Chiuta

Late in a wet afternoon in the hills of Malawi, the storm moves off to the east and the sun comes in low under the cloud. The air smells of wet earth. Water is still running off the thatch. And across the dark sky where the rain has gone stands a bow, wider than any valley, striped with colour and resting on nothing.

The Tumbuka people of northern Malawi named their god for it. Uta is a bow. Chi- is the prefix that makes a thing huge. Chiuta is the Great Bow, the greatest of all bows, and the name belongs to the one who made the world and sends the rain. The Chewa, to the south, use the same name, sometimes in the form Chauta, and add others of their own. When he comes as a lightning storm they call him Mphambe. Tumbuka speakers also call him Mulengi, which simply means the Creator.

Nobody describes him. He has no face, no limbs, no animal form and no image, and the tradition says outright that he is shapeless and is present in every place at once. What people know of him is weather. Rain is his. So are thunder and the storm, and so is the bow that follows them.

He is also a long way off. A person with a need does not walk up to Chiuta and state it, any more than a villager would walk up to a chief and start talking. There is a proper road. The request goes first to the ritual elders. They pass it to the spirits of the family dead. The dead hand it up to higher spirits, and these carry it the last stretch to Chiuta. People can and do speak to him directly, but what comes of a prayer depends a good deal on whether the ancestors are willing to back it. What comes down that road in return is the list of things a farming people needs most: rain, food, children, health, and success in both war and peace.

He was not always so far away. The Chewa tell a story about that, and it is thought to be one of the oldest creation stories in Central Africa, possibly older than the farmers who now tell it.

In the beginning there was the earth, and there was Chiuta in the sky above it. The land was bare and dry and nothing lived there. Then the sky opened. Chiuta sent down a man and a woman, and with them a hoe, a mortar for pounding grain and a winnowing basket, and pairs of all the animals. He came down too, and the rain came with him. They landed on a flat-topped hill called Kaphirintiwa, in the Dzalanyama range on what is now the border of Malawi and Mozambique. Marks shaped like the feet of people and animals can still be seen in the rock there. Where the rain fell, the bare ground turned green.

For a while that was the whole world. God, people and animals lived together on the new grass, and nothing was afraid of anything else.

Then one day the man sat twirling one stick against another, and the wood began to smoke. A thread of it rose, sharp and strange. A spark dropped into the dry grass at his feet, and the grass caught. The fire ran. The animals bolted from it in every direction, and from that hour they hated the creature who had made it. Chiuta was caught on the burning ground with the rest. It was a spider that saved him. The spider spun a line up into the sky, and the maker of the world left the earth on a length of spider silk.

He did not come back. From the sky he gave his ruling. People would now die, and when they died they would rise to where he was. There they would be put to work making rain clouds, to put out the fires their kind had started below.

The Tumbuka explain death another way. Chiuta sent two messengers down to the people, a chameleon and a lizard, and they carried different words about whether humans would live or die. The message of life arrived too late. The same pair of messengers, with the same result, turns up in the stories of many peoples across southern Africa.

Kaphirintiwa did not stay only a place in a story. The hill became a rain shrine, remembered as the mother of all shrines, and was founded according to tradition by a priestess with the title Makewana, who led some of the earliest Chewa settlers into the country. In the fourteenth or fifteenth century the shrine was moved down to Msinja, the old settlement at the foot of the hill. People went there to ask for rain. They were asking the god who had first come down on that very rock.

Chiuta’s power is the plainest kind there is in a country that farms by the rains. He made everything, and he decides whether the clouds come. A late season, a failed harvest and a hungry year are all his to send or to hold back, and no one stands above him to appeal to.

His limits are odd ones for a creator. He cannot be reached without help, so every prayer needs its chain of carriers. He does not live among the things he made. And he was beaten, once, by a grass fire. He needed a spider to get away from it, and he never undid what the man had done. He only set the terms for living with it. The dead go up, the rain comes down, and after the rain his bow stands in the sky.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Chiuta?

Chiuta is the supreme god of the Tumbuka and Chewa peoples of Malawi and nearby parts of Zambia and Mozambique. He is the creator of the world and the giver of rain. He has no shape or image, and his sign in the sky is the rainbow.

What does the name Chiuta mean?

Chiuta means “Great Bow”. It joins the word uta, a bow, with the prefix chi-, which marks something very large. The great bow is the rainbow, which appears after the rain that Chiuta sends.

Why did Chiuta leave the earth?

In the Chewa creation story, Chiuta came down to the hill of Kaphirintiwa with the first man and woman and all the animals, and lived with them in peace. A man then made fire by rubbing sticks, the grass caught, and the animals fled. A spider spun a thread to the sky and Chiuta escaped up it and never returned.

How do people pray to Chiuta?

Requests to Chiuta are usually passed up a chain. Ritual elders take them to the spirits of the ancestors, the ancestors pass them to higher spirits, and these carry them to Chiuta. People may also pray to Chiuta directly, but the ancestors are believed to affect whether the prayer is answered.

Where is Kaphirintiwa, the place where Chiuta came down?

Kaphirintiwa is a flat-topped hill in the Dzalanyama range on the border of Malawi and Mozambique. Marks like human and animal footprints can be seen in the rock there. It became a major Chewa rain shrine, linked with a priestess called Makewana, and the shrine was later moved to Msinja at the foot of the hill.

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