The Zulu

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In a clearing above the White Mfolozi, near the edge of the Nkandla forest, a grave is watched. The man laid in it, Cetshwayo kaMpande, has been dead since February 1884, and the keeping of the place has never lapsed; it is held sacred and guarded to this day. In the same province, once a year as the summer turns, a living king lifts the season’s new fruit to his mouth and tastes it, and only after that may the nation eat. The amaZulu are a people whose kings are spoken of in the present tense and whose dead are not described as gone.

The people of the heavens

The name is a claim about the sky. With the isiZulu prefix that marks a people, the amaZulu take their name from the abakwaZulu, “those of the house of Zulu” — and izulu is the word for the heavens, for the weather that comes down from them, for the sky itself. In the reading the tradition favors, they are the people of the heavens. At the accession of Shaka kaSenzangakhona, around 1816, the abakwaZulu were one small Nguni chiefdom among hundreds strung along the southeastern seaboard, numbering a few thousand souls. Within little more than a decade they were the ruling house of a kingdom that reached from the Phongolo to the Thukela and beyond.

The instrument of that change was partly a young chief and partly a system. Shaka had come up under Dingiswayo, paramount of the Mthethwa, a wider confederation into which the small Zulu chiefdom had been drawn; serving in Dingiswayo’s regiments, he learned an order of things and then remade it. On the Mthethwa foundation he refined the ibutho, the age-regiment — the institution by which the young men of the nation, and in their own cohorts its women, were gathered by age-set rather than by lineage, quartered in the king’s military homesteads, and held at his call for war, for labor, and for the great national rites. The ibutho cut across the older loyalties of clan and chiefdom and bound the cohort directly to the crown, and it was this, as much as any battle, that turned a cluster of chiefdoms into a single people. Shaka absorbed the Mthethwa paramountcy itself after Dingiswayo’s death and drew more than a hundred chiefdoms into the new order. By the close of his reign, records collected in the following century reckon, he ruled some quarter of a million people. He was killed in September 1828 by his half-brothers Dingane and Mhlangana, with the induna Mbopa contriving the moment; Dingane took the kingdom.

The people reach the written record on two channels, and it is worth keeping them apart. The kingdom’s political history is dense and comparatively well documented — Shaka’s consolidation and death, Dingane’s reign, Mpande, and Cetshwayo’s defeat in 1879 are set down in colonial dispatches, traveler’s accounts, and the modern scholarship built on them, and the South African History Online record and the standard reference works largely agree on the frame. The religious world reaches the record more obliquely. Its earliest sustained documentation is the work of an Anglican medical missionary, Henry Callaway, whose The Religious System of the Amazulu was issued in parts between 1868 and 1870 — a foundational compilation, taken down from named informants in their own words, but shaped through and through by the missionary encounter that produced it, and so read critically rather than as a neutral transcript. Twentieth-century ethnography followed — Krige in the 1930s, Berglund and Ngubane in the 1970s. But the primary bearer of the religious life is neither the missionary nor the ethnographer. It is the living tradition itself: the households of KwaZulu-Natal who keep the ancestors at the byre and the rear of the great hut, the diviners called by the shades, and the monarchy’s own present-day observances.

Those households make the amaZulu the largest ethnic group in South Africa. isiZulu is the country’s most widely spoken home language, recorded in the 2022 census as the first language of 24.4 percent of the population; the total Zulu figure returned by that census runs to some fifteen and a half million. Estimates of the ethnic-Zulu population commonly range from about ten to twelve million upward, the number shifting with the source and with whether one counts ancestry or the language spoken at home. They live mainly in KwaZulu-Natal, the province that carries their name.

