In the beginning, the Chewa say, God, human beings and all the animals came down to the earth together and lived in peace. There was no separation between them. God lived among his creation, people lived alongside the animals, and the world had not yet been divided into the realms that would later become familiar to them. Then a man made fire, and the peace broke. God fled to the sky, the animals fled to the bush, and death entered the world.
For the Chewa, this first breach helps explain the misfortunes of human life. Sickness, death and the troubles that disturb the world belong to a creation that has been divided from the harmony it once knew. But the story does not end with the separation. In Chewa religious life, there remains a way of calling the scattered world back together, of bringing the living into relationship with the dead and restoring, however briefly, the order that was lost in the beginning.
This way is known as the gule wamkulu, the great masked dance of the secret Nyau brotherhood, in which the dead and the wild animals are brought back among the living so that the shattered world of the beginning can be made whole for a night and then safely closed again. To understand the dance, we will sojourn to a hill that still carries the footprints of the beings of the very first morning.
There is a caution worth making before we enter the story. The people we call the Chewa are part of a wider Bantu family that includes the Chewa, Nyanja and Mang'anja, spread across present-day Malawi, Zambia and Mozambique. They were once connected under the old Maravi confederation, from which Malawi takes its name. They are a matrilineal people, tracing descent and belonging through the mother.
Their religious world also has its own boundaries. At its centre is Nyau, a secret society whose knowledge is guarded through riddles, coded language, ritual and masks. Much of what happens within Nyau is deliberately kept from outsiders. Some things can be explained; others are shown only to those who have been admitted into its world. This means that what follows is not an attempt to lay every Chewa belief bare. Much of it has never been meant for outsiders to know. What we have instead is the part of the tradition that has been recorded, passed down and made available to those outside the society.
In the Beginning...
The Chewa origin myth is pretty short unlike most, and it begins with the Chewa god, Chiuta, also known as Chauta, Mulungu, and Namalenga, the maker. Chiuta, whose name translates as "the great bow," the rainbow that arches after rain, is considered both male and female. That is, male in the sky as the rainbow and female in the earth, as the womb where the seed germinates and life renews.
We don't know what happened but it seems that one day, the earth lay barren and waterless and the relationship between the sky and the earth ended. Then the clouds gathered, lightning flared, thunder rolled like the roar of a hungry lion and rain poured heavily on earth. In the pouring rain, Chiuta is said to have come down in the form of a spider, descending on a silken thread. Along with him came the first man and the first woman, carrying a hoe, a grain mortar, and a winnowing basket, and with them, all the animals, two by two. They alighted on a hilltop in the Dzalanyama range, on the border of what is now Malawi and Mozambique, at a place called Kaphirintiwa. The ground there was still soft from the rain, and as the first feet and paws pressed into it, they left their prints, which hardened into the rock and, the Chewa say, can be seen on the stones to this day. The rain woke the barren land into green. There was food in abundance. And God, human beings, and the animals lived together, at Kaphirintiwa, in peace.
Then things turned upside down when man discovered fire, and this is the heart of the Chewa worldview. Apparently, Chiuta had warned man not to play with sticks, lest he bring forth fire, an instruction man neglected. He took a soft stick and a hard one and twirled them until they smoked and caught fire. In that instant, humanity seized a power it had been told to leave alone. The stick caught fire and so did the dry grass on Kaphirintiwa. The fire ran across the world in great confusion and every living thing had to make a big decision on what to do about man.
Here, the animals divided. Their division created the map the Chewa have lived on ever since. The dog and the goat ran toward the man and took shelter at his side; they became the domestic animals, companions of the village. But the elephant and the lion and their kind fled from him in rage and terror, away into the wild, and they became the beasts of the bush, hostile to humankind from that day. The single peaceable creation of Kaphirintiwa split in two, into the tame and the wild, the village and the bush.
The god, Chiuta, fled too. Chiuta, in the story, was too old to climb a tree to escape the flames. So, the spider let out its thread, climbed it back up into the sky and did not come down again. He was driven from the earth, the Chewa say plainly, by the wickedness of man. As he ascended, he pronounced judgment upon mankind; from that moment, human beings must die, and in dying, they would join him in the sky. The dead also had a task in heaven. They gathered into rain clouds that put out the earth's fires. Inadvertently, a cycle is created. With the rains, the spirits of the dead return to the land. In the dry season, when the grass fires burn, they withdraw again to the sky. Rain, fire, death, and the dead are bound together in one endless year.
The Impact of the Myth on the Chewa Society
The Fall of the Chewa is technological, moral, and ecological all at once. A single human act, the mastery of fire, and the violence that came with it, changed the relationship between God, people and animals. It drove God away from human beings, it turned the animals into enemies, and it let death into the world.
It is worth pausing to set this beside the Akan, who we discussed in another article, for they too tell of a sky-god who withdrew upward. But while the Akan god drew back from a petty domestic nuisance — a woman's pestle knocking against the sky — the Chewa god is driven off by fire and bloodshed, by the wickedness of man, in a rupture that also estranges humanity from the whole living world. This is not a god who got out of the way. It is a paradise that a people burned down.
It is believed that the fire permanently divided the Chewa into two domains, hence the reason the whole of their moral and spiritual life is lived across the border between them. On one side is the mudzi, the village: human, domestic, ordered, the world of the hoe and the hearth and the tame animals that stayed. On the other side is the bush and the graveyard, the wild country where the animals fled in their rage and where the dead now dwell. The two domains are not enemies exactly, but they are dangerous to each other, and they must be kept in the right relation. Health, fertility, and good fortune flow when the border is properly managed. Misfortune occurs when it is not. Then, the breach of Kaphirintiwa reopens and the wild or the neglected dead come pressing back into the village on the wrong terms.
