indicated. ZCC membership existed beyond the Limpopo division he was earlier only “overseer”

85
African Epistemology in the 21st Century

of for Motaung’s AIC. This is why ZCC oral testimonies incessantly refer to Engenas Lekganyane
and some of his followers from Thabakgone and Johannesburg worshipping together with
Motaung in Lesotho.

According to Lesufi’s testimony, Engenas did not join Motaung in Lesotho for worship only
at the time his Johannesburg followers joined him. Lesufi describes how Engenas once did
“sepela le bagwera ba yo jela Good Friday Lesotho ka ngwaga wa 1910” from “GaMamabolo
and Hlabina” (went with his fellow worshippers from GaMamabolo and Hlabina to Lesotho
for Easter services in Lesotho) (ZCC Messenger, 2010). Relations between the ZCC leader and
Lesotho-based Pentecostal evangelist Motaung continued to be cordial even after the former
had started his own AIC. That is why when Engenas’s son Edward was born in 1926, the former
fondly named him after Edward Motaung. Engenas’s fellow worshipers in the ZCC who travelled
to Motaung’s church in Lesotho from the rural Limpopo province of South Africa had belonged
not only to Motaung’s Lesotho-based church, but had also been with Engenas in the Church
of Scotland (ZCC Messenger, 2010). It should be noted that black Zionist worship coalition
exemplified above did not deny the existence of the separate churches led by the prominent
figures Mahlangu and Motaung and Lekganyane. This is why the research participant Simon
Ramalepe, whose baptism in Engenas’s ZCC was explained above to have taken place on 6
January 1924, can speak of meeting Engenas Lekganyane in the company of Mahlangu and
Edward Lion Motaung (ZCC Messenger, 2010). What can be deduced here is that the existence
of a distinct ZCC on the one hand, and its founder Engenas’s sojourns with Mahlangu and
Motaung on the other hand, do overlap.

Testimony emanating from within the ZCC’s oral tradition thus helps to rectify inaccuracies
and distortions apparently extant in formal, hegemonic history about the same organisation.
Insight about the ZCC gained from the cited testimonies coincides with what Prins (1991)
pinpoints generically as revelations of oral history research, namely “traditions of genesis,
dynastic histories and accounts of social organization.”

Reliance by ZCC researchers such as Anderson, Lukhaimane, Mafuta and Motolla directly or
indirectly on oral testimonies in their varying compilation of written texts attests to some
“post-documentary sensibility” breaking down the distinction between the oral history oral
source and the oral history document product, taken further in the digital revolution era
of oral history we are living in where digitization has added a dissolution of the oral history
document source into the oral history documentary product (1990).

Interviewer position within the ZCC brand of oral history

Questions relating to the position of the interviewer in oral history research are so fundamental
to my kind of enquiry into the quality of ZCC oral history, that I cannot do justice to the study
without attempting to describe the specific nature of this relationship.

Testimonies of the origins and nature of the ZCC covered by this study do not emanate from
a newsletter covering just the period before the 100th anniversary of the church. The scope
of the ZCC project to solicit oral narratives about the genesis, dynastic successions and social

86
 History, Politics and Development Studies

organisation of the church spans three decades, although started just after the inception of
the revamped newsletter under the new title ZCC Messenger in 1985. International oral history
theory and practice seem to validate such an approach by the ZCC, in conceptualising oral
history research as “a process,” and not an event (Leavy, 2011).

During the interview of the research participant Frans Ramalepe, the assigned ZCC
researcher refrains from assuming or shaping the nature of the findings likely to emanate
from the research, in spite of authority invested in him by virtue of being dispatched by ZCC
headquarters. It is evident that the ZCC researcher went about as Jones recommends, beginning
“with one open, ‘narrative inducing’ question and then proceeded to allow the participant to
tell his or her story without interruption” (Jones in Leavy, 2011). The one open-ended, broad
question posed at the beginning of the interview resulted in the informant’s narrative giving
uninterrupted testimony, rich with information relating to the formative years of the ZCC as
well as its social organization /character under the leadership of its founder. This happened
without unwarranted interjection by the conductor of the interview (ZCC Messenger, 1985). The
potential harm of the tasked ZCC story collectors, to use Mchunu’s words, “inadvertently making
erroneous assumptions based on the researcher’s prior knowledge and/or experience” is kept
in check by strategies such as choosing “to conceptualize themselves as co-investigators,
co-learners, facilitators or advocates rather than researchers”, thus minimising “the power
differential between themselves and those participating in their research” (Mchunu, 2013).

