Unkulunkulu

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In colonial Natal in the 1860s a medical missionary put a plain question to the Zulu speakers who sat with him and answered in their own words: at the present time, are there any who pray to uNkulunkulu? The reply that went into the record is three words long. “There are none.” They pray, the informant went on, to the amatongo, the ancestral shades; they honor them that the shades may come and save them. The man asking was Henry Callaway, and the answer is not a report of atheism or of forgetting. It is a report about what kind of being uNkulunkulu is — a being so far up the line of descent, so entirely at the origin, that the living do not address him. The whole difficulty of the First Being sits inside that short reply.

The name before the being

The word arrives in the record ahead of any settled account of who wears it. uNkulunkulu is built by reduplication from the isiZulu adjective stem -khulu, “great” — the great doubled, so that the name reads as the Great-Great-One, or, with the other weight the doubling can carry, the Old-Old-One. That grammar is not only theological. In ordinary genealogical speech the same word names the most senior forebear a person can reach back to: the great-great-grandfather, the ancient one at the head of a house, the source from whom the living descend. A Zulu speaker could say uNkulunkulu and mean the founder of a lineage; the plural, onkulunkulu, could gather the far ancestors of a family, and they need not all be male. The name for the First Being of all and the name for the first man of one’s own line are the same name, and that overlap is the hinge on which every later argument turns.

The primary documentary record of the figure is the work of that missionary in Natal. Henry Callaway (1817–1890) was an English physician who took orders in the Church of England and came to southern Africa in 1854; he would end his life as the first bishop of St John’s, Kaffraria. His method with Zulu religion was, for its century, unusual. Rather than summarize what he took the people to believe, he took down what named informants told him, printed the isiZulu and an English translation on facing columns, set the whole in a question-and-answer form, and let his sources contradict one another on the page. The result, issued in parts, opens with the section titled “Unkulunkulu; or, The Tradition of Creation as existing among the Amazulu and other Tribes of South Africa.” Part I appeared in 1868; the full compilation, running through its treatment of the ancestral shades, the diviners, and the workers of harm, was complete by 1870. Elias Canetti, reading it much later, called the compilation “among the essential documents of mankind,” and its cadences reached English fiction — H. Rider Haggard drew on it, and Nadine Gordimer set extracts at the chapter-heads of a novel.

Callaway’s book must be read for what it is: not a transcript from a sealed pre-colonial world but an artifact of an encounter. The very question that runs through Part I — is there a Lord in heaven, is uNkulunkulu prayed to, did he leave a word for man — is a question the mission carried in. His informants feel its pressure differently, and they disagree. One will place uNkulunkulu at the head of all creation; another will insist the ancients said nothing of a Lord in the sky; a third will fold uNkulunkulu together with a prior power and a fourth hold them apart. That disagreement is not a defect in the record. It is the most reliable thing in it, because it shows the tradition thinking aloud rather than reciting a catechism — and because it is the ground on which modern scholars have built directly opposed readings of the same pages.

Around the central name the record sets others. There is uMdali, “the Creator,” from the verb ukudala, to create or to make from old. And there is uMvelinqangi — glossed as “the one who appeared first,” “he who was in the very beginning” — a name the sources tie to the sky, to thunder, and to the earthquake. Whether uMvelinqangi is uNkulunkulu under a second name or a distinct prior power of the heavens is one of the things Callaway’s informants will not agree on: some say plainly that uNkulunkulu is uMvelinqangi, “for they say he came out first,” while others keep the sky-power apart and above. That relation is contested in the tradition itself, and it is treated at length in its own place rather than settled here.

What came out of the reed-bed

Within the tradition’s own telling, uNkulunkulu is the First Being, the one from whom all things break off and stream out. He came out of — or broke off from — the uhlanga, a word that means at once a reed, a bed of reeds, and, beneath both, the source or stock from which things spring. The image is concrete and the concreteness matters: one of Callaway’s informants told him, in as many words, that it was said two people came out of a reed. From that same source uNkulunkulu brought forth people and brought forth cattle, and after them the rest — the mountains and the streams, the snakes and the game — breaking each off and sending it to its place across the earth, until the world was filled. He is the origin not only of the things that exist but of the shape of a life lived among them.

For it is said of uNkulunkulu that he gave the arrangements by which people live. He gave marriage, and he gave chieftainship — the ordering of households and the ordering of rule. He gave people the amadlozi, the ancestral shades who watch over and guide the living from close by. And he gave the offices by which the hidden is uncovered and the sick are treated: the izangoma, the diviners who are called and authorized by the ancestors to see what is concealed, and the izinyanga, the herbalist-healers who work with the medicines of root and bark. The distinction between the two is kept exact in the tradition — the isangoma divines, the inyanga treats — and both trace their standing, through the shades, back to the gift of the First Being. What the colonial record would later flatten into the single insulting figure of the “witch-doctor” is, from within, two distinct and honorable vocations that uNkulunkulu set among people at the beginning.

The coming of death belongs to him as well, in a story told across the Zulu world and, with variations, among many Bantu-speaking peoples. uNkulunkulu sent word to humankind by two messengers. To the chameleon, unwabu, he gave the message that men should not die, and started it on its way. Afterward — the tellings differ on why he changed the sentence — he gave the lizard, intulo, the opposite word, that men should die, and sent it after. The chameleon went slowly. It loitered, it stopped to eat the purple ubukwebezane berries along the path, it was, as chameleons are, in no hurry. The lizard ran, and arrived first, and delivered its word; and when the chameleon at last came with the message of life, the word of death was already spoken and could not be called back. Callaway recorded this telling from the informant Fulatela Sitole, and the loitering of the chameleon has stayed, in Zulu speech, a byword for a fatal slowness. Death entered the world not by rebellion but by a delay in the delivery of a message.

