Paper short abstract:

This paper will position the air and atmosphere as crucial factors shaping the colonial contact zone in South Africa. Through contemporary empirical material I suggest that the African Independent Churches can be reinterpreted as a response to colonial efforts to control the African atmosphere.

Paper long abstract:

Recent studies have emphasized that the colonial conquest of southern Africa spurred a plethora of new subjectivities. I will add to this body of literature by placing the rather elusive materiality of atmospheres, wind and weather at the center of the colonial contact zone.

I will use historical sources to suggest that a hitherto overlooked aspect of colonialism was a struggle to control and influence the air. Settler communities experienced the atmosphere as an aspect of African nature and people with dire consequences for health, and consequently strove to reshape both the natural- and social surroundings to 'deodorize the air'. Combining these historical sources with contemporary ethnographic evidence from the Zulu Zionist movement in Durban, South Africa, I will argue that contemporary Zulu Zionists ritual practices can be viewed as a creative engagement with European practices of 'air conditioning', which aimed to enclose and purify the colonial atmosphere. This will allow me to trace contemporary ritual practices as ways to materially create new subjectivities in relation to an aerial contact zone that connected atmosphere with olfactive traces of race, prosperity, poverty, health and disease.