Only two questions are asked during Ramalepe’s oral narration. The questions were probably
captured initially in the interviewer’s scribbled notebook and by means of an audio tape and
later preserved in the published newsletter. The two questions are “Na lena monna yo wa
Modimo le mo tsebišitšwe ke mang?” (“Honourable elder, how did you come to know about this
man of God?”); and “Na Ramalepe, e be le sa šome naa?” (“Honourable Ramalepe, were you not
employed at the time?”) (ZCC Messenger, 1985). As what is preserved in writing in the published
newsletter is probably compressed due to usual space constraints, it would seem that the
researcher analysed the information from Ramalepe after the first interview. Thereafter
follow-up interviews were conducted in which the captured two questions were posed, shaped
by interceding attempts at sense making. The question whether Ramalepe was not employed
during his encounter with Engenas could have been answered without prompting, had it
not been perhaps for what the writer Mchunu (2013) decribes as “the assumption, among
participants that the researcher already knows the answers, by fact of his/her being an
insider.” It is likely that the ZCC researcher and the research participant Ramalepe have often
shared personal life stories prior to the oral history project having to be performed as decreed
by the church leadership, because the interviewer is an insider ZCC official.

The nature of the questions is such that there is mutual respect between the researcher
and research participant, and no specific kinds of answers are pre-empted. However, the
formulation of the questions by the skillful interviewer unintrusively leads the research
participant to give information relating to his personal biography as well as Engenas
Lekganyane’s character and values. In this way, Ramalepe’s reconstruction of own biography
comes across beneficially in the way Leavy (2011) describes an effective oral history
interviewing method of covering “an extensive part of a participant’s life, seeking to uncover
processes and link individual experiences with the larger context in which those experiences
occur.”
87
African Epistemology in the 21st Century

The benefit is that by Ramalepe relating parts of his personal experiences, he taps into
Engenas Lekganyane’s character in which are embedded the values of the church founded by
the latter. These values informed the social organisation of the ZCC at the time, which is crucial
for qualitative oral history research to gather information on. Such an approach is in keeping
with the proper attitude in oral history research to assume that “meaning isn’t ‘waiting out
there’ to be discovered, but rather that meaning is generated during the research process”
with the result that “we build meaning through the generation of an interview narrative, and
the analysis and interpretation of that narrative” (Leavy, 2011).

From Ramalepe’s oral narrative, we gather that “Engenas e be e le monna wa boikokobetšo,

wa sekgwari gomme o be a tseba go opela kudu … boikgogomošo o be a sa bo tsebe” (Engenas
was a modest man, very ingenious and greatly gifted in singing” (ZCC Messenger, 1985). The
conductor of the interview adds the footnote that “Ramalepe ke mokgalabje yo a bontšhago
tebogo ya gagwe ka go ngwala history ya Kereke, gomme se sengwe le se sengwe se o
mmotšišago ka sona o bula dipukwana tša gagwe go go balla. O ngwadile matšatši le mehlolo
ye a e bonego ge a be a sepela le Engenas.” (“Ramalepe is an old man who shows his gratitude
by documenting the history of the church in personal notes, and whenever you question him
about anything that has to do with the history he opens his notebooks to read for you. He has
recorded dates and miracles that he saw performed by Engenas as the two travelled together”)
(ZCC Messenger, 1985).

This personal information about Ramalepe’s pious devotion is given after the interviewer
has mentioned earlier that “Ramalepe ke o mongwe wa batho ba mmalwa ba phelago yo a
tsebago bishop Engenas Lekganyane ka botlalo. O phedile le yena gomme o be a rata go mo
latela mo a bego a ya gona. Ramalepe e be e le motshwari wa patla ya Engenas, ge Engenas
a tlhobola Ramalepe o be a e tšea.” (“Ramalepe is one of the only few living people who know
Bishop Engenas Lekganyane very well. He lived with him and loved to follow him wherever
he went. Ramalepe was the holder of Engenas’s staff when Engenas changed clothes”) (ZCC
Messenger 1985). Such information by the reporter of research results validates Ramalepe’s
narrative as authentic and accurate, no less than the earlier mentioning of the archeological
item “Monono River” by the research participant himself as the place where he was baptized
in order to become a ZCC member (ZCC Messenger, 1985). Obviously, the triangulating role of
archeological items like the “Monono River” is that they are tangible and their existence can
be verified.

