Bantu mythology

Like other cultures around the world, the Bantu peoples of southern Africa have developed a rich and complex set of mythological beliefs over the course of their history. Anthropologists began to develop a particular interest in cataloging and analyzing these traditional belief systems in the nineteenth century. From the perspective of Western scholarship, much of the compiled knowledge of traditional Bantu mythological beliefs is rooted in the work of the well-traveled author and researcher Alice Werner.

In 1933, towards the end of her life, Werner published Myths and Legends of the Bantu. The book provides a detailed exploration of traditional Bantu mythology, spiritual beliefs, legends, and folktales. It continues to be regarded as a seminal and authoritative work in the field of Bantu mythological analysis and scholarship, with a level of comprehensiveness and detail rarely rivaled. In the book, Werner explores common themes among the belief systems and customs observed by various Bantu-speaking ethnic groups. The work examines their creation and origin stories, gods and deities, religious beliefs, views of the afterlife, animal fables, and mythologies. Other authors and commentators including the Dutch-born professor and translator Jan Knappert have also made significant contributions to the scholarly documentation of traditional Bantu beliefs. Knappert’s 1977 work Bantu Myths and Other Tales has achieved a critical status of the same level as Werner’s Myths and Legends of the Bantu.

Background

The Bantu peoples encompass the various ethnic and tribal groups whose native languages belong to the Bantu linguistic family. Bantu languages are spoken across a wide region of Africa roughly spanning from southern Cameroon to Kenya in the east, and south from Kenya to South Africa. A plurality of scholars accept a classification model proposed in the late 1960s that divides Bantu languages into western and eastern groups, then classifies the various languages belonging to each primary geographic group into a further thirteen subdivisions. Experts include approximately five hundred contemporary languages in the Bantu family, based on their descent from an origin tongue known as Proto-Bantu and their relationships to Ur-Bantu, an etymological mother tongue proposed in the 1890s by the German-born African language scholar Carl Meinhof. Examples of major Bantu languages include Swahili, Zulu, Rundi, Rwanda, Shona, and Xhosa. Each of these languages has at least five million native speakers as of 2022, with Swahili being the most common and serving as a de facto lingua franca among the various Bantu ethnic and tribal groups.

Anthropologists attribute the wide geographic spread of the Bantu languages to historical migration patterns, which saw Bantu-speaking peoples emigrate from their origin point in the southern regions of West Africa across the central, eastern, and southern portions of sub-Saharan Africa beginning around the middle of the second millennium BCE. These migrations ended around 1500, resulting in the Bantu peoples achieving a dominant position in the traditional cultures of the regions they settled.

Overview: Major Bantu Myths and Legends

Bantu mythology encompasses ideas ranging from grand cosmological questions to anecdotal fables that interpret events from everyday social and civic life. Given the daunting scope of Bantu linguistic culture, Werner focused the initial stages of her analysis on the commonalities among the many myths and legends of various Bantu-speaking groups. Werner observed that all Bantu peoples share a common belief in a supreme god, though Bantu religions cannot accurately be described as monotheistic since many acknowledge other deities such as demigods and great heroes who have acquired divine characteristics.

The supreme god of the Bantu peoples is known by various names, including Mulungu, Leza, Chiuta, Kalunga, Nzambe, Katonda, and Unkulunku, among others. These names reflect concepts including the sky, the sun, the highest of high gods, the first ancestor, and ghosts. Though some Bantu peoples associate the supreme god with the origins of the world, many do not. Werner noted that many Bantu traditions consider the Earth to have existed first among all things, effectively presupposing its creation independently of any religious belief or system. Many Bantu myths initially position the supreme god as an Earth-dweller who moved into the heavens after being displaced by destructive human activity. The Bantu peoples generally consider the supreme god as the original and common ancestor of all humankind, with most (but not all) traditions conceiving of the supreme god as not actively interacting with the mortal world.

