Distinctive Identity in the Worship Music of the Zion Christian Church within the Category of African Initiated Churches

Abstract While the mapping of continuities and differences between mainline and African Initiated Churches (AICs) has been carried out at national level, more work still has to be done on the Zion Christian Church (ZCC). In this article, I argue that an initially homogenising, determinist approach seeing a uniform rupture in all AICs from the Apostolic Faith Mission imported from Illinois in 1908 delayed adequate individual analyses of the AICs. I extend research on the ZCC specifically, by comparing and contrasting its recorded worship songs with those of other dominant AICs operating in its geographical vicinity. I intend to demonstrate that by juxtaposing this aspect of the ZCC with a similar phenomenon in the other ambient AICs in a geographical area, better determinate contours of existing knowledge about the ZCC will be achieved. While the Nazareth Baptist Church founded by Isaiah Shembe remains the first and among the biggest AICs, I exclude it from my comparison. First, I do so because adherents of this Church are most massively concentrated in KwaZulu-Natal Province (not the focus of this study), and not in the part of Limpopo Province that I focused on. Second, my view is that the AIC has received relatively adequate attention due to its earlier birth. Furthermore, my intention is not to conduct the study on a national scale, hence my inclusion of selected AICs due to their sharing of space with the ZCC in a specific place.