So when trouble came — illness, a run of deaths, barrenness, or drought — the Chewa asked which relationship across that border had gone wrong, and they took the question to a sing'anga, a healer and diviner. The latter's answer would usually identify a mzimu, an ancestral dead, grown cold because their descendants had forgotten them. The sing'anga might also identify a broken taboo, a defilement the Chewa call mdulo, a 'cutting', contracted through transgression of the rules that govern heat, sex, and the body. Or it might be ufiti, witchcraft, the most feared cause of all, worked by the mfiti, the witch who prowls at night and feeds on kin. The witch, in the logic of this cosmos, is the villager who has gone over to the bush, the human being who has taken on the predatory nature of the wild beast and turned against the community.
Gule Wamkulu, The Great Dance
Gule wamkulu, the great dance, is a ritual dance performed by the Chewa to close the rift between the two sides, the village and the bush, the living and the dead. It is usually performed by the Nyau, a secret male brotherhood, at the moment when the two worlds most need to be brought into contact — at funerals and at the end of mourning, when the newly dead must be settled among the ancestors; at the girls' initiation, the chinamwali; at the installation and the death of a chief; and in the season after the July harvest.
Rather interestingly, the dancers wear masks over their faces, masks created to represent the faces of the dead, and which signify the return of the ancestral spirits. Then next, the dancers were the zilombo, the great towering structures of wood and straw that cover their whole bodies, which represent the wild animals. In other words, the two things that the fire drove out of the human world at the beginning, the dead and the beasts of the bush, are exactly the two things the Nyau bring back into the village in the dance. For the span of the gule wamkulu, the sundered creation of Kaphirintiwa is reassembled. The dead walk among their descendants again, the wild moves through the settlement again, and the peace of the first morning is briefly, dangerously, restored, before the masks are put away and the spirits are sent back across the border to the bush where they now belong.
The Chewa call this communication with the dead pemphero lalikulu, the Great Prayer, and they sometimes gloss the great dance itself as a healing dance. The word is exact. The gule wamkulu heals the wound in the world. It is also, in the same motion, a school of morality, for the masked figures act out greed, cruelty, folly, and misbehaviour of every kind, and the village, watching, learns by satire what a person must not become.
That the Nyau is a male brotherhood in a society that reckons descent through women is not an accident either; it gives men a domain of authority and secrecy of their own, a counterweight in a matrilineal world.
During the colonial era, missionaries tried for a century to stamp the dance out, and failed. It survived by learning to coexist with the church. A Chewa man today may belong to both the brotherhood and Christianity. Today, the dance is recognised by UNESCO as a treasure of humanity.
How The Chewa Origin Myth Survived In The Rituals, Political Order And History Of Malawi
The story of Kaphirintiwa was not left behind as a story about the beginning of the world. Its ideas about Chiuta, rain, the earth and the relationship between human beings and the supernatural have found their way into the political and religious life of the people. One of the clearest places to see this was in the old Maravi political state, a kingdom and confederation that emerged in the region around Lake Malawi from about the fifteenth century and brought together several related peoples, including communities from which the modern Chewa developed.
Rain was especially important. If Chiuta lived in the sky and sent the rain, then rain was not simply a matter of weather. It was the thing that made the earth fertile, crops grow and life continue. Securing the rains therefore became one of the most important religious responsibilities of the society. This was conducted through human intermediaries at territorial shrines.
At the great rain shrine of the central highlands, a priestess remembered as Makewana, the mother of the people, served as the voice and spirit-wife of the high god. Through her, the people could speak to Chiuta and seek the rains that kept their crops alive. The rain that came from the sky was therefore tied to the religious and political order on the ground.
The Kalonga, the paramount chief of the Maravi confederation, ruled within this sacred order. His authority existed alongside the religious institutions through which the people maintained their relationship with the rain priestess and, through her, with Chiuta. The political and religious order were mutually dependent, and the Kalonga's position remained central in the affairs of the people.
The old worldview did not simply disappear with the Maravi state. The gule wamkulu is danced today across Malawi, Zambia, and Mozambique, at funerals and initiations, as vigorous as it has ever been. The sing'anga is still consulted when misfortune has no ordinary explanation. The moral map of village and bush is still legible in how people speak of danger and belonging. And witchcraft remains a live and sometimes lethal social force, with accusations still capable of tearing a community apart — the ancient fear of the villager who has crossed over to the bush still doing its work.
A Note on Sources
Primary and early record. The Kaphirintiwa myth survives through Chewa oral tradition, recorded from the colonial period onward and still taught in Malawian schools as a lens on the traditional worldview. The inner meanings of the Nyau and the gule wamkulu are guarded by the brotherhood and are only partly accessible to outsiders, a limit any honest account has to respect.
Secondary and scholarly. J. Matthew Schoffeleers is the essential scholar of Chewa and Mang'anja religion, on the territorial rain cults and their guardians and on the Nyau; his collection with Adrian Roscoe, Land of Fire: Oral Literature from Malawi, preserves versions of the creation story and treats Kaphirintiwa as among the oldest creation myths in Central Africa. John McCracken's A History of Malawi sets out the famine, drought, rain, and fire motifs that run through the region's oral literature. UNESCO documents the gule wamkulu as an intangible cultural heritage. For the wider Bantu high-god context of Chiuta and Mulungu, see John Mbiti's African Religions and Philosophy.
This piece continues Africa Rebirth's series on African origin myths and cosmologies, following the Dogon, Yoruba, Akan, and Kongo, the Shona, the Kikuyu, the Twa, Hutu, and Tutsi, and the Luba.
