Nzambi a Mpungu

Also Known As: also Nzambi Ampungu, Nzambi Mpungu, Nzambi Mpungu Tulendo, Nzambi Sundidi; Kikongo nzambi, god or spirit, with mpungu, supreme or almighty, from the verb -pungula, to complete
Region/Culture: Central Africa
Mythos: Bantu/Congo Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: He holds the fire of heaven, sends the rain and the lightning, and hangs the rainbow, and he parts with any of it only when someone climbs up and asks him properly.
Role in Mythos: He is the maker and the highest power of the Kikongo-speaking world, so far above the daily business of the living that the ancestors and the water spirits handle almost all of it on his behalf.
Relation to Humans: The Bakongo built him no temple, carved him no image and made no charm to compel him, on the understanding that he is not the sort of thing that can be compelled. People say his name least when they think of him most, and it surfaces mainly as an exclamation when something has gone badly wrong.

The spider climbed first and came back down trailing a line of silk that held. It ran from the ground to the blue roof of the sky, and it did not break when the tortoise took hold of it, or the rat, or the woodpecker, or the sandfly so small that nobody bothered to count him. At the top the woodpecker set to work. The sound carried, a dry tapping against the underside of heaven, until the wood gave and there was a hole, and past the hole a whole country nobody on the ground had seen. The five of them went through into the house of the god who keeps the fire.

He was badly dressed.

The story records that before anything else, and it records the visitors thinking about it, wondering how somebody wearing that could be holding the lightning. Nzambi a Mpungu received them courteously and asked what they wanted. They told him: the terrible fire, for Nzambi who rules below. He said he would go and consult his people, and while he was gone the sandfly went with him, riding along unseen, listening. When the god came back he wanted proof they were not impostors, so he sent the tortoise down for a bundle of bamboo, put the rat underneath it and set the whole thing alight. The bamboo burned to ash. The rat walked out of the ash. Then, satisfied, the god asked one more question, which was where the fire was kept, and the spider answered that it was in one of the five cases in the fowl-house, because the sandfly had heard him say so. The answer was correct. The god of the lightning kept it in a poultry shed, and he handed it over without argument.

That tale was written down among the Bavili of Loango at the end of the nineteenth century, and it holds the shape of the thing better than any summary. He is the highest power there is, he lives on the far side of a solid sky, and he is entirely reasonable once you get to him. Getting to him is the difficulty.

His name is old and it is not in dispute. Portuguese visitors to the Kingdom of Kongo recorded Nzambi as the word for God in the early sixteenth century. Nzambi carries the sense of god or spirit; mpungu attaches the idea of the supreme, the complete, the one nothing stands above. Along the Loango coast the name split into a pair, and the split is worth following. Nzambi Mpungu is the father in the heavens and the guardian of the fire. Nzambici is the essence, the god on earth, the great princess, the mother of all the animals, and it is her daughter who is promised to whoever can fetch the heavenly fire down. Some tellers went further and said he made the world, sent her into it, then came down and married his own creation, which makes him the father of everybody by a fairly direct route.

The earth half of that pair is the one the stories can actually get their hands on. She drowns an inhospitable town in a night of heavy rain and leaves the roof-sticks visible at the bottom of the water. She turns a dry field into a lake full of fish because one man came down a palm tree to give a thirsty child a drink. She refuses the crab a head for boasting about getting one, which is why the crab has to lift its eyes out of its body to see where it is going. And once, memorably, she takes a drum she has no right to and is hauled before a prince to answer for it, and loses, and is fined, and pays. Nothing of that kind ever happens to the one upstairs. He is not available to be summoned to court.

That unavailability is the whole design. No shrine was raised to him, no figure carved, no nkisi packed and nailed to make him do anything, because the working end of Kongo religion was never him. The ancestors and the bisimbi, the chthonic spirits in the rocks and pools and streams, are what a person actually deals with. He rules the rain and sends the lightning and gives the rainbow, and then the record goes quiet about him, and the quiet is not neglect. People spoke of him sparingly out of respect, and the name came out most often as a cry when something had already gone wrong.

