Uhlanga

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A child at the edge of a river in the Zulu country can reach into the shallows and pull up a reed — umhlanga, the tall jointed cane that stands in the wet ground and throws its feathered head above the water. It is an ordinary thing, cut for mats and screens and the frames of houses. It is also, in the same language and by only the shift of a prefix, the thing a person means when speaking of the stock from which the person came. Uhlanga is the reed and the reed-bed; uhlanga is also one’s lineage, one’s descent, one’s race and origin — so that to ask after someone’s uhlanga is to ask what source they were broken from. The cosmology sits inside that doubling. A nation keeps its account of where it began, and its word for the family it belongs to, filed together in a marsh.

The word before the myth

Uhlanga reaches the record first as a living word, not as a story someone set down. The Dictionary of South African English carries the double field intact: uhlanga is a reed, a reed-clump, an original stem — and by the same entry stock, ancestry, and origin, glossed as the primal source of being from which the first human ancestor is said to have emerged. The two senses are not a pun that a later teller draped over a plain word. They are the word. A reed and a race are named by one term because the tradition understood descent through the image of the reed, and the image through the fact of descent. The weight of the cosmology is carried, in the first place, lexically — in what an isiZulu speaker cannot say about a reed without also, faintly, saying something about where people come from.

The fullest early written tellings come through Henry Callaway, an Anglican missionary who set down Zulu accounts of the unseen world and published them, in parts issued between 1868 and 1870, as The Religious System of the Amazulu. Callaway organized the whole into parts — the first on uNkulunkulu, then on the ancestral shades, the diviners, and those accused of sorcery. The book is indispensable and it must be read against its own grain. It grew out of the Christian encounter it was part of; its questions were a missionary’s questions; and Callaway’s own informants did not agree among themselves, a disagreement he printed rather than smoothed away. More than one of them told him the old knowledge had grown uncertain, now that another account of the beginning had come into the country. What survives in the book is therefore not one doctrine but a field of tellings, some of them already leaning toward a questioner who had a creator-God in mind, others still holding the older shape in which the first ancestor was something the reeds gave up. To read it well is to hear both at once, and to keep them apart.

Callaway also supplied the botanical hinge on which the whole image turns. Glossing the old form of the word, he wrote that uthlanga is “a reed, strictly speaking, one which is capable of ‘stooling,’ throwing out offsets,” and thus, he added, it “comes metaphorically to mean a source of being.” Stooling is a real property of the plant. A reed of this kind does not stand as a single stalk; it sends up new shoots from the base of the old one, offset after offset, until one root has become a thicket. A stem that multiplies itself by throwing out offsets is an exact natural emblem for a source from which peoples branch, each branch a lineage of its own. The metaphor was not imposed on the reed. The reed already behaves the way a genealogy behaves.

Callaway was not alone in the early record. David Leslie, whose Among the Zulus and Amatongas appeared in 1875, reported the same reed at the origin — the first people, in the tellings he heard, torn out of the reeds. An early colonial-era observer recorded the Natal tradition of a Being called the First Appearer or Exister, with creation “effected by splitting a reed, when the first man and other things issued from the cleft.” The lexicographers and ethnographers who followed — A. T. Bryant early in the twentieth century, read as critically as Callaway, and the dictionary tradition after him — preserved the semantic field without dissolving it, so that the reed and the reed-bed, the stem and the stock, kept arriving in the record together. The details vary from teller to teller and from writer to writer: whether the being grew from the reed or split it, whether one pair came out or many, whether the reed-bed lay to the north or nowhere named. The reed does not vary. It is the fixed point around which the accounts move; a century of uneven recorders disagreed about nearly everything else and kept the reed.

In the reed-bed is the beginning

The cosmology’s ground-image is neither a garden nor a void. It is uHlanga: a primal marsh thick with reeds, placed in some tellings in the country to the north, out of which the order of things was drawn. From the uhlanga grew uNkulunkulu, the Great-Great-One, the first and oldest — he grew there as a reed grows, grew heavy, and came away from the reed-bed and fell to the earth. Having come out of the reeds himself, he then broke off from the reeds the others: the first man and the first woman, and after them the nations, and after the nations the cattle and the wild animals, the sun and the moon and the ways of living. One of Callaway’s informants put the human beginning at its plainest — that two people came out of a reed, and there came out a man and a woman. Of the peoples, the record keeps the flat statement that uNkulunkulu broke off the nations from the uhlanga.

What is drawn from the reed-bed is not only people. In the fuller tellings the breaking-off runs through the whole furniture of a livable world: after the man and the woman come the nations in their kinds, then the cattle without which a Zulu homestead cannot be reckoned wealthy or complete, then the wild animals, the dogs, the game, and the grain; and with them the sun that crosses the sky and the moon that measures the month, and the customs by which people marry and eat and bury their dead. Creation here is not the making of raw matter but the sorting of a world into its ranks — each thing broken off into its own place and given its office. The reed-bed yields an ordered society already furnished with its means of life, not a bare earth waiting to be filled. That the first cattle come out of the same source as the first people is not incidental in a world where cattle stand between the living and the ancestral shades; the byre and the lineage are drawn from one marsh.

