Breathing Pneumatology: Spirit, Wind, and Atmosphere in a Zulu Zionist Congregation

This chapter is based on three years of ethnographic fieldwork among a group of Zulu Zionists in an urban township in the vicinity of Durban, South Africa. The Zionists are part of the African Independent Churches (aics) and were for the largest part of the twentieth century the most rapidly growing religious movement in Africa south of the Sahara.1 There has long been a fruitful academic exchange between theologians and anthropologists in research into Zulu Zionism and the aics. Academic studies of the movement first gained momentum through the work of the Swedish missionary Bengt Sundkler.2 His publications were ethnographically rich, detailed, culturally embedded, and imbued with a sound historical awareness, thereby opening up a sociological understanding of the Zionist movement. Sundkler’s work was followed by a series of publications in missiology and anthropology which largely pursued his lead, interpreting the rise of the aics as a reaction towards the paternalism, racism, and general exclusion experienced in the larger colonial society as well as the mission churches.3 Several of these