The shades and the sky-powers

At the center of the religious life stand the amadlozi — singular idlozi, the ancestral shades of the kin. They are not the departed in the sense of the absent. They are present in the household through dreams, through omens, through illness and through the diviner’s word; they are honored at the umsamo, the sacred rear space of the great hut where the beer-pot and the offerings are set, and at the isibaya, the cattle-byre, where the beast is spoken to before it is given. A year or so after a death the shade is brought home by the rite of ukubuyisa, the returning, so that the one who has died takes a settled place among the guardians of the living. The full working of the shades — how the idlozi is addressed, how it answers, how it is brought back — is the proper subject of its own account; kept here at summary altitude, the point is only that the amadlozi are the presences the ordinary religious life turns toward, and that “ancestor-worship,” as the phrase was thrown at the tradition from outside, is a poor name for a relation in which the dead are consulted, propitiated, thanked, and above all kept in the conversation of the household.

Above the shades stand the sky-powers. There is uNkulunkulu, the Great-Great-One, who broke off from the uhlanga — the reed, the reed-bed, and beneath both the source or stock from which things spring — and from that same origin brought forth people and cattle and the rest of the world, and set among the living the arrangements by which a life is lived: marriage, chieftainship, the ancestors themselves, and the offices of healing. There is uMvelinqangi, “the one who appeared first,” the one who was there in the beginning, bound in the tradition to the sky and the thunder; whether he is uNkulunkulu under a second name or a distinct prior power of the heavens is a question the sources will not settle among themselves, and it is left open here. And there is uNomkhubulwane, the princess of heaven, who gives the rain and teaches the grain, honored by the young women of a district in the rites that ask a good season. Of the deep pools and their storms the tradition keeps the inkanyamba, the great serpent whose rising is felt in the weather.

Between the shades and the living stand the izangoma, singular isangoma — the diviners, called to their vocation by the ancestors themselves through the long affliction-and-training the tradition names ukuthwasa, and authorized by the shades to see what is hidden. They are to be kept exactly distinct from the izinyanga, singular inyanga, the herbalists who work with the medicines of root and bark. The distinction is precise within the tradition — the isangoma divines, the inyanga treats — and it was precisely this distinction that the colonial slur “witch-doctor” collapsed and defamed, folding two honorable and separate vocations into a single figure of dread. The diviner is not a witch and not a doctor of the colonial imagination; the diviner is a healer-mediator, called and standing on the authority of the dead. The making and the craft of the diviner belong to the account of that institution; what belongs here is the plain fact that the Zulu religious world is a coherent and articulated system, with its powers ranked, its offices defined, and its channels of address kept in order.

Two great communal rites bind the nation to its sources. The first is uMkhosi woKweshwama, the festival of the first fruits, at which the king — a sacred person, standing where the nation meets its ancestors — tastes the new harvest before any of the people may eat it, so that the season is opened at the top and passes down. The second is uMkhosi woMhlanga, the reed dance, which gathers the young women of the nation in a procession of carried reeds before the crown. The amaZulu are today a majority-Christian people, and for very many the ancestral religion runs alongside that Christianity, or is woven into it, rather than displaced by it; the shade at the umsamo and the God of the church are, in a great many households, kept at once.

The kings sit inside this same order rather than above it. A Zulu king does not merely rule the living; on his death he joins the royal shades, and the shades of the royal house are addressed as the guardians of the nation as the household shades are addressed as guardians of the kin. This is why the earliest kings are not historical figures only. In the valley of the ancestor-kings south of Ulundi they are spoken to, and their names are carried in the izibongo, the praise-poems declaimed by the imbongi, the praise-singer, at the great gatherings — long recitations that hold a king’s deeds and his lineage in a fixed and public form and keep them current. Praise-poetry of this kind is one of the ways the nation’s past is not archived but rehearsed, said aloud in the present tense before the crown. To name a dead king in his izibongo is not to eulogize a man who is gone; it is to address one who has taken his place among the powers that keep the people.

The kingdom broken and kept

The kingdom Shaka built outlasted him by every measure its enemies tried. Under Dingane the royal town was uMgungundlovu, a great capital laid out on the slopes to be read from the surrounding hills; there, in February 1838, the Voortrekker party of Piet Retief was killed — an act still argued over, presented here at the register of the record and without a side taken — and the war that followed brought the Boer victory at the Ncome River, Blood River, on 16 December of that year. Mpande took the kingship in 1840 after defeating Dingane, and reigned long; his son Cetshwayo kaMpande succeeded from 1873 and carried the kingdom into its collision with the British.