The other research participant, Maselesele, thickens the valuable information in recounting
that Engenas Lekganyane, known to come from GaMamabolo, “o be a tsebiwa e le monna wa
mehlolo e bile a bolela ka ga Bibele le Modimo … wa go tseba go neša pula” (“got to be known
as a performer of miracles and a spreader of the message of the Bible and God … and could
make rain”) (ZCC Messenger, 1985). Maselesele recalls returning home in GaKgatla in 1925 to
till the land a different man, rich with knowledge of the principles of the church of Engenas
Lekganyane forbidding witchcraft, the use of traditional muti, smoking, drinking, as well as
the commitment of murder and carrying of weapons (ZCC Messenger, 1985).

The eye-witness narratives by Frans Maselesele serve to validate his narratives as authentic,
even if the years of occurrence may not be quite accurate due to natural dimming of memory

88
 History, Politics and Development Studies

(ZCC Messenger, 1985). However, the now familiar ZCC practice of members jotting down
personal notes on the history of the church as urged by the leadership lend credence even to
the possible exactness of the years in which the incidents took place. Frans Maselesele’s first
testimony is about the day Engenas visited the village of Botlokwa, about 45 kilometres from
the ZCC headquarters, on foot to spread the word of God. Engenas came on foot yet showed no
physical exhaustion at all, heard the cries of women in the homestead of his host in the middle
of the night as the hut he was sleeping in had been set on fire by those who did not like his visit
and gospel message. Engenas then woke up and extinguished the flames single-handedly and
with his bare hands, and the following day when many villagers flocked to the homestead with
the hope of witnessing miracles Engenas was famed to perform, all he did was preach the word
of God to them, out of humility (ZCC Messenger, 1985).

An even more intimate interaction with Engenas was in 1932 when Maselesele visited the ZCC
headquarter of Moria and Engenas sent him with 50 closed envelopes to Messina close to the
border of Zimbabwe, to hand them over to a man from Zimbabwe called Samuel Moyo (ZCC
Messenger, 1985). Through the power of the Holy Spirit after Engenas had laid his hands on
him, Maselesele could reach Messina despite not knowing the place, and Samuel Moyo knew
who he was before he could introduce himself (ZCC Messenger, 1985).

As mentioned earlier, the Easter 2010 issue of the ZCC Messenger has a front cover photograph
of the church structure built by Engenas in 1924 at Thabakgone, GaMamabolo. This is the
issue celebrating the ZCC’s 100th anniversary by means of publishing narratives of many
more research participants whose stories corroborate some aspects of those by the research
participants we have scrutinised above, as well as affirm the narratives across research
participants covered in that specific issue. The published narratives are acknowledged in
the publication to have resulted from oral testimony of the participants, similarly to the way
the interviews of Simon Ramalepe, Frans Ramalepe and Frans Maselesele were processed for
earlier issues.

The continuum of oral narratives published in the consulted ZCC Messenger issues spanning
September 1985 and Easter 2010, are accompanied by the photographs of the three successive
ZCC bishops, the archaeological church ruins of Thabakgone and imposing, modern Zion
City Moria church building used to date for worship. Portrait photographs of the research
participants whose testimonies have been covered over a period of time are also published in
graphic detail revealing the old age of the majority of them. Photographs of the aged members
of Engenas’s generation are mostly in black and white, attesting to the technological state of
the times when colour photographs were rare. The portraits can also be utilized at the higher
level of archaeological objects enriching the texture of the oral history, rather than mere
images attesting to authenticity of the eye witness accounts.

