Nomkhubulwane

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Near a river, in the first soft weeks of spring, unmarried girls hoe a small plot and sow it, and then they walk away from it. The plot is never weeded. It is never reaped. Through the whole growing season the crop stands in the wet grass under whatever rain falls, and the rain that falls is hers: the field belongs to iNkosazana, the princess of heaven, and no human hand takes back what was planted for her. A homestead may go hungry beside it in a lean year and still leave it standing. The point of the field is not the harvest. The point is the giving — a plot of grain set aside for the maiden who owns the rain, sown by the young women who are her people, and left for her to keep. From that one left-standing field the rest of her opens outward: the maiden of mist and rainbow who walks the wet grass, the giver of the soft sufficient rain, the teacher of the grain and the beer, the one whom it is dangerous to look at directly.

The princess of heaven

She reaches the record under a cluster of names. Most often she is iNkosazana yeZulu, the princess of heaven, and often simply iNkosazana, the princess; the personal name uNomkhubulwane travels with these titles and sometimes stands alone. She is the female power of the sky in the Zulu sacred world — the deity of rain and of agriculture, of fertility in crops and cattle and people, and of the rainbow that arches over the drenched hills when a storm has passed. The scholarly synthesis of the field material is unusually emphatic about her. The Zulu, it observes, are singular among the Bantu-speaking peoples of southern Africa in holding to a female deity of fertility who is worshiped even today — not a fading memory of the elders but a presence still addressed. Writers reaching for a European handle have called her the Zulu Demeter, and the comparison catches something true about her province: grain, growth, the turning year. It also flattens her, and the tradition owes it nothing.

Her name carries more than one gloss, and the glosses are traditional rather than philologically settled. One reads it against the verb khubula, to sow a field again after rain or a scorching sun has spoiled the first crop — a name for the second chance the rain gives, the replanting she makes possible. Another ties the name to shape-shifting, to a being who chooses the form she wears and can go about in the body of an animal. Neither reading has been fixed by the philologists, and both belong to the way she is spoken of rather than to a dictionary.

Her genealogy within the tradition is told more than one way, and the disagreement is itself part of what she is. Several present-day and popular tellings make her the daughter of the sky-father uMvelinqangi, the one who appeared first, with a queen of heaven, iNkosikazi yezulu, for her mother; in some accounts she stands the other way about, named the mother of a sky-son alongside the older male power. The older field record is more reticent. It places her in heaven beside the Lord-of-the-sky, iNkosi yezulu, without pinning down a single lineage — a princess of the above whose parentage the tradition never needed to agree on. The line of descent is a living, plural thing here, not a settled dogma, and to hammer it into one pedigree would be to mistake the tradition for a genealogical chart.

The earliest sustained written notice of the princess of the sky belongs to Henry Callaway’s The Religious System of the Amazulu, issued in parts between 1868 and 1870, the last of them left incomplete — a missionary-era record built from Zulu testimony and shaped, at every turn, by the encounter that produced it. Callaway’s informants do not always agree with one another, and the text preserves the disagreement rather than resolving it, which is part of why it is read critically and not simply quarried for facts. The anthropological placement came later, from Eileen Krige’s The Social System of the Zulus (1936) and, above all, from Axel-Ivar Berglund’s Zulu Thought-Patterns and Symbolism (1976), the study on which the modern picture of iNkosazana chiefly rests. Max Gluckman took her spring rites as the central case of what he named rituals of rebellion. Between them these writers set a household observance in a social frame — and the observance had been going on in the homesteads long before any of them arrived to describe it.

The maiden who brings the soft rain

What she gives is the soft rain: the sufficient rain, the rain that is neither too little nor too much. Drought is a withholding, the searing heat of a hard summer a sign of her displeasure, and both are met with placation. When the rain she sends is right, the crops swell, the cattle come into milk, the wombs of women open; her gift is fruitfulness across the whole of a homestead’s life, and she is thanked for it in the same breath as she is asked for it. She is the giver of grain, and in the telling she is the teacher of the grain — the one who showed the people how to work the ground and, more particularly, how to brew umqombothi, the sorghum beer that is itself the standard offering poured out to the powers. The beer is her invention and her portion at once: what she taught the people to make is what they give back to her. There is a closed circle in that, and it holds across the whole of her province. The rain she sends grows the sorghum; the sorghum becomes the beer; the beer is poured back to her at the foot of the field she was given — so that the gift returns to its giver at every turn of the season, and the growing year runs as one long exchange between the homestead and the maiden of the sky. When the rain fails and the summer burns hard, that circle has been broken somewhere, and the placation offered in drought is an attempt to mend it: to give again, and rightly, so that she will send down the soft rain once more.

She is elusive by nature, and self-revealing on her own terms. She shows herself in the fructifying mists that hang in the valleys at the start of the growing season, in the rainbow, and sometimes as a beautiful young woman walking through the rain-wet grass. She shows herself, too, in the shape of an animal, or as a serpent of the water — a form that places her in the same imaginative country as the great storm-serpent of the deep pools, the inkanyamba, though she is not that being and is not confused with it. To look on her directly is held to be perilous; a person who meets her gaze face to face is said to sicken and not recover. So she deals with people at one remove — through signs and weather, through the diviners, and above all through women and girls. The diviners who carry her word are the izangoma, the diviner-healers called and authorized by the ancestral shades; the colonial writing that named them “witch-doctors” mistook them entirely, and the word has no place in describing them. They are the ones she speaks through. But her chosen people are the women and the girls, whose patron she is, and her honor is women’s and girls’ work from beginning to end.