Then the missionaries arrived and the name did something no other part of the tradition managed. King Nzinga a Nkuwu was baptised in 1491, and in the decades that followed European clergy working with Kongo intellectuals, King Afonso I among them, went looking for Kikongo words to carry Christian concepts. For God they took Nzambi a Mpungu. It stuck. It was still doing that job in 1624, when the Jesuit Mateus Cardoso oversaw a Kikongo translation of Marcos Jorge’s catechism, printed in Lisbon as the Doutrina Christãa, the earliest surviving printed book in any Bantu language. The borrowing cost the rest of the pantheon dearly. Nzambici, the bisimbi and the minkisi were reclassified downward into something like angels, subordinate where they had been simply different.

There is a harder claim underneath all of this, and it should be said plainly rather than smoothed over. Wyatt MacGaffey, working from manuscripts written in Kikongo by Kongo ethnographers at the very start of the colonial period, has argued that the precolonial Nzambi was not a benevolent sky-father at all but a personification of death, and that the power of life belonged to the bisimbi. If that reading holds, then the gentle creator who hands over his fire to a spider is not the ancient figure but the figure after four centuries of translation. It is worth knowing too that the tidy cosmology now circulating in English, the empty circle called mbûngi and the spark of kalûnga that sets the universe going, comes largely from the twentieth-century writing of Kimbwandende Kia Bunseki Fu-Kiau, an in-culture synthesis of real material rather than a transcript of old belief.

The name travelled anyway. It crossed the Atlantic in the holds and surfaced in Palo in Cuba, where Nzambi is the creator who resides in natural things and in the dead; in Candomblé Bantu in Brazil, where he made the earth and then withdrew from it, keeping only the rain and human health; and in Kumina in Jamaica, where the high creator is called King Zombi. The English word zombie is generally traced to this same Kikongo root, by way of nzambi and its relatives nzumbi and mvumbi, the corpse that still holds its soul. A god who could not be given a body ended up lending his name to the walking dead.

His limits follow from all of it. He cannot be depicted, because he has no shape to depict. He cannot be coerced, because nothing was ever made that could hold him. He gives away the fire of heaven to anyone who arrives at his door with the right answer, which is generous and also means the fire is now down here permanently and out of his hands. And his name proved portable enough that another religion picked it up and carried it off, which is either the greatest success any Kongo word ever had or the quietest disappearance, depending on who is telling it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Nzambi a Mpungu?

Nzambi a Mpungu is the supreme god of the Bakongo and other Kikongo-speaking peoples of Central Africa. His name combines nzambi, meaning god or spirit, with mpungu, meaning supreme or almighty. Portuguese visitors to the Kingdom of Kongo recorded the name in the early sixteenth century, and it is still the ordinary Kikongo word for God today.

What does Nzambi a Mpungu look like?

Kongo tradition holds that he has no body, summed up in the saying “do not look for God, he does not have a body.” No image of him was carved and no shrine was built for him. The one folktale that places him in a room notices only that he was poorly dressed, which surprised the visitors who had come to ask him for the lightning.

What is the story of Nzambi a Mpungu and the fire?

In a tale collected among the Bavili of Loango, a spider spins a thread to the blue roof of the sky so that a tortoise, a rat, a woodpecker and a sandfly can climb up and ask Nzambi a Mpungu for the heavenly fire. He tests them by burning the rat under a pile of bamboo, and the rat emerges unharmed. He then hands over the fire, which he had been keeping in one of five cases in his fowl-house.

Is Nzambi a Mpungu the same as the Christian God?

Not originally, but the name became the Kikongo word for the Christian God after 1491. European missionaries and Kongo intellectuals, including King Afonso I, chose Nzambi a Mpungu to render the Christian deity, and the term appears in the 1624 Doutrina Christãa, the oldest surviving printed book in a Bantu language. One consequence was that other Kongo spirits were reinterpreted as lesser beings comparable to angels.

Is the word zombie related to Nzambi?

Yes, the English word zombie is generally traced back to the same Kikongo root, arriving through Haitian Creole zonbi. Related Kongo and Kimbundu words include nzumbi, a wandering spirit, and mvumbi, a corpse that still retains its soul. In the Jamaican religion Kumina the high creator god is still called King Zombi.