Conclusion
Thomson (2007) has helpfully laid down a matrix of the way “particular social and intellectual
forces have shaped contemporary approaches to oral history.” My approach in analysing ZCC

89
African Epistemology in the 21st Century

oral history was an attempt to apply the present day trends. This is because I believe social
forces within and outside the ZCC where worshippers some from, have been impacted by oral
history notions articulated by “intellectual forces” Thomson refers to. I thus credit the ZCC,
under the circumstances, for its valuing of history told by ordinary people from their own
perspectives. Such a coincidence of the ZCC approach and contemporary oral history theory
has facilitated my coalescence of defensible versions of ZCC history. Not only should this
version of ZCC history be allowed to live side by side with the hitherto only version recognized
in research. Such ZCC history obtained from the grassroots should be admitted as a necessary
part on the broader plane of South African church history. In that way, the two histories of
the ZCC will live side by side without the imbalance of unequal attention, refinement and
acceptance.

The ZCC and other South African AICs have historically grappled with what one may term
war scale apartheid onslaught on the identity of the oppressed. Thomson’s (2007) view of an
impetus to international oral history from the 1940s through to the 1970s until present times as
“the postwar renaissance of memory” that is a source for “‘people’s history’ ” remains relevant
for other kinds of war experiences than World War 11 (1939 – 1945). One such parallel situation
warranting such a “postwar renaissance of memory” (Thomson, 2007) is the need within ZCC
culturally to recreate a people’s unmangled history beyond imperialist battering by apartheid
National Party government (1948 – 1994). Such a self-writing of history is an ingredient of the
greater act of resistance. One way to achieve meaningful resistance was for Zionist churches
incorporating “many cultural traditions that European missionaries viewed as ‘pagan’”
including the use of “orality … in its ceremonies” (Norton, 2014). The remark that “European
missionaries had often sought to impose European culture on their African converts” (Norton,
2014) hints at the imperialist war the aftermath of which the ZCC had to use oral history among
its other tools to counteract. The ZCC testimonies used primarily in this study have impactfully
been reduced to an audio cassette and published in a newsletter with a readership of millions.
By this 2010 project, the organisation took full advantage of what Thomson has described as
the era of “digital revolution of the late 1990s and early 2000s.” (Thomson, 2007).

The research participant Simon Ramalepe’s narrative includes the fact that “Mo go emego
kereke ya Moria lehono, ke mo re bego re tshwarela kereke ya rena nakong ya Engenas gomme
nakong yeo, yona e be e dirilwe ka matlhakanoka” (“Where the church building stands today
in Moria is where we held our church services in the times of Engenas, however the church
structure then was made of reeds” (ZCC Messenger, 1985). In addition to the psychic merging of
the modern church building with the memory of the original reed enclosure infusing the status
of a relic into the current building, the image of adherents worshiping in makeshift structure
underscores the poverty under which the church had to survive. The narrative of Frans
Maselesele includes the fact that Engenas had to go from Moria to Botlokwa on foot because
“Dikoloi … e be e le semaka gomme di sepela fela ka bahumi ba makgowa fela” (“Motor cars
in those days were inaccessible to us, driven around only by rich whites.” (ZCC Messenger,
1985) Such items of the ZCC oral tradition are a clear indication that the ZCC leadership and
membership have always been on the subaltern side of society, thus striving from within
the underprivileged in the apartheid era to uplift themselves spiritually, socially and
economically. This is the strand in the making of the ZCC Morton (2014, p. 32) is emphasising in

90
 History, Politics and Development Studies

his comment that the “explanation of Lekganyane’s motivations would appear to reside in the
struggles of the society in which he was born and raised.”

The oral testimony in this regard endorses what writers like Pongweni (2000), Rafapa (2005)
and Anderson (1999) (demonstrate to be the philosophical underpinnings of the ontological
and epistemological character of African churches like the ZCC. The research participant
Simon Ramalepe’s testimony that cars in those days belonged to the rich, who happened to
be white people by default, seems to endorse Wieder’s (2004) views on the need to recognise
the testimony of the formally oppressed as oral history, specifically within the South African
context of past apartheid. The gains, as Wieder (2004) sees them, are that “the horrors of and
the struggle against apartheid previously silenced by history from above are in this way made
to “have a public voice in South African society.”

