This Easter weekend, Limpopo’s roads buckle under the weight of devotion.
Convoys of buses crawl along the N1 and R71 as Zion Christian Church (ZCC) pilgrims make their way to Moria. This annual movement, the one time the church’s secrecy briefly cracks open, brings one of the largest religious gatherings on the continent to Limpopo.
Moria is the ZCC’s “cultic” centre, says preacher, traditional healer and scholar Kelebogile Resane, “a holy site where devotees converge and bring their votive offerings and perform cultic ceremonies under the guidance and directions of spiritual leaders”.
According to historian Barry Morton, one in 10 South Africans belongs to the ZCC, making it “the largest indigenous religious movement in Southern Africa”.
Harvard anthropologist Jean Comaroff has traced the roots of the ZCC to John Alexander Dowie, a Chicago‑based faith healer whose methods included “relentless tithing”. An elder in Dowie’s church, John Lake, brought the movement to South Africa in 1908. In 1925, Engenas Barnabas Lekganyane founded the ZCC after “he had a vision that a multitude would follow him”. He used “healing, dietary taboos and uniforms to help migrant workers resist alienation under industrial capitalism”, Comaroff wrote.
In 1948 Lekganyane died on his farm east of Polokwane, by which time the ZCC had reached 50,000 members. His son Edward was installed at Easter 1949 in what the Setswana newspaper Naledi ya Batswana described as a peaceful celebration, with congregants chanting “Edward ke Morena Thabasione” (“Edward is the Lord of Zion”). Naledi ya Batswana provided rare contemporary insights into the ZCC’s growth in the apartheid era.
The ZCC’s secrecy is a deliberate fortress that has preserved discipline and member loyalty for a century
— Spencer Mafede
Within two decades, Edward had expanded the church to 500,000 congregants, who were sworn to abstain from alcohol and not use conventional medicine. Elders carried out river baptisms and healing rituals in which “relatives carried their sick members on mattresses” to be prayed over.
“Members were forbidden from discussing the church with outsiders,” Morton says, noting that its scriptures remain restricted. Yet, its influence is publicly visible in the badges worn by members — a star for the main branch established by Lekganyane, a dove for the breakaway St Engenas ZCC.
Spencer Mafede, a faith leader from a nondenominational Pentecostal church, tells the FM: “The ZCC’s secrecy is a deliberate fortress that has preserved discipline and member loyalty for a century. Outsiders see a closed door, insiders experience trust that powers their operations, including benefits from the TymeBank partnership serving members.
“That same veil has built generational wealth through property acquisitions and vast business empires that few external players can penetrate. The social capital functions as an economic multiplier, channelling collective purchasing power and support in financial inclusion.”
Mafede notes that when apartheid began crumbling in the early 1990s, political leaders flocked to woo ZCC members as potential electoral supporters.
“The same fortress draws every major leader to Moria, from FW de Klerk and Nelson Mandela in 1994 to Jacob Zuma and Cyril Ramaphosa, seeking the church’s blessing and goodwill, while the ZCC itself stays strategically neutral.”
Every Easter, the pilgrimage to Moria tests Limpopo’s logistics systems and, as the Limpopo Chamber of Commerce & Industry notes, provides a brief multibillion-rand economic boost.
Albert Jeleni, the chamber’s president, says up to 10-million pilgrims might take part this year, “in line with pre‑pandemic levels”. With numbers of that scale, the Polokwane economy, which normally ticks over at R250m-R350m a day, could surge to between R5bn and R10bn-plus. With a smaller crowd of up to 4-million people, economic turnover could still rise to R2bn for the Easter weekend.
“Much of this value is not structured, captured or retained within the local economy,” Jeleni says, noting that supply chains and water and power supplies will face severe strain. Water demand is estimated at between 300-million and 1.5-billion litres.
Putco will move more than 30,000 pilgrims to Moria next week, deploying 550 buses from Gauteng, Mpumalanga and parts of Limpopo, including Sekhukhune. Spokesperson Lindokuhle Xulu tells the FM the company enters the operation with one of the youngest fleets in the country after “a rigorous bus replacement programme that has seen the procurement of more than 500 new buses in the past four to five years”.
Drivers got refresher training in defensive driving through the Road Accident Fund, the Road Traffic Management Corp, provincial and national traffic departments, fire departments and other road‑safety partners.
Sipho Maloma, spokesperson for the South African National Taxi Council in Limpopo, says the organisation’s Operation Hlokomela road‑safety campaign is “on high alert” and it has urged all road users to be vigilant over the Easter period.