The verb the tellings use is a breaking-off — the reed’s own gesture. The stem throws out its offsets and each offset, once broken from the parent, is a new plant and a new line. To make a nation is to break one off. This is why the single word had to carry both meanings at once: uhlanga is a reed because the reed multiplies by offsets, and uhlanga is a race because a race is an offset broken from the one stem and set walking on its own. Every clan, on this understanding, is a shoot from a source that keeps sending up. The account of human origin and the word for descent are not two facts that happen to share a syllable. They are one fact, held in one term.

That is also why the reed-bed stands for continuous origination rather than a single dated making. A reed-clump is not finished. It goes on stooling; the source keeps throwing up new canes long after the first. A cosmology whose founding image is a stooling reed does not picture creation as a shut event in the far past but as a stem that is still, in principle, sending up — the same source from which the living are descended and to which, in the tradition’s own reckoning of the dead, they return. The dead do not leave the lineage; they become its elder part, the ancestral shades who are still addressed in the homestead, so that a person’s uhlanga runs backward into the reed-bed and forward into the household in one unbroken cane. Origination in this world is less a beginning that happened than a bed that keeps bearing.

From this the reed itself is carried into ceremony as a sign of purity, unity, and origin. The annual uMkhosi woMhlanga — the Reed Dance — bears the very name, umhlanga, the reed; and its presentation of cut reeds gathers a whole people back toward the birth-image, the reed-bed from which the first ancestor came. The rite’s full observance belongs to the living life of the amaZulu and is treated there; what matters to the concept is that the reed at the center of the ceremony is the same reed that is at the center of the origin, and is meant to be. The maidens who carry it up the hill are carrying the emblem of the source. The plainest household form of the same idea needs no ceremony at all: abantu bavela ohlangeni, the people came out of the reed-bed — a saying still spoken as a saying, the tradition’s whole account of human origin compressed into four words.

A reed-bed of common reed (Phragmites australis), the tall jointed cane whose habit of “stooling” — throwing up fresh shoots from the base of the old — makes the reed a natural emblem of a stem from which lineages multiply. Photographed in the lower Oder valley; the same reed grows in the wetlands of southern Africa. Krzysztof Ziarnek (Kenraiz), via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

The afterlife of a word

The reed-origin has had a contested afterlife, in large part because it sits exactly where the tradition met the mission. Nineteenth-century missionaries and Bible translators reached for a Zulu name to render the Christian creator, and recast uNkulunkulu — the first-ancestor who grew from the reeds — as a worshipped God who made the world from nothing. How far the pre-Christian figure was a remote first-progenitor and how far a creator-deity is genuinely debated, and Callaway’s own testimony, gathered inside that encounter, is part of what is under debate rather than a neutral report of what came before it. The scholarship puts the question squarely — whether uNkulunkulu is God, a god, or the first ancestor — and the fuller treatment of that reframing belongs with uNkulunkulu himself. For the reed-image, the consequence is only this: the being who came out of the uhlanga was reshaped in the record, and the shape he had before is not cleanly recoverable from the record that reshaped him.

Contested, too, is how the reed-bed stands to the sky. Some tellings have uNkulunkulu himself grow from the reeds and break off the first people. Another, reported by the scholar of African religions Jacob Olupona in his African Religions: A Very Short Introduction (2014), has the prior sky-power uMvelinqangi — the First-to-Appear — descend and wed the multicolored uHlanga, breaking off pairs of people from its reeds, each pair itself called a Unkulunkulu and each founding a nation of its own color. In that version the reed-bed is a bride and a womb rather than a mere source, and the multiplicity of nations is written into the multiplicity of the reeds. The sources do not resolve these into one account. They preserve, in the phrasing that recurs across the record, different and conflicting traditions about all three — the reed-bed, the Great-Great-One, and the First-to-Appear — and the relation of uMvelinqangi to uNkulunkulu is its own long question, kept where it belongs. Contested as well is the shape of the cult that surrounded the image, and how much of it belongs to the era of the kingdom rather than to the older, pre-Shakan life of the Nguni homesteads from which the kingdom was assembled.

What is not contested is the word’s endurance. Uhlanga still carries stock, origin, and nation in everyday isiZulu, spoken with no antiquarian self-consciousness by people who are not reciting a myth when they use it. And the reed-image is renewed in public each year: the Reed Dance, revived in 1991, is held every September at the eNyokeni royal residence at Nongoma, in KwaZulu-Natal, where young women carry cut reeds in procession before the Zulu king. It is a present-tense observance of a present people, kept by the households and by the diviners of the ancestors, the izangoma, who still hold the reed-saying as plain speech. In one comparative line, the reed-bed is not a Zulu isolate but a shared Nguni birth-image: the Swazi keep their own Umhlanga, a reed ceremony held at the Ludzidzini royal village in eSwatini, and kindred reed-origin traditions run across the wider Nguni family.

The reed answers the oldest question a people can ask of itself with a thing anyone can hold. Asked where it began, the tradition does not point to a first day or a made world. It points to a stand of cane in the wet ground — the source that broke off the first man and the first nations, and that goes on, in the plant and in the word, sending up. Callaway thought the reed had been meant, at the first, quite literally; the households have never stopped meaning it. To carry the umhlanga up the hill at Nongoma is to carry the emblem of an origin that is still, by its own nature, bearing.

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