South Africa is a mainly Christian country: in the 2022 census 85.3% of its roughly 62 million people, about 52.8 million, identified as Christian, followed by 7.8% who follow African traditional religion, 3.1% with no religion, 1.6% Muslims, 1.1% Hindus and 1.1% belonging to other faiths, including a Jewish community estimated at between 52,000 and 75,000. There is no state religion. The 1996 constitution opens with a multilingual invocation of God but guarantees freedom of religion in Section 15 and protects religious communities in Section 31. No single church dominates: mainstream Protestant churches, Pentecostal churches, African-initiated churches such as the Zion Christian Church and the Catholic Church all have large followings.
Those national figures hide sharp regional contrasts. The Northern Cape is almost entirely Christian, KwaZulu-Natal has the country's largest traditionalist and Hindu shares, and the Western Cape has by far the highest Muslim share. The census table below shows the nine provinces side by side, and the sections that follow travel across the map to explain why.
| Province | Christian | African traditional | No religion | Muslim | Hindu |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Northern Cape | 97.8% | 0.7% | 0.3% | 0.8% | 0.0% |
| North West | 95.5% | 2.3% | 1.2% | 0.3% | 0.0% |
| Free State | 92.7% | 4.9% | 1.4% | 0.5% | 0.0% |
| Mpumalanga | 89.1% | 7.8% | 1.8% | 0.5% | 0.1% |
| Limpopo | 86.8% | 6.3% | 5.1% | 0.5% | 0.0% |
| Eastern Cape | 86.1% | 11.0% | 1.5% | 0.6% | 0.1% |
| Gauteng | 86.1% | 6.0% | 4.5% | 1.6% | 0.7% |
| Western Cape | 85.6% | 5.3% | 2.6% | 5.2% | 0.2% |
| KwaZulu-Natal | 74.9% | 13.6% | 3.6% | 1.9% | 4.2% |
| South Africa | 85.3% | 7.8% | 3.1% | 1.6% | 1.1% |
Western Cape: Dutch Reformed Roots and the Muslims of the Bo-Kaap
Organised Christianity in South Africa began at the Cape. When Jan van Riebeeck founded the Dutch East India Company's station in 1652, its employees were members of the Dutch Reformed Church, served at first by a lay "comforter of the sick" who preached in the fort. The first church on the site of today's Groote Kerk on Adderley Street was built in 1678, and the present building of 1841 kept its original tower, making the congregation the oldest place of Christian worship in the country. From this Cape base the Nederduitse Gereformeerde Kerk spread inland with the trekboers and became the largest of the country's Dutch Reformed churches; it reported 1.1 million members in 2013.
The Western Cape also has the highest Muslim share of any province, 5.2% in 2022, and the reason is the slave trade. From 1652 until the mid-1800s the Dutch brought enslaved people, political prisoners and exiles to the Cape, many from the Indonesian archipelago. Sheikh Yusuf of Makassar, exiled by the Dutch, arrived in 1694 with 49 followers and was settled on the farm Zandvliet, far outside Cape Town; the first cohesive Muslim community formed around him, and after his death in 1699 the area was renamed Macassar after his birthplace. Exiled scholars followed. Tuan Guru, a religious leader and political prisoner who wrote out the entire Quran from memory while in prison, became the first imam of the Auwal Mosque in the Bo-Kaap when it opened in 1794 on land owned by a freed slave, Coridon van Ceylon. It is recognised as the first mosque in South Africa.
The Bo-Kaap, on the slopes of Signal Hill, remains the centre of Cape Malay life: 56.9% of its residents are Muslim, and the Nurul Islam Mosque there dates from 1844. Shrines of revered teachers, known as kramats, ring the peninsula, including one on Robben Island for Sheikh Madura, exiled in the 1740s. Cape Town also holds the country's first Jewish congregation, the Gardens Shul, founded in September 1841.
KwaZulu-Natal: Shembe's Nazarites, Durban's Temples and Grey Street Mosque
KwaZulu-Natal is the most religiously varied province. It is the least Christian, at 74.9%, and has the highest share of people following African traditional religion, 13.6%, reflecting the strength of Zulu ancestral practice. Many Christians here belong to the Nazareth Baptist Church, founded in 1910 by Isaiah Shembe (c. 1865–1935), an itinerant evangelist and healer whom members revere as a prophet sent to restore the teachings of Moses and Jesus. Within ten years he had dozens of congregations across Natal. Its followers keep the Saturday Sabbath, avoid pork and gather for pilgrimages to the holy mountain of iNhlangakazi; after leadership disputes from 1976 onward, the main branch is based at the village of Ebuhleni.