The fact that ZCC oral tradition considered in this paper has to do with only three generations
of ZCC leaders and followers since the founding of the Church in 1910, adds to the testimonies’
probable accuracy even regarding dates. In Boeyens and Hall’s (2009) view, “oral accounts
of history are reliable, especially if they are chronologically of the most recent three to four
generations.” Such a dimension adds to what I perceive to be the achievement of this study,
viz. the demonstration of the reliability of the ZCC oral history made valid by looking at the
oral history from inside the testimonies themselves, and not by means of hegemonic written
history.

One more significant feature of the ZCC approach is its anchoring of testimonies in
archeological and other tangible items. The visuals, artefacts and archeological items
published alongside the testimonies of research participants such as Simon Ramalepe, Frans
Ramalepe, Simon Maselesele and the current ZCC bishop, perform the important function of
grounding the ZCC oral history. In this way, the ZCC testimonies and accompanying artefacts
live true to the roles of each. To use the words of Boeyens and Hall (2009), the narratives and
artefacts respectively perform mutually reinforcing functions of providing “explicit historical
contexts” which anyone wanting to test the historical force of the ZCC oral tradition can control
and verify “by the methods and discoveries of archaeology.” It is within such and adequately
textured historical context that research participants including Frans Sekgobela, Simon
Sekgobela and Frans Maselesele reveal the “traditions of genesis” and “dynastic histories” of
the ZCC, to borrow Prins’s words, while more timeless narratives like those by the current ZCC
head yield for the perceptive oral historian “accounts of social organization.” (Prins, 1991).

This article has demonstrated that the ZCC oral tradition does yield one indispensable
component of its two histories. Moreover, this paper’s findings on ZCC oral history confirm
views in oral history theory that testimony and authoritative written history should not be
declared to be mutually exclusive. Canonised history like one represented in this paper by
the works of writers such as Lukhaimane, Anderson, Mafuta and Morton has served a clear
scaffolding role for this study eventually to arrive at the rigorously tested findings regarding
the history and character of the ZCC derived from oral traditional sources.

What a writer such as Prins (1991) has described as hegemonic approaches to historical
research, through their propensity to look mainly for change in a given history, would have

91
African Epistemology in the 21st Century

missed out on the benefits of the methodologically defensible oral history approach of the
ZCC mapped in this article. It is clear from the ZCC project to record oral historical testimonies
that, far from an interest in change within the organisation, ZCC authorities sought to assert
sameness through a constructivist re-assembling of a historical identity that continues to be
the character of the AIC at present.

The findings of this article imply that not only hegemonic accounts of histories of African
churches in southern Africa generally, and of the ZCC in particular, should be seen as valid.
Histories of the same entities resonating with the oral tradition should be accepted side by
side with dominant ones from the Centre. Such ‘histories from below’ containing much needed
perspectives of ordinary men and women that may not be ignored, once embraced, should
serve to enrich the dominant academic accounts. What my findings point to is that this one
organisation called the ZCC does have two histories in the public space. One of these two
histories has been unfairly repressed and ignored in academic research.

References
Anderson, A. H., 1999. The Lekganyanes and Prophecy in the ZCC. Journal of Religion in Africa.
29 (3). pp. 285–312.

Anderson, N., and London, S., 2009. The Moemedi Pentecostal Church and the Construction of
Jewish Identity. Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions, 13 (10).
pp. 92–105.

Boeyens, J., and Simon, H., 2009. Tlokwa Oral Traditions and the Interface between History and
Archaelogy at Marothodi. South African Historical Journal, 61 (3). pp. 457–481.

Du Bruyn, D. 2013. Oral history and community development: Exploring a community history
approach: Representing the hidden, the untold and the veiled. Proceedings of the Fifth and
Sixth Annual National Oral History Conference, organized by the Oral History Association
of South Africa. Landman, C. (ed.), Pretoria: Research Institute for Theology and Religion,
University of South Africa. pp. 129–137.

Frisch, M., 1990. A Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public History
Albany: State University of New York Press.

Hallencreutz, C. F., 1998. ’Bantu Prophets’– After Fifty Years. Swedish Missiological Themes, 86
(4.) pp. 581–600.

Kalinga, O. J. M., 1982. Jordan Msumba, Ben Ngemelu and the Last Church of God and His Christ
1924–1935. Journal of Religion in Africa XIII, 3. pp. 207–218.

Kiernan, J. P., 1980. Zionist Communion. Journal of Religion in Africa, 61 (1). pp. 124 – 136.

