Qamata

Also Known As: also uQamata, Qamatha, uQamatha, Qhamata; isiXhosa, possibly from an unrecorded Khoikhoi word
Region/Culture: Southern Africa
Mythos: Xhosa Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: Creator of heaven and earth, giver of blessing and protection, and in the oldest printed testimony the one who made the chiefs.
Role in Mythos: The supreme being who sits at the top of the Xhosa order of authority, above the ancestors and above the kings, and who is almost never present in daily religious life.
Relation to Humans: Nobody approaches him directly; requests travel up through the ancestral dead, who receive the goats and the cattle and who hold the only part of the arrangement that has a ritual attached to it. His name is nonetheless spoken out loud in one perfectly ordinary circumstance, which is when somebody sneezes.

A man sneezes in the Eastern Cape, wipes his face, and says a name out loud. Qamata, keep us, protect us, save us from the amagqwira, the witches. The Xhosa writer Isaac Wauchope set that moment down in 1908, and he set it down with an edge on it, because a missionary had recently arrived to tell his people about a God they supposedly did not know. They knew him. They had been saying his name every time somebody sneezed.

That is close to the whole shape of Qamata. He is the supreme being of Xhosa tradition, the maker of heaven and earth, and he is almost entirely absent from the religion built beneath him. Dudley Kidd, writing in 1925, put the oddity plainly: nobody offered him sacrifices, and nobody knew his praise names. In a culture whose highest verbal art is izibongo, the praise poem that pours a chief or an ancestor out in a torrent of epithets, that is a startling silence. The greatest being in the system has no poem.

The road to him runs through the dead. Janet Hodgson, whose 1982 study of the Xhosa supreme being is still the standard work, records the traditional position exactly: Qamata is approached through the ancestors. So the ritual life of a Xhosa homestead, which is dense and physical and expensive, points at intermediaries rather than at him. A goat is killed at the end of a mother’s ten days of seclusion after a birth. Goats mark the stages of a boy’s initiation while the abakweta sit apart in their huts with white clay dried grey on them from scalp to ankle, wrapped in a blanket against the cold. Cattle are the wealth and cattle are the offering. All of it is aimed at the shades, and the shades carry it further up.

Further up is a real ladder, not a metaphor. The Xhosa scholar Zilibele Mtumane sets out the order that runs through the tradition: God at the top, then the ancestors, then the kings, then fathers, mothers and children. S.E.K. Mqhayi described the founding of that order in a few lines about the day the mountains appeared, when one person was set over the others and told to be obeyed by everyone, and told in turn to obey Qamata. A chief is not answerable to his people. He is answerable upwards.

There is one weather in which he is felt to come close himself. When thunder walks across the hills, people sit still. A lightning strike on a homestead is not read as an accident but as the Lord becoming playful, ukudlala kweNkosi, a signal that something is wanted, and it is answered with about a week of cleansing for the whole village followed by a day of celebration once he is judged to be appeased. In some communities you also do not point at the sky with a straight finger. You bend it, because a straight finger aimed upward is poking God.

Where the name came from is unsettled and interesting. The other Xhosa word for God, uThixo, is a loan from the Khoikhoi, from Tsui-Goab, and Hodgson’s case is that Xhosa religious vocabulary absorbed a good deal from Khoikhoi neighbours during the long southward expansion. The lexicographers say Qamata may have come in by the same route, from a Khoikhoi word that was never written down. A survey published in 1905 guessed the same thing, with more confidence than the evidence supports. Nobody has closed the question.

The antiquity question is separate and easier. Hodgson recorded a Xhosa testimony placing the worship of Qamata in the reign of Tshiwo, in the late seventeenth century, and before that, and specifically before the arrival of the settlers. John Knox Bokwe, writing in 1913 about the Gcaleka before the mission stations, said they believed there was a God, had no way of describing him, kept no idols, and called him Qamata. The earliest printed mention found so far is from 1880, in an interview in which a Xhosa speaker explains that Qamata was the great spirit, since in their view he made the chiefs.

Colonial print made a mess of the neighbours for decades. A 1905 science survey confidently gives the Xhosa word for God as Unkulunkulu, which is the Zulu one. By 1939 the ethnographer N.J. van Warmelo has it right, Unkulunkulu for the Zulu and uQamatha for the Xhosa, and a 1982 magazine feature draws the same line, Qamata for the Xhosa and Mvelinqangi for the Zulu. It took roughly sixty years of printing to sort out two names.

There is one story attached to him, and it is worth handling carefully. In the version that circulates widely, the sun god Tixo and the earth goddess Djobela conceive Qamata; Qamata raises dry land out of the sea; the great sea dragon Nganyamba fights him for it and cripples him; his mother creates four giants to hold the four quarters, and the southernmost of them is turned to stone and becomes Table Mountain. It is a good story. It is also absent from every printed witness gathered by the Dictionary of South African English between 1880 and 1992, none of which mentions a dragon, a mother goddess or a war over the making of land, and it survives mostly in the guidebook and tour literature of the Cape Peninsula rather than in the ethnographic record of Xhosa religion.

What he does, then, is give. Blessing, protection, rain, increase, chiefs. What limits him is the etiquette of the whole arrangement: he cannot be gone to, only sent to. Even the offerings are disputed. Berthold Pauw, working in the 1970s, called the word itself sacred and named its bearer the Giver of blessings, the Protector and the Receiver of offerings, which is precisely what Kidd had denied half a century earlier. Both accounts cannot be true, and the record does not adjudicate. A Xhosa account from 1992 keeps the thing where it belongs, calling him the supreme being whom even the probing thoughts of a person dare not defile, and adding that human knowledge of him goes no further than those three roles.

He has no face, no image and no poem. Mqhayi, answering the old slander that his people had no religion at all, wrote that it is known to everyone that the amaXhosa are worshippers of the Creator, the Omnipresent, the living Qamata. Almost everything else about him is argued over. The one point nobody disputes is that you do not go to him yourself. You go to your dead, and your dead go on ahead.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Qamata?

Qamata is the supreme being of Xhosa tradition, understood as the creator of heaven and earth and the source of blessing and protection. He sits at the top of an order of authority that runs God, ancestors, kings, then people. In practice he is remote from daily religious life, and requests reach him through the ancestral dead rather than directly.

Is Qamata the same as uThixo?

They are two Xhosa names for God, but they do not have the same history. uThixo is a loan from the Khoikhoi, traced to Tsui-Goab, and it is the word missionaries took up for the Christian God. Qamata is the name the pre-mission record attaches to the traditional supreme being, and its own origin may also be Khoikhoi, from a word that was never written down.

How do Xhosa people pray to Qamata?

Not directly. The traditional position, set out in Janet Hodgson’s study of the Xhosa supreme being, is that Qamata is approached through the ancestors, so the goats and cattle killed at births, initiations and funerals are offered to the shades, who carry the matter further. The one everyday exception is the invocation spoken at a sneeze, recorded in 1908 and again in 1925 as a short plea for help and protection.

Is the Table Mountain story about Qamata a genuine Xhosa myth?

It should be treated as modern. The tale of Qamata raising dry land, being crippled by the sea dragon Nganyamba, and being defended by four giants created by the goddess Djobela appears in none of the printed testimony on Qamata gathered between 1880 and 1992, and it circulates almost entirely through Cape Peninsula guidebook and tourism material rather than through the ethnographic record.

What does Qamata look like?

No source describes him. He has no image, no idol and, according to a 1925 observer, no praise names either, which is remarkable in a culture where praise poetry is the highest verbal art. A Xhosa account from 1992 puts the silence deliberately, calling him a being whom even the probing thoughts of a person dare not defile.