Unkulunkulu

A bed of reeds stood in shallow water, and the reeds began to split. Out of the splitting came the first people, and behind them the cattle, and behind the cattle the dogs and the game and the snakes, until the marsh had given up everything that would ever walk or graze or crawl. The Zulu call that source uthlanga, a bank of reeds grown thick enough to break off in the hand. Unkulunkulu came out of it before anything else. His name carries the sense of “the old, old one,” the ancestor so far back that counting toward him stops meaning anything, and he is remembered above all as the one who broke off first and then broke off everything else.

What he did with that beginning was practical work. He brought the people up out of the reeds and set the cattle beside them. He raised the mountains and let the streams run down them, and set the sun on its track. Then he turned to the people themselves and gave them the things that hold a life together: marriage, so that households would form; chieftainship, so that a people would have a head; the diviners who read what is hidden, and the doctors who treat what is sick. He also gave them their dead. The amadlozi, the ancestral spirits who guide and watch and must be fed with ritual, exist because Unkulunkulu arranged that the dead would not simply vanish from the family.

The stories disagree about what he was. Some accounts make him a man who broke from the reed bed. Others fold him into the reed bed itself, so that uthlanga is not a place he came from but a thing he is. A few traditions hold that the first ancestor was a man and a woman together, a single source with two halves. No storyteller seems to have troubled to fix his face or his height. The Zulu myths are not interested in his appearance. They are interested in his hands and what came off the ends of them, and a figure described entirely by his actions ends up with no portrait at all. He is less a body than a verb.

The most told story about him is not a story of creation but a story of a decision that went wrong. Unkulunkulu wanted the people to live without ending. He called a chameleon, named Unwaba, and gave it a message to carry down to humankind: they would not die. The chameleon set off. It went the way chameleons go, one slow foot lifted and held and considered before it was set down, the body rocking as if the ground might not be trusted. It stopped to eat. It climbed into a tree of ubukwebezane berries and lingered there in the shade. The chameleon is not built for an urgent errand.

While it dawdled, Unkulunkulu changed his mind, or thought better of his first thought, and sent a second messenger after the first. This one was a lizard, intulo, and the lizard carried the opposite word: the people would die. The lizard ran. It had nothing to delay it and a straight back and quick legs, and it reached the people first. It told them they would die, and the people took the word as it was given. When the chameleon finally arrived with its message of life, the matter was already settled. The people had heard the lizard. They told the chameleon so. Death had a foothold by then, and a foothold was all it needed.

That single tale carries the whole weight of why the world is the way it is, and it turns on a few wasted hours and a handful of berries. After it, Unkulunkulu steps back. This is the strange shape of his power. He is the source of everything, the maker of land and cattle and people and law, and he is almost entirely absent from the worship of the people he made. No temple is raised to him. No beast is killed in his honor. The Zulu direct their prayers and their sacrifices to the amadlozi, the recent and knowable dead, the grandparents and great-grandparents who still take an interest in a household. Unkulunkulu is too far back to be reached. He is not prayed to.

His strength, then, is entirely generative and entirely spent at the beginning. He can bring a world out of a marsh and furnish it with institutions, but the same myths that grant him that scope grant him no ongoing grip on it. He did not recall the lizard. He did not overrule the word of death once it had landed, and nothing in the tradition suggests he could have. He grows fainter as the world fills. When missionaries arrived in the 1830s, they found in him a name large enough to borrow, and Unkulunkulu was slowly recast as a creator-god in the Christian mould, a supreme being rather than a first ancestor. The older figure is quieter than that. He is the oldest thing anyone can name, the reason there are people and cattle and chiefs and graves, and once his work was done he had the good sense, or the bad luck, to disappear.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Unkulunkulu?

Unkulunkulu is the first ancestor and original creator figure of Zulu mythology, a name meaning “the old, old one.” He emerged from a primordial bed of reeds called uthlanga and then brought forth the first people, the cattle, the natural world, and the institutions of human life such as marriage and chieftainship.

How did death enter the world in the myth of Unkulunkulu?

Unkulunkulu first sent a chameleon named Unwaba to tell humankind that they would not die, but the chameleon traveled too slowly and stopped along the way to eat. He then sent a lizard, called intulo, with the opposite message that people would die, and the swift lizard arrived first. Because humans accepted the lizard’s word before the chameleon reached them, death became permanent.

Why do the Zulu not worship Unkulunkulu directly?

Unkulunkulu is regarded as too ancient and too remote to be reached through prayer or sacrifice, and no temples are raised in his honor. The Zulu instead direct their worship to the amadlozi, the ancestral spirits of the recent dead, who remain close enough to their living descendants to take an interest in them.

What did Unkulunkulu create?

Unkulunkulu created the first people and cattle, the mountains, the streams, and the sun, drawing all of it from the reed bed called uthlanga. He also established human social institutions, including marriage, chieftainship, diviners, and healers, and arranged that the dead would continue on as ancestral spirits rather than vanishing.

What does the name Unkulunkulu mean?

The name Unkulunkulu means “the old, old one,” conveying the idea of an ancestor so ancient that tracing a line back to him stops meaning anything. It reflects his role as the first being to emerge from the reed bed and the ultimate source of all people, animals, and the natural world.

Related Entries

uMvelinqangi, Amadlozi, Tokoloshe, Chitauli, Inkanyamba, Impundulu, Umdhlebi, Kholomodumo, Modimo, Nyame, Amma, Mawu-Lisa, Adam