uThixo

Also Known As: also Thixo, Tixo, Utixo, uThico, Utiko, Uti’ko, Teco; a loan into isiXhosa from Khoikhoi, from the same root as the Khoikhoi supreme being Tsui-Goab
Region/Culture: Southern Africa
Mythos: Xhosa Mythology, Khoikhoi Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: Maker of heaven and earth, giver of rain, cattle and increase, and in the one tale where he acts directly, the judge who decides what each people will be allowed to own.
Role in Mythos: The supreme being of the Xhosa under a name borrowed from their Khoikhoi neighbours, and since the early nineteenth century the standard word for God in the isiXhosa Bible and hymnbook.
Relation to Humans: In the older arrangement he is remote and reached through the ancestral dead rather than addressed face on, while the missionaries who adopted his name taught people to speak to him directly. His name is ordinary speech in the Eastern Cape today, used in prayer and in exasperation with equal ease.

The word carries a click. Not the tidy tut English speakers make when they disapprove, but a full lateral release off the side of the tongue, the sound a rider uses to start a horse. IsiXhosa writes it with a plain x, which flattens it on the page into something the Latin alphabet can hold, and it sits at the centre of the name of God. uThixo. Two beats and a click, said in church, said in grief, said by a man who has just put a hammer through his thumb.

In 1803 a Dutch missionary named Johannes van der Kemp sent his society what he considered decisive proof that the Xhosa were atheists. They had no word in their own language for the Deity, he wrote, and called him Thixo, which he judged a corruption of a Khoikhoi word meaning one who induces pain. He got the accusation wrong and the etymology roughly right.

Nine years later Henry Lichtenstein’s travels put it more carefully in English: the Xhosa believed in a great Being who created the world but had no name of their own for him, so they had adopted one from the Gonaqua, who called him Thiko. John Brownlee in 1827 heard the borrowed word glossed as Beautiful, sitting alongside an older Xhosa term, uHlanga. Thomas Pringle in 1834 agreed on Beautiful and noted that the missionaries had taken the word up to denote the true God. Robert Moffat recorded in 1846 that it was by then in use along the entire frontier. By 1860 William Shaw could report that after long and careful consideration the missionaries had generally concurred in adopting Utixo as the name for God, and that from the Colony to beyond the Mzimvubu nobody attached any other meaning to it. Sixty years, and a loanword had become the name of the Almighty for several million people.

Behind the loan stands a Khoikhoi figure who does have a body and a biography. Theophilus Hahn, raised at a mission station in Namaqualand and speaking Khoekhoe from childhood, published a study of him in 1881 under the name Tsuni-Goam. Most readers since have taken that name to mean wounded knee, after an injury taken in an endless nightly fight with Gaunab, who holds the dark half of the sky. Hahn himself leaned toward something else entirely, the red morning, the red daybreak coming on. Both readings are still in print and neither has won. He is the one prayed to for rain, and the thunder is him arriving. The prayers Hahn set down are full of streams and cloud, and scholars working on Nama religion keep going back to them.

Janet Hodgson’s 1982 study of the Xhosa supreme being, still the standard work, puts the borrowing inside centuries of contact rather than treating it as a missionary accident. The Xhosa moved south and west into country the Khoikhoi already held, married into them, took their cattle vocabulary and their clicks, and in time took some of their theology as well. Her case is that this absorbed material is part of why Christianity could be thought and argued in Xhosa as quickly as it was. The name of God in isiXhosa is a loanword, and it has been one for at least two hundred years.

Ntsikana, who died in 1821, composed the first Christian hymns anyone had made in Xhosa, and the greatest of them opens on the word itself: Ulo Thixo omkhulu ngosezulwini. He, the great God in heaven. He never wrote a line of it down. It moved by voice, learned by people standing close enough to catch the melody, and it was still being sung a century later out of printed hymnals, at funerals, and as a song of the nation.

