Through this series we have asked one question of each African cosmology in turn. When something goes wrong, where do we look for the cause? For the Zulu, when something goes wrong you look to the family, including dead ones.
Most readers half-know one Zulu story already, the tale of the chameleon and the lizard that explains why people die. It is a good story, and we will tell it. But it turns out to be a poor guide, for the purposes of this inquest, to the Zulu worldview about cosmic responsibility. For you see, the Zulu spent almost no energy on the origin of death. The real Zulu religion is not a theory of why we die. It is a practice of how life is lived, honored, and preserved
The caution our series on African Cosmologies always owes its readers is still needed here, albeit with slight modifications. There are no sealed peoples whose beliefs are Zulu and no one else's. The amaZulu belong to the wider Nguni world, alongside the Xhosa, the Swazi, the Ndebele, and others who share the same reed-bed origin, the same ancestors, the same diviners, in local variations. The Zulu kingdom itself is a comparatively recent thing, forged in the early nineteenth century when Shaka kaSenzangakhona consolidated surrounding clans and rival kingdoms, into a unified and powerful Zulu state. Their traditions were written down largely by a missionary, Henry Callaway, in the 1860s, and refined by later scholars, and every such record carries the marks of its collectors.
Below, we narrate the founding origin of the Zulu people. Mind you, our version serves as the mainstream of the numerous versions told among the amaZulu, not a creed every Zulu would phrase the same way.
The Origin of Man
In the beginning, Zulu tradition says, there was only darkness and in that darkness dwelt a primordial creator, Umvelinqangi, whose voice was like thunder and whose anger shook the world. His name translates as 'The One Who Appeared First.'
Some accounts say Umvelinqangi created a single seed that he sent to the earth while others say the seed fell from him into wet earth and grew into a reed. All accounts, however, agree that the seed became the source from which all other life descended.
When the seed fell into the wet earth, it grew into a long reed which grew even more reeds until a vast marsh of reeds, uhlanga, the source, covered the land to the north. At the tip of one reed a man grew. His name was Unkulunkulu, the Great-great-one, the Ancient One. Unkulunkulu grew until he was too large and heavy for the reed, and broke off it. When he walked across uhlanga, he saw other men and women sprouting from other reeds, so he plucked them. These were the first people, the ancestors of every nation, and from uhlanga, they spread across the earth.
As Unkulunkulu walked further, he saw many other life forms growing at the end of different reeds. From the reeds, he gathered the fish and put them in the rivers, birds and antelopes that darted into the wild, lions and other games that could hunt prey, and cattle to be used by humans. The legend further stated that Unkulunkulu plucked a ball of fire and a glowing stone orb off the reeds and flung them into the sky, creating the Sun and the Moon.
One of the beings Unkulunkulu harvested were magical creatures, some good and some bad. One of them was called Mamlambo, the snakelike goddess of the rivers. Mamlambo is rumoured among the amaZulu to drown people, suck their brains out and eat their faces. Another magical creature Unkulunkulu harvested was Mbaba Mwana Waresa, a beautiful goddess who created the rain and rainbows. She is also associated with inventing farming and giving men the gift of beer. Others call her Nomkhubulwane, the sky-princess of rain, fertility, and the harvest, a shape-shifting benefactress honoured by young women in time of drought.
The Chameleon and the Lizard
Finally, we tell the much anticipated story of the chameleon and the lizard. The story of the chameleon and the lizard is often described as one of Unkulunkulu's final tragic acts. In this story, Unkulunkulu, having plucked the first chameleon, unwabu, off a reed, sent it to give humans a very simple message: "Men must not die." By these words, humans would have gained immortality. However, and rather unfortunately, the chameleon, slow and lazy, dawdled to feed on the purple ubukwebezane berries along the way.
Unkulunkulu then sent a lizard, intulo, with a different message, 'Let men die.' The lizard ran and arrived first. By the time the slow chameleon delivered its news of life, death had already been spoken, and it became the law.
However, this was the order of events as narrated in Henry Callaway's The Religious System of the Amazulu (1870).
Other accounts state that Unkulunkulu grew impatient and picked another lizard from the reeds which he sent with the same message. However, the lizard, which was fast and arrived earlier than the chameleon, did not bear the same instructions. Instead, it delivered the words, "Men must die," and so it is that from then, men became mortal. The amaZulu believe that chameleons change colour because they are ashamed their ancestor was not fast enough to spare humans the invention of death.
Yet death is not treated as much of a big deal by the amaZulu. Although the slow-messenger motif is spread widely across southern and central Africa, the resemblance is minimal because the Zulu do almost nothing with it. There is no cult of the chameleon, no elaborate theology of the first mistake like can be found in other cultures. Death, once it has entered, is not treated as a catastrophe to be explained and mourned. Among the Zulu, open mourning is even discouraged, because death is understood less as an ending than as a change of address. The person does not vanish. The person goes below. And what happens below is the whole of the religion.
The Honorific Role of Zulu Ancestors, the Amadlozi
For the amaZulu, the creator does not play a role in daily life. As a matter of fact, having made the world, they retired from it. Umvelinqangi and Unkulunkulu receive no shrines and no regular worship; they are the assumed and distant source of everything and the object of almost nothing. Into the space left by the retired creator step the beings who actually run a Zulu life, the amadlozi, the ancestors. The word comes from dloza — to watch over, to keep an eye on, and it shows the entire role ancestors are relegated to play in Zulu cosmology. The amadlozi are also known by two other names: the abaphansi, those of below, because the dead are believed to dwell beneath the earth; and the amathongo, from the word for deep sleep, because one of the ways they reach the living is through dreams.