The field is the plainest form of that work. Before the season’s hoeing begins, women plant a small field for iNkosazana near a river and pour out a libation of beer on the ground, with a prayer for a fruitful harvest — the ordinary opening gesture of the planting year, recorded from the homesteads by Berglund. In the older practice the field sown for the princess was then left exactly as the girls’ plot is left: standing, unweeded, unreaped, given over to her as her share of the ground. It is a field farmed backward. Everything a homestead knows about tending a crop is withheld from it on purpose, and the withholding is the offering.

Her rites belong to the same ceremonial world as the girls’ coming-of-age. The fertility songs raised over a girl at her puberty observance are the fertility songs raised at the rites for the princess; the two occasions borrow one another’s music because they are about one thing, the opening of fecundity and the drawing-down of good rains. And in the spring rites recorded from the older communities the ordinary order of the homestead is turned inside out. Girls and young women take up men’s work and men’s dress. They carry shields and sticks, drive the cattle out and herd them and handle them — cattle that in ordinary life are kept from women — and they go bare and sing songs of open license, saying in ritual what may not be said outside it. The inversion is exact and it is controlled; it lasts a day and returns the world to its seams. Gluckman read it as a ritual of rebellion, a licensed reversal that renews the social order precisely by acting out its opposite, and Krige, who understood the observances as belonging with the girls’ fertility rites, read the same reversal toward the same end. Within the tradition the meaning is not sociological at all: the reversal clears the way, unsettles and cleanses the season, and opens the ground for the princess’s blessing on the coming year.

The eclipse and the calling home

In the documented past her cult was the female counterpart to the remote sky-powers of the Zulu world — set against the far height of uNkulunkulu, the first being from the reed-bed, and of uMvelinqangi, kept close to the ground in the spring planting-rites of the homesteads and in the ceremonies of the girls. She was never a temple deity or a figure of the great national gatherings. She was a maiden of the growing season and the riverside plot, honored where grain was sown and daughters came of age, and her testimony was gathered by Callaway and set in its social frame by Krige, Gluckman, and Berglund. Her power ran alongside the other channel of Zulu devotion, the daily commerce of a homestead with its own ancestral shades, the amadlozi brought home to the byre and the hearth; she was the sky’s gift where they were the lineage’s presence.

The nineteenth-century missionary encounter that recast the great sky-being as the Christian creator — a reframing that is itself contested, and whose full weight belongs to the account of uNkulunkulu — went hand in hand, on the popular telling, with the eclipse of the female cult. As Christianity spread, that account holds, the worship of the goddess waned while attention to the male aspect of the sky endured, so that the princess slipped toward memory while the remote Father was carried into the churches under a borrowed name. How complete the eclipse ever was is not certain, and the claim is better held as a contested reading than asserted as fact; the observances never entirely stopped, and elders kept the memory of the seasonal rites where the public cult thinned.

She is, in any case, a present-tense figure, and her observances were consciously called home again from the 1990s. Patience Gugu Ngobese, known as Nomagugu, then a graduate student of Drama at the University of Natal, revived the Nomkhubulwane festival in 1996, following a dream that had come to her in 1994; she went on to leave teaching and to become an isangoma herself, taken up into the very office through which the princess has always spoken. The first revived festivals were filmed by her supervisor, Kendall, in a documentary called Calling the Zulu Goddess Home (1996), and the Alan Paton Centre at the University of KwaZulu-Natal holds the oral-history tapes and transcriptions from the 1996 and 1997 gatherings near Bulwer, in the well-watered Midlands where the green hills answer her rain. Ngobese founded a culture-and-youth-development non-profit, later the Nomkhubulwane Institute, a KwaZulu-Natal body for cultural revival, and is nationally recognized for her work in indigenous knowledge. Other communities keep the festival on their own account. At Newcastle the uMkhosi kaNomkhubulwane is held in the last week of July, a ceremony led by women and maidens and centered on prayers for a fruitful planting season, and its people trace its founding to a dream received by Thoko Hadebe, MaNtombela. The gatherings of maidens have continued into the present, documented as recently as 2024. There is a fitness in the shape of the revival that is easy to miss. It came to women, in dreams, and it is carried by women — the diviner who took up the office, the elders who remember the songs, the girls who plant the plot and raise the fertility music. The princess whose honor was always women’s and girls’ work was called home along the same channel through which she had always dealt with her people, so that the modern festival is not a museum reconstruction imposed from above but the old current running again in its own bed.

The revival did not come unentangled. From the outset the Bulwer festival was bound up with the wider revival of Zulu virginity-testing, ukuhlolwa kwezintombi, and in the public debate of the early 2000s that practice was drawn into the country’s arguments over HIV and AIDS, defended by traditionalists as a protection for girls and opposed by women’s-rights advocates as a violation — a controversy sharp enough that the Paton archive hosted a formal debate between the two sides. That is a contested contemporary matter of the public record, and it is named here at that register and no further; it is not the meaning of the goddess, and the field and the beer and the songs of the princess are older and larger than the campaigns that later attached to them.

What endures is the maiden of the wet grass and her plot by the river. The girls still hoe the small field in the first weeks of spring and sow it and leave it, and the crop still stands there through the season, weeded by no one and reaped by no one, watered by the soft rain that is hers to give. The princess of heaven still walks in the spring mist and shows herself in the rainbow, still deals with her people through the diviners and through the women who are her own, and is still, in the homesteads of KwaZulu-Natal and at the festivals that carry her name, a figure of living devotion. The field left standing is not a ruin. It is a gift kept open, year after year, for the one who owns the rain.

The KwaZulu-Natal Midlands in the summer rains — the well-watered country of the Bulwer festival, where the green hills answer the soft rain of iNkosazana. Aleph500Adam, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

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