Landau, P. S., 1999. The Spirit of God, Pigs and Demons: The ‘Samuelites’ of Southern Africa.
Journal of Religion in Africa, 29 (3). pp. 313-340.

92
 History, Politics and Development Studies

Landau, P. S., 1996. Explaining Surgical Evangelism in Colonial Southern Africa. History, 37.2
(1996), pp. 261–281.

Leavy, P., 2011. Oral History. Understanding Qualitative Research. Auckland: Oxford University
Press.

Ledwaba, L., 2002a. Moria: a journey of hope, salvation. City Press (Johannesburg) 31 March: 31.

Ledwaba, L., 2002b. The ZCC – where Africa meets God. City Press (Johannesburg) 31 March: 31.

Lukhaimane, K. E., 1980. The Zion Christian Church of Ignatius (Engenas) Lekganyane, 1924
to 1948. An African experiment with Christianity, Unpublished Masters dissertation,
Sovenga: University of the North.

Maahlamela, T. D., 2017. Sepedi oral poetry with reference to Kiba traditional dance of South
Africa, Unpublished doctoral thesis, Makhanda: Rhodes University.

Mafuta, L., 2010. Religion and development in South Africa. An investigation between
soteriology and capital development in an African Initiated Church, Unpublished doctoral
thesis, Pretoria, University of South Africa.

Mahopo, Z. 2015. New Moria Road officially opens. Sowetan, 30 October (Johannesburg): 18.

Maxwell, D. 1999. Editorial. Journal of Religion in Africa. XXIX (3). pp. 239–246.

Maxwell, D., 1999b. Historicizing Christian Independency: The Southern African Pentecostal
Movement. The Journal of African History 40 (2). pp. 243–264.

Maxwell, D., 2006. “Writing the History of African Christianity: Reflection of an Editor”. Journal
of Religion in Africa. 36 (3-4). pp. 379–395.

Mchunu, M. 2013. Insider, outsider: negotiating the researcher’s position. Oral History:
Representing the hidden, the untold and the veiled. Proceedings of the Fifth and Sixth
Annual National Oral History Conference organized by the Oral History Association of
South Africa. Landman, C. (ed.), (Pretoria: Research Institute for Theology and Religion,
University of South Africa. pp. 137–151.

Morton, B. 2014. ’The Rebellion From Below’ and the Origins of Early Zionist Christianity.
African Historical Review, 46 (2). pp. 22-47.

Motolla, E. M., 2010. (ed.), ZCC Messenger, Easter.

Motolla, E. M., 2010. (ed.) ZCC Messenger, December.

Motolla, E. M., 2008. (ed.), ZCC Messenger, December.

Motolla, E. M., 1987. (ed.), ZCC Messenger, Easter.

Motolla, E. M., 1995. (ed.), ZCC Family Bible. Waterkloof: Olyfberg Publishers.

93
African Epistemology in the 21st Century

Motolla, E.M., 1985. (ed.), ZCC Messenger, September.

Mphahlele, E., 2002. Cape Town: Kwela Books.

Müller, R., and Kruger, 2013. Rain and Water Symbolism in Southern African Religious Systems:
Continuity and Change. Exchange, 42. pp. 143–156.

Pongweni, A., 2000. Voicing the Text: South African Oral Poetry and Performance. Critical Arts,
14 (20). pp. 175–222.

Prins, G., 1991. Oral History. In P. Burke (ed.), New Prespectives on Historical Writing.
Cambridge: Polity Press, pp. 114–139.

Rafapa, L., 2010. Es’kiaMphahlele’s Afrikan Humanism. Johannesburg: Stainbank and

Associates.

Rafapa, L., 2013. Popular music in the Zion Christian Church. Muziki. Journal of Music Research
in Africa, 10 (1). pp. 19-24.

Sundkler, B. G. M., 1948. Bantu Prophets in South Africa. London: Lutterworth Press.

Thomson, A. 2007. Four Paradigm Transformations in Oral History. The Oral History Review, 34
(1). pp. 49–70.

Wieder, A. 2004. Testimony as Oral History: Lessons from South Africa. Educational Researcher
33 (6). pp. 23–28.

ZCC. 1992. ZCC Church Choir Volumes, 1&2. Zion Christian Church.

94

View publication stats