What uNkulunkulu is not, in the tradition’s own weighting, is the daily object of cult. Having made the world and set its arrangements, he leaves it to run; he is remote, distant, in some tellings said to have turned away from what he made. The presences addressed in the ordinary religious life of a Zulu household are not the First Being but the amadlozi — the shades of the recent dead, brought home by the rite of return, present at the umsamo, the sacred rear of the dwelling, and at the isibaya, the cattle-byre, spoken to over the slaughter-beast, answering through dreams and omens and through the mouth of the diviner. It is to them that a family turns for health, for increase, for protection. uNkulunkulu stands behind all of it as the source and almost never in front of any of it as the one addressed. That remoteness is precisely what makes him so hard to file. He has the reach of a creator and the genealogy of an ancestor, and the tradition does not appear to feel the pressure, which came later and from outside, to make him only one of the two.

Who worships him

The afterlife of uNkulunkulu is in large part a nineteenth-century argument about that last point — about who worships him, and whether anyone ever did. Callaway’s own pages supply the sharpest evidence for one side of it. Pressed on whether the First Being is prayed to, his informants answer that he is not: “There are none. They pray to the Amatongo; they honour them that they may come and save them.” Pressed on whether the ancients spoke of a Lord above, one answers with a flatness that has been quoted ever since — that the ancients did not say there is a Lord in heaven, that as for uNkulunkulu they do not know that he left any word for man, and that what they worship is the amatongo, the shades. Taken at face value, this is testimony that the pre-Christian uNkulunkulu was a remote first-ancestor and origin-figure, honored in the way an origin is honored, but not a worshiped creator-god with prayer directed to him.

That is a live scholarly reading, and it is load-bearing rather than settled. The Africanist Ana Maria Monteiro-Ferreira has pressed the first-ancestor case, and more recently Agnieszka Podolecka has argued it directly from the shape of the cult itself. In her 2020 study for the Yearbook of Oriental Studies — drawn in part from fieldwork among practicing izangoma in 2013, 2018, and 2019 — Podolecka observes that a being who receives no prayer, keeps no temples, and is approached through no intermediaries sits closer, structurally, to a first ancestor than to a monotheistic God. A creator whom no one petitions is doing something other than the work a supreme deity is usually built to do.

Against that reading stands the plain fact of what the mission did with the name. When American and European missionaries reached the Zulu in the 1830s, they first rejected uNkulunkulu as a rendering of the Christian God precisely because of its ancestral associations — for a name that meant, in ordinary speech, somebody’s great-great-grandfather could hardly carry the sovereign Creator of Scripture. Early Bible work reached instead for uThixo, a term drawn in from the Xhosa, and the Natal bishop John Colenso, wary of any vernacular word freighted with the old associations, tried for a time the imported uDio before folding uNkulunkulu into a later revision of his New Testament. But the resistance did not hold. As the historian M. R. Masubelele has traced, many of the same missionaries came in time to adopt uNkulunkulu as the word for God in preaching and in translation, judging it the term that would land among the people they addressed — and, in doing so, changing what the name meant. The Supreme Being the Zulu had known was, in the phrase Masubelele uses of the process, cast into a Christian mold. Through the printed Zulu Bible and the pulpit the figure was recast: the remote origin at the head of the reed-bed became the sovereign, present, worshiped Creator of the mission’s theology. The recasting succeeded so completely that today uNkulunkulu is simply the ordinary isiZulu word for God — in the mainline churches, and in the great independent congregations of KwaZulu-Natal, among them the Nazareth Baptist Church founded by Isaiah Shembe and the many Zionist churches. This is the load-bearing contested point of the whole subject, and the honest position is that the record does not close it: the testimony that no one prayed to uNkulunkulu, and the fact that within a lifetime everyone did, are both in the archive, and the figure in the middle was moving under the pressure of the very encounter that recorded him.

A second debate runs alongside the first and touches the Zulu understanding of the heavens. Irvin Hexham argued in 1981 that there is no evidence of belief in a heavenly deity or sky-god in Zulu religion before the coming of the Europeans — that the “Lord of Heaven” is itself, in some measure, a product of contact. Ranged against him is a line of scholars — Eileen Krige, Isaac Schapera, Axel-Ivar Berglund in his 1976 study of Zulu thought, David Hammond-Tooke, and the theologian John Mbiti — who hold that a Lord of Heaven, bound up with uMvelinqangi and with thunder and storm, long predated any European and stood above the ancestor-creator uNkulunkulu. Neither position is asserted here; both draw on the same thin and contested body of early testimony, and the disagreement is itself part of what there is to know. Callaway’s informants, arguing among themselves in 1868 about whether the ancients spoke of a Lord in the sky, had already opened the question that Hexham and Krige would go on contesting a century later.

What the argument leaves standing is the being it argues about. The amaZulu of KwaZulu-Natal go on speaking the name — for the God of the churches, and, in the older register, for the source at the head of things and the ancient one at the head of a house. The izangoma whom Podolecka questioned answered from inside a living practice, not from a closed past. And the record that first set the difficulty down — Callaway in 1868, read now for its encounters as much as for its contents, his informants preserved in the act of disagreeing — remains the place any account has to begin. The First Being who broke off from the reed-bed and then let the world run is, in the tradition’s own telling, both the maker of everything and the great-great-grandfather no one prays to, and the two descriptions were never felt, from within, to be rivals.

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