Botswana will hold a national memorial service on Thursday for 45 individuals who died traveling to an Easter event in South Africa. An eight-year-old girl, Lauryn Siako, was the one survivor after a bus sure for Zion Christian Church crashed through barriers and fell 164 feet down a ledge last week.
In the times following the deadly accident, pastors in Botswana have appeared on national television to wish and to comfort the grieving.
“This tragedy calls us to come back out of our sleeping moment and be ever praying and declaring the protection of God in any given situation,” said David Seithamo, the top of the Evangelical Fellowship of Botswana. “The nation should gather around to essentially support those which are grieving at this moment. When they mourn, we should always mourn, but they need to know that Christ stays our comfort.”
The pilgrims from Botswana were amongst thousands and thousands who travel each Easter to Moria, a town in northeast South Africa and the headquarters for Zion Christian Church (ZCC, pronounced zed-c-c), considered one of the most important African-initiated churches within the region. ZCC has churches across Southern Africa, including Botswana, Lesotho, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Mozambique, and Malawi.
The church has two branches, ZCC and St. Engenas ZCC. This 12 months marks the one hundredth anniversary for the latter, and South African president Cyril Ramaphosa attended the celebration event. Though pilgrims also showed up at St. Engenas in 2023, that is the church’s first official pilgrimage event for the reason that pandemic.
Given the variety of tourists often packing the roads over Holy Week, the South African government had previously checked the capability of drivers and the security of cars.
Siako told officials the bus was following two cars carrying church elders when it careened into the ravine. It was the primary time that pilgrims from Botswana’s capital, Gaborone, took this path to Moria. One South African journalist suggested that that they had opted for the winding mountain road to avoid the onslaught of traffic.
Jobe Koosimile, the previous president of The Apostolic Faith Mission in Botswana, called it “only a miracle” that the young girl was in a position to survive.
In an official statement, Seithamo encouraged his fellow Chistians to maintain praying for “the
bereaved families and speedy recovery of the eight 12 months old sole survivor of the accident.”
We also commend the efforts of the Government of Botswana through the Embassy of
Botswana in South Africa along with Government of South Africa for a surmountable
help to the bereaved,” he wrote. “We implore Christian leadership to proceed offering prayer and godly counsel to the bereaved families.”
African roads are notoriously hazardous. Traffic accidents are the leading explanation for death for those on the continent for adults under 50; about 1 in every 5 deaths in Africa occurs on the road.
In Botswana, vehicle insurance firms have partnered with not less than one national Christian ministry to advertise road safety.
“Road safety is something that because the church, we’re conscious of, whether it’s the Pentecostal church, the Organization of African Instituted Churches, or a mainline church, we actually are conscious of and consider road safety something of critical importance,” said Koosimile.
“When it involves national holidays, road safety is something that’s emphasized on each the national radio and the national TV, and also you’ll find that there are even roadblocks almost throughout the country, where our police and traffic officers do [road safety] campaigns. It’s something that is actually strongly emphasized.”
Despite the country’s large geographic size—Botswana is barely larger than France—only 2.4 million people live there. About 80 percent are Christian.
“We have never experienced something like this in our nation. We have never had so many deaths like this in our nation. It has shocked almost everyone,” said Koosimile.
“Losing 45 people will not be a joke for our very small population. It’s quite a tragedy. Mostly we’re related, and [you’ll easily] find that one is expounded to at least one who’s either affected or who [died] within the accident.”
Botswana is home to many Zionist churches and a large population of ZCC members.
The growth and prevalence of ZCC has “essentially sidelined the standard Protestant churches that introduced Christianity to southern Africa,” wrote African studies researcher Barry Morton. “In addition to their vast membership base across the region, in addition they control extensive business empires in areas comparable to transport, agribusiness and insurance.”
Some estimate as many as 1 in 10 South Africans are members.
ZCC was founded a century ago by Engenas Lekganyane, a South African who grew up amongst Lutheran and Presbyterian missionaries and later joined Pentecostal, Zionist, and faith-healing movements.
According to Morton, “he took most of his theology from the then white-led Apostolic Faith Mission, a Pentecostal group he belonged to from 1910 to 1916. He incorporated many syncretic practices taken from African tradition.”
The two branches, each in Moria, are led by Lekganyane’s grandson (ZCC, represented by a star) and by his great-grandson (St. Engenas ZCC, represented by a dove). Their theology continues to reflect a lot of Lekganyane’s teachings, with uniforms and badges for members, an emphasis on healing and warding off evil, and the practice of ancestral intercession.
Despite the large pilgrimages, the group maintains a level of secrecy over its practices and beliefs.