Becoming an ancestor is not automatic. The crucial rite is ukubuyisa, the bringing-home. The rite is performed about a year after a death, in which the family slaughters a beast and calls the spirit back from the cold bush to take its place at the umsamo, the sacred rear of the great hut. Until this is done the spirit is dangerously homeless. Once installed, the ancestor becomes a full and active member of the household. He is fed with beer, the smoke of burning impepho (a group of aromatic plants burned as incense) and the meat of sacrifice. The Zulu call this ritual umsebenzi, literally 'the work.' Such ancestors are consulted on every large decision — a marriage, a move, a journey, or a sickness. He speaks back through dreams, and he may show himself as one of the harmless brown house-snakes that a Zulu must never kill. Diviners address the ancestors as makhosi, (chiefs) for below they are deemed to keep the rank they held above.
Set this beside the Shona, the people nearest to the Zulu in this series, and the difference is sharp and instructive. The Shona reach the dead up a long staircase, through a remote high god and a hierarchy of territorial spirits, the great lion-ancestors of the land. The Zulu keep no such staircase, because the high god has withdrawn and there is little traffic with him at all. For the Zulu the dead are not distant powers to be approached through intermediaries. They are immediate, domestic kin, living at the back of the hut and in the cattle byre, addressed by name, fed by hand, quarrelled with and appeased. The nearest thing the Zulu have to a present god is the eldest member of the family.
The Anger of the Ancestors Breeds Misfortune
From all of these, the Zulu answer to misfortune follows directly and beautifully. When life goes well, the amaZulu say the ancestors are with them. When it goes wrong, they say the ancestors have turned their backs, ukufuthela. Misfortune is a posture of the dead. It is the family, in its senior and invisible half, facing away.
The amaZulu are not naive about the anger of their ancestors. In fact, they draw a line between two kinds of trouble: the umkhuhlane — the run of ordinary ills that simply happen; a passing fever, the frailty of old age, misfortunes that carry no deep message and call for no diviner. And there is ukufa kwabantu, the illnesses of people, the meaningful misfortunes that persist, that strike the wrong person, that come in a pattern, that will not yield to ordinary remedy. Those demand to be read, because those are relational. Behind them lies one of three things: ancestors who have turned away because a duty was neglected; a rite left undone, a kinship obligation failed; or ubuthakathi, witchcraft, the malice of a living enemy — an umthakathi working harm through familiars such as the hairy tokoloshe (a supernatural being in Zulu) or the lightning-bird impundulu; or a state of umnyama, a heavy darkness or pollution clinging to a person that must be cleansed away.
To learn which of these a person is being affected by, one consults the isangoma, the diviner, who does not choose the calling but is chosen for it by the ancestors themselves, seized in youth by the initiation-illness ukuthwasa that lifts only when the vocation is accepted. Possessed by the shades and reading her divining objects, the isangoma names the cause. Where the trouble needs medicine, the inyanga, the herbalist, treats it with muthi. But the true remedy is almost always relational, because the true cause almost always is. A neglected spirit must be brought home. An overdue sacrifice must be made. A broken kinship duty must be mended. An enemy must be driven off. Set the Zulu diviner beside the others we have watched at work and the distinctive question stands out. The Shona diviner asks whose bond has been broken; the Kikuyu diviner asks what has been defiled; the Luba diviner asks which power has slipped its restraints. The Zulu diviner asks a family question. Is the household, living and dead, whole and turned toward you, and if it has turned away, why, and who if anyone has entered the gap.
From the Part to the Whole
This family logic does not stay in the homestead. It scales all the way up. When Shaka forged the Zulu nation in the early nineteenth century out of many separate chiefdoms, he built a kingdom whose spine was exactly the same relationship the humblest homestead knew: the living bound to their dead. The royal ancestors became the guardians of the nation. The king hinged between the people and the founding dead, and the great national rituals, the first-fruits ceremony above all, were addressed to keep that vast royal family whole by making its ancestors turn towards the land.
A people named for the heavens govern themselves by the same conviction that governs the smallest hut — that the dead remain members, that they must be honoured and consulted, and that the health of the whole depends on the conversation never breaking off.
The Zulu Answer
We return one last time to the question the series asks. When something goes wrong, where do the Zulu look? Not to the structure of the cosmos, nor to a meddling god, nor to one ancient error, nor to no one, nor to a defilement, nor to power run wild. They look to the family, and to the half of it that has gone below. Misfortune is, in the end, the ancestors facing away, or an enemy who has slipped into the space their turning opened. And the remedy is to turn the family back to face you, to bring the wandering spirit home, to make the work, to repair the bond.
The deepest thing the Zulu teaches is the separation they refuse to yield to death. The dead do not leave; they descend, and go on watching, as a continued part of the family.
A Note on Sources
Primary and early record. The foundational compilation is the Reverend Henry Callaway's The Religious System of the Amazulu (1868–1870), which prints Zulu narrators' own accounts of Unkulunkulu, the reed bed, the chameleon and the lizard, and the cult of the dead, alongside the translations and framing of a missionary collector whose aims should be kept in view. A. T. Bryant's writings on the Zulu cult of the dead and on Nomkhubulwane preserve further early material.
Secondary and scholarly. Eileen Jensen Krige's The Social System of the Zulus remains a standard account and is the source of the observation that ancestor religion is the vital core of Zulu life. Axel-Ivar Berglund's Zulu Thought-Patterns and Symbolism is the essential modern ethnography of the ancestors, the diviner, and witchcraft. Harriet Ngubane's Body and Mind in Zulu Medicine sets out the distinction between umkhuhlane and ukufa kwabantu drawn on here. The wide distribution of the chameleon-and-lizard motif across southern and central Africa is well documented in the comparative literature.
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. Where the record was shaped by its collectors, we have said so rather than smoothing it over.