There is one story in which he acts, and it is a story about property. Thixo made three peoples and set cattle in front of them. The Xhosa saw the herds and could not contain themselves, shouting and crowding forward, and he judged them a restless people and gave them cattle and nothing else. The white men waited. For waiting they were given cattle, and horses, and sheep, and every other kind of property besides. The Khoikhoi, in the version Harold Scheub prints, came away with nothing at all. Dudley Kidd heard a form of the same tale early in the last century, reduced to a single line about three kinds of men. Dust, noise, animals shifting on the hoof, and a verdict nobody gets to appeal.

It is not an ancient story. A tale that ends with one people holding horses and sheep and another holding nothing is a tale told after the frontier wars, by people who had watched the thing happen and were explaining it to themselves. It has the shape of scripture and the content of an audit.

The word also does ordinary work. Alan Paton put it in his priest’s mouth twice in Cry, the Beloved Country, once in horror at what a woman had become and once in thanks for mercy and rain. Writers in Drum used it the way anyone uses the name of God, gasped at gossip, shouted at a charging rhino, dropped into a line about a woman fainting theatrically at a graveside. It is not a museum word.

Nothing in the Xhosa record gives him a face. No image, no carving, no praise poem of the kind the language pours over chiefs and ancestors by the hundred lines. The borrowed figure behind him had a damaged knee and a red sky to walk out of, and what crossed into Xhosa kept the name and left the body where it was. The silence is not an oversight. A being who is everywhere, and who in the older arrangement is reached through the dead rather than addressed, has no particular use for a portrait.

What he does is give. Heaven and earth first, then rain, then increase, then cattle, which in that country is the same as saying wealth. The rival glosses the old writers fought over all lean the same direction, Beautiful or Supreme or the coming dawn, a being of light and the top of the sky rather than of the ground. By the middle of the nineteenth century he was also the God of the Bible in isiXhosa, which means the entire freight of that book was loaded onto a Khoikhoi word about a knee or a sunrise, and the word held.

The limits are the limits of a borrowed word. Whatever the Khoikhoi originally meant by it cannot now be recovered, because the two best guesses at the root have been disagreeing since 1881 and nothing has turned up to settle them. The traditional supreme being the missionaries recruited the word to translate was not approached directly in any case, so the name arrived fixed to a being nobody was in the habit of addressing. And for most isiXhosa speakers alive now, uThixo means the Christian God and means nothing else, which leaves the older figure standing somewhere behind the name with no reliable way to ask after him. The word outran the thing it was borrowed for. That happens to words. It is rarer for it to happen to a god.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is uThixo?

uThixo is the supreme being of the Xhosa and the standard isiXhosa word for God. He is understood as the maker of heaven and earth and the source of rain, cattle and increase. The name itself was borrowed from the Khoikhoi and was taken up by missionaries in the early nineteenth century as the word for the Christian God.

What does the name uThixo mean?

Nobody has settled it. The name comes from the Khoikhoi supreme being Tsui-Goab, and that name has been read since the nineteenth century either as wounded knee, after an injury taken in a nightly fight with the god of the dark sky, or as red dawn, the daybreak coming on. Early missionaries offered their own glosses, including the Beautiful and one who induces pain, and none of the readings has driven out the others.

Is uThixo the same as Qamata?

They are two Xhosa names for God with two different histories. Qamata is the name the pre-mission record attaches to the traditional supreme being, approached through the ancestors rather than directly. uThixo is a Khoikhoi loanword that missionaries adopted for the Christian God, and for most isiXhosa speakers today it carries that Christian sense.

Did the Xhosa have a name for God before uThixo?

The early travellers thought not, and said so repeatedly, though they were hostile witnesses with an interest in the answer. Henry Lichtenstein wrote in 1812 that the Xhosa believed in a creating Being but had no name of their own for him. John Brownlee in 1827 recorded an older Xhosa term, uHlanga, in use alongside the borrowed one, and the name Qamata belongs to the same older layer.

What is the story of uThixo and the three nations?

In the tale, Thixo makes three peoples and puts cattle in front of them. The Xhosa grow excited and unruly at the sight of the herds and are judged a restless people who will own cattle and nothing more, while the white men wait patiently and receive cattle, horses, sheep and every other kind of property, and the Khoikhoi are left with nothing. It is a colonial-era story rather than an ancient one, told by people explaining a distribution of wealth they had watched being made.