That collision came in 1879. On 22 January a Zulu army fell on the British central column at Isandlwana and destroyed it, one of the sharpest reverses a Victorian force suffered in the field. The war turned against the kingdom over the months that followed, and on 4 July the British broke the Zulu army at Ulundi and ended it. What was done next was deliberate: the victors carved the single kingdom into thirteen separate chieftaincies under compliant chiefs, a settlement designed less to govern than to prevent the kingdom from ever cohering again. Cetshwayo was captured and exiled, first to the Cape and then to London; restored in part in 1883, he found his country in civil conflict, and he died on 8 February 1884. He was buried near the Nkandla forest, in the country of the ancestor-kings, and his grave has been kept and guarded from that day.

The dismembered kingdom did not stop generating history. Colonial Natal’s imposition of a poll tax provoked, in 1906, the rising associated with the chief Bambatha kaMancinza; it was suppressed with a severity the numbers record plainly — on the order of three to four thousand Zulu dead against thirty-six of the colonial forces, with thousands more imprisoned and flogged. It is set down here at the historical register, without the gloss of warrior-romance that has so often been laid over Zulu violence and Zulu suffering alike. Through the same decades the state worked at the roots of the religious order: uMkhosi woKweshwama was banned in the wake of 1879 and stayed banned; the missions recast uNkulunkulu, the remote First Being of the reed-bed, as the Christian creator-God — a reframing that is genuinely contested, and whose full weight is carried in the account of that figure; and the diviner was slandered, in official and popular writing alike, as a “witch-doctor.” Under apartheid the KwaZulu homeland was carved out from about 1970-72; in 1994 it merged with Natal to form the present province of KwaZulu-Natal.

What has happened since is a deliberate restoration. King Goodwill Zwelithini kaBhekuzulu revived the first fruits in 1990 and reintroduced the reed dance in 1991, both now held at the eNyokeni royal palace near Nongoma; the reed dance today draws tens of thousands of young women from across the province and beyond. The diviners and herbalists whom the colonial order defamed were given legal standing by the Traditional Health Practitioners Act, Act 22 of 2007, which provides for the registration of the izangoma and the izinyanga among other categories of practitioner. And the monarchy itself continues. Goodwill Zwelithini died on 12 March 2021; in the will of Queen Mantfombi Dlamini, read on 7 May 2021, Misuzulu kaZwelithini — born 23 September 1974 — was named the heir. He held his traditional coronation on 20 August 2022 and was recognized by the state on 29 October 2022. The eMakhosini valley south of Ulundi, where the earliest kings of the house lie, remains a place where the royal ancestors are addressed as a matter of course.

The Christian present is a fact of the same landscape and is best stated as one. Most Zulu people identify as Christian, many through the African Initiated Churches that grew up outside the mission establishment. The largest of these among the amaZulu is the Nazareth Baptist Church — the iBandla lamaNazaretha, the church of Isaiah Shembe, founded in 1911 — and the many Zionist congregations, which hold the ancestral inheritance and the Christian gospel together rather than choosing between them. The scholarship of the tradition runs the whole distance of this history: from Callaway’s compilation of 1868-70, read now for the encounter it records as much as for the beliefs, through the fieldwork of Krige in the 1930s and Berglund and Ngubane in the 1970s, to the news record of the revived royal festivals and the statute that reinstated the diviners. The kingdom was broken in the field and on the map, and much of what was done to it was meant to be final. The grave near the forest is still guarded; the reeds are still carried up to the palace; the king still tastes the fruit first.

The reed dance, uMkhosi woMhlanga, reintroduced by King Goodwill Zwelithini in 1991 and held each September at eNyokeni near Nongoma. Retlaw Snellac Photography, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 2.0.

King Cetshwayo kaMpande, who led the kingdom in the war of 1879 and was buried near the Nkandla forest in 1884. Portrait by Carl Rudolph Sohn, 1882, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

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