Modimo

A drought on the high veld can last long enough to turn the ground to iron. The grass goes, the cattle stand in the shade of dead trees, and the sky holds a hard, cloudless blue for weeks. When the rain finally comes it comes with violence: a wall of cloud building in a single afternoon, a crack of thunder that sounds like the sky splitting, and then the smell of water striking hot earth. The Sotho and Tswana peoples of southern Africa did not say the storm was Modimo. They said the storm was where Modimo showed. The lightning and the thunder were manifestations of something that could never itself be seen, and the rain that followed was the plainest gift the unseen maker ever gave.

Modimo is the supreme being at the summit of Sotho-Tswana belief, the source and root of everything that exists, and one of the harder gods in the world to picture, because the tradition insists there is nothing to picture. Modimo has no body and no face. No one has ever seen it. There is an old phrase, Modimo ga o itsiwe, meaning that Modimo is not known, and it is meant almost literally: a being so far above and so deeply inside all things at once that it cannot be met the way a person meets a chief or a neighbour. It is intangible and all-pervasive, part of every human experience and directly sensed in none of it.

Even the name says something careful about what kind of thing this is. In Setswana and Sesotho, modimo is a singular noun whose plural is badimo, the word for the ancestors, the honoured dead. The two are one word in different number, which tells you that the distance between Modimo, the ancestors, and living people is understood as a matter of degree rather than kind. All of them belong to a single order of being, and Modimo simply stands at the far, high end of it. The Tswana can say motho ke modimo, a person is modimo, and mean far more by it than a European might mean by saying there is something divine in everyone. The root of the word points upward, to what is above and in the sky, which is why Modimo is so often rendered in English as the one above or the high one.

Because a person cannot come into direct contact with that source and stay unchanged, the traffic between people and Modimo runs through the badimo. The ancestors are close, involved in daily life, parental in their concern; they correct faults, guard the fertility of people and cattle and crops, and expect in return to be honoured with a share of every feast. A little beer poured onto the ground, a portion of meat set aside, and the dead are kept in good humour and the living kept in balance. In times of real crisis the appeal travels further up the chain. When the rains failed, the rain doctors and the chief addressed the royal ancestors, and through them reached toward Modimo, who was held to be the sole giver of rain. To an outsider the ritual looked as though it was aimed entirely at the dead. It was aimed, in the end, at the one the dead themselves answer to.

The praise names gather up the contradictions rather than resolving them. Modimo is mme, mother, and lesedi, light, the warmth and origin of life. Modimo is also selo, the thing or the monster, because the same power that makes and sustains can also destroy, and reaches so far past ordinary human scale that it is genuinely dangerous to stand near. As maker, Modimo is Mmopi, the one who moulds. As the fountain of everything good it is called the father of light and the redeemer. None of these are portraits. They are angles on a being that will not hold still long enough to be drawn.

Where Modimo came from, the tradition does not ask. A high god of this kind has no birth story, because it is not one more thing inside the world that needed making. It is the making itself, the root under the roots. That silence about origins is not a gap in the record. It is the point.

The strangest chapter in Modimo’s history is a recent one, and it turns on a translation. When the missionary Robert Moffat reached the Tswana early in the nineteenth century, he decided they had no religion at all and no idea of a supreme being, and he was inclined to treat any talk of Modimo as something the missionaries had brought with them. David Livingstone, who came after him, thought this was nonsense, and pointed to old Tswana men whose memories ran back before any missionary arrived and who spoke plainly of a maker of all things, to whom everything otherwise unexplained was traced. Moffat went on to translate the Bible into Setswana, the New Testament in 1840 and the whole of it by 1857, and he used the name Modimo for the Christian God. The choice stuck, and it did something lasting. It pressed a remote, formless, impersonal power into the shape of a personal, singular, male deity, and it recast the badimo as something closer to demons. The theologian Gabriel Setiloane, writing from inside the culture, argued that the older Modimo had never been a person in that sense at all. It belonged to an impersonal class of nouns, and that grammar was a way of marking it as something larger than a person, not smaller, an all-pervasive force rather than a great man in the sky. His own people, he noted, had gone on quietly holding the old view even after generations of Christianity, fitting the new god into the shape of the old one rather than the other way around.

What Modimo can do follows from all of this. It is the ground of existence, the maker and sustainer, the giver of rain and the guardian of the moral order, present in everything and shown most clearly in the storm. What it cannot do, or will not, is be reached the way lesser powers are reached. It does not walk through the stories, does not marry or quarrel or bleed, does not answer a direct petition, and asks no cult of its own. Its remoteness works less as a flaw than as a kind of refusal, and it leaves people dependent on the ancestors to carry every message the last stretch of the way. The one real vulnerability the record shows is the one that arrived from outside: a name that old and that central could be taken up by a foreign scripture and bent, across a few decades, into meaning something its first speakers might not have recognised.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Modimo?

Modimo is the supreme being and creator of the Sotho-Tswana peoples of southern Africa, regarded as the formless, invisible source and root of all existence. Modimo is remote and impersonal, never depicted or directly seen, and is understood as the giver of rain and the guardian of the moral order.

What does the name Modimo mean, and how is it linked to the badimo?

The name Modimo comes from a root meaning “above” or “in the sky,” and is usually translated as “the one above” or “the high one.” Modimo is the singular form of the same word whose plural, badimo, means the ancestors, which shows that Modimo, the ancestral dead, and the living are seen as one order of being differing in degree rather than in kind.

Is Modimo male or female?

In traditional Sotho-Tswana belief Modimo is essentially genderless, an impersonal all-pervasive force rather than a man or a woman, and one of its praise names is even mme, “mother.” The image of Modimo as a singular male God came largely from nineteenth-century missionary Bible translation, which mapped Modimo onto the personal Christian God.

How do people worship or reach Modimo?

People do not approach Modimo directly, because the source of life is held to be too far above and too dangerous to meet face to face. Instead they reach Modimo through the badimo, the ancestors, honouring them with offerings of beer and meat and, in times of drought, directing rainmaking appeals through the royal ancestors and the chief toward Modimo as the sole giver of rain.

Did missionaries invent Modimo?

No. Although the missionary Robert Moffat claimed the Tswana had no concept of a supreme being, David Livingstone recorded older Tswana informants whose memories predated the missionaries and who described a maker of all things. What missionaries did was adopt the existing name Modimo for the Christian God in the Setswana Bible, reshaping a formless, impersonal power into a personal deity.

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