The province's Hindus and most of its Muslims arrived with the sugar industry. In 1860 the ship Truro brought the first 342 indentured labourers from Madras to Natal, and about 200,000 Indians came to Natal over the next five decades, speaking Tamil, Telugu, Bhojpuri and Hindi. Most were Hindu, with Muslim and Christian minorities, and The first Hindu temples were operating by the 1870s. Today KwaZulu-Natal is 4.2% Hindu and the national Hindu population reached 682,302 in 2022, the largest in Africa after Mauritius. Durban is now one of the largest Indian-populated cities outside India, and Deepavali is among the community's major festivals.
In August 1881 two merchants, Aboobaker Amod Jhaveri and Hajee Mohamed, bought a site on Grey Street, now Dr Yusuf Dadoo Street, for £115 and converted a small building into a mosque. Its minarets, added in 1904 and 1905, were for a time among the tallest structures in Durban, and the Juma Mosque, rebuilt in 1927, remains a Sunni congregational mosque at the heart of the old Indian business district.
Eastern Cape: Mission Stations and 11% Traditional Religion in the Xhosa Heartland
The Eastern Cape has the second-highest traditionalist share, 11.0%, and the deepest history of Xhosa encounters with Christianity. Ntsikana, born around 1780 and raised in the Thyume valley north of Alice, became one of the first people to express Christian ideas in Xhosa terms; he died in 1821. Three years later, in 1824, the Glasgow Missionary Society founded Lovedale, rebuilt after 1834 on the Tyhume River about 3 km north of Alice, a mission station and educational institute that trained generations of African students. Further east, Mthatha, the former capital of the Transkei, has both Anglican and Catholic cathedrals.
Ancestral religion did not disappear. Across South Africa there is substantial and sustained blending of African traditional religion with Christianity among people who call themselves Christian, so the census count of traditionalists understates how many people honour the ancestors. Since 1994 traditional practitioners have also become more publicly visible and organised.
Gauteng and Limpopo: Soweto's Regina Mundi and Zion City Moria
Gauteng, the most urban province, mirrors the national average at 86.1% Christian but has an above-average share of people with no religion (4.5%) the third-highest Muslim share (1.6%) and the second-highest Hindu share (0.7%). The Zion Christian Church's founder, Engenas Lekganyane, passed through here early on, joining the Apostolic Faith Mission in Boksburg on the East Rand. In Soweto, Regina Mundi in Rockville, built in 1964 and able to hold 5,000 to 7,000 people, is the largest Catholic church in the country. It earned the name "the people's church" because residents met there during the struggle against apartheid, and its "Black Madonna" painting shows Mary and the infant Jesus as black. The Catholic Church nationally has about 3.8 million members, some 2.7 million of them Zulu, Xhosa, Sotho and other black South Africans, organised in 26 dioceses and archdioceses.
South Africa's Jewish community, the largest in Africa, grew from 4,000 in 1880 to more than 40,000 by 1914 and peaked at about 120,000 in the 1970s; emigration after the Soweto uprising of 1976 and since 1994 has reduced it to an estimated 52,300 to 75,000 people.
North of Gauteng lies the heartland of the largest African-initiated church. Lekganyane founded the Zion Christian Church after a revelation in 1910 on Mount Thabakgone near Polokwane. Its headquarters, Zion City Moria, near Polokwane in Limpopo, receives up to a million pilgrims every Easter, travelling by bus from across southern Africa. The 1996 census counted 3.87 million members and the 2001 census 4.97 million. Limpopo also recorded the highest share of people with no religion, 5.1%.
Northern Cape, Free State and North West: The 90% Christian Interior
The dry interior is where Christianity is most complete. The Northern Cape was 97.8% Christian in 2022, North West 95.5% and the Free State 92.7%, with traditional religion in each below 5%. Afrikaner Calvinism came here with the Great Trek of the 1830s and 1840s, when farmers left the Cape Colony and founded republics beyond the Orange and Vaal rivers; Dutch Reformed churches still stand at the centre of many Free State and Northern Cape towns. The Dutch Reformed Church initially supported apartheid and was expelled from the World Alliance of Reformed Churches in 1982, which declared apartheid a sin; at its 1986 General Synod the church changed its stance and opened its doors to people of all races. The General Household Survey of 2015 still found 86% of South Africans identifying as Christian.
Seen together, the map explains the national numbers: Christianity everywhere, ancestral religion strongest in the Zulu and Xhosa east, Islam rooted in the slave history of the Cape and the indentured history of Natal, and Hinduism mostly in KwaZulu-Natal. The languages that divide the same provinces are mapped in our guide to the languages spoken in South Africa, the nine provinces themselves in how many provinces South Africa has, and the racial laws that shaped where each community could live in our account of the geography of apartheid.