Another unifying belief covers life after death. Bantu peoples uniformly believe that a ghost or spirit survives bodily death, but they do not believe this ghost or spirit is immortal. Rather, the afterlife generally persists only as long as living people remember the deceased. When there is no longer any living memory of a person, their spirit simply ceases to exist. Exceptions apply to great leaders and important heroes whose deeds influenced the course of Bantu society or history. These figures endure longer, with some earning veneration that reaches demigod or deity status. In Bantu cultures, ghosts regularly interact with the world of the living and are capable of influencing practically every aspect of mortal life. However, Bantu tales rarely depict ghosts appearing to people. Instead, the spirits of the dead usually take on animal forms such as snakes or birds, or appear to the living in dreams.

Bantu cosmologies generally conceive of the spirit world as existing in an underground place parallel to the world of the living. Many myths and legends tell of people accidentally entering this spirit underworld, usually after following a burrowing animal into a hole in the ground. Holes in the ground play other important roles in some Bantu mythologies. For example, the Anyanja people of present-day Malawi traditionally believe that the first humans emerged from a hole in the ground or a cave proximate to Lake Nyasa.

Other Bantu groups have developed myths and legends surrounding the origins of humanity. In multiple cases, such as in the origin myths of the Zulu and Tsonga peoples, the first humans are said to have grown out of reeds. The Herero people have a variation on this story, believing that their original ancestors emerged from a tree they call Omumborombonga.

Regarding death, Bantu myths are notable for not generally considering death to be an unavoidable and natural byproduct of life. Instead, Bantu traditions hold that death did not have to exist, but was brought into the world. Many Bantu peoples have their own iteration or variant of a common myth, in which the supreme god sent a chameleon into the world to proclaim that people would not die. On its way, the chameleon became distracted after finding sweet fruits growing on a bush, which it stopped to eat. Knowing that the chameleon had not reached its destination, the supreme god sent a lizard to proclaim that people would die, then waited to see which of the two animals would be the first to complete its mission. The lizard reached humanity first, telling people that they would die. The chameleon then appeared to say that people would not die, but people had already accepted the word of the lizard and so death became an entrenched feature of life. Notably, original Bantu stories do not specify the reason why the supreme god sent the lizard after the chameleon. However, European colonists projected their own religious traditions onto the story, characterizing the supreme god’s decision as a consequence of human immorality.

In Bantu cultures, religious rituals and ceremonies are more frequently directed towards an individual’s ancestors than the supreme god. On a community level, such rites typically venerate great leaders and heroes who have achieved immortality as deities and demigods, and similarly favor these figures above the supreme god. In some cases, these venerated figures are known and documented to have really existed, while in other cases, they are or appear to be entirely legendary. Detailed practices are used to these ends, with some such ceremonies displaying the characteristics of secretive cults.

Further Insights

Bantu legends and folktales also include a large body of accounts describing mythical creatures and relating stories that explain the origins of various social customs. Werner, Knappert, and other experts have compiled and described these tales, sometimes endeavoring to interpret their meanings and functions in the context of general Bantu culture.

Mythological Beings in Bantu Folklore

Werner compiled tales describing many classes of mythological beings that inhabit Bantu folklore, with recurring examples including creatures akin to the werewolves, demons, goblins, ogres, and gnomes found in Western mythological traditions. As wolves are not native to the geographic areas traditionally inhabited by the Bantu peoples, other animals including hyenas, leopards, and lions are said to have the ability to assume human forms. Some Bantu cultures believe that magical rituals are capable of granting a person the ability to take on an animal form, while others hold that consuming certain traditional medicines enables a person to transmute themselves into an animal of their choosing upon dying.

Demons, often called ngojama, are sometimes described in Bantu mythology as powerful spirits who haunt and stalk people with the intent of eating them. The Galla people characterize the ngojama as elder lions who have become too old and slow to continue hunting prey, and have thus taken to hunting people instead. The ngojama and other mythological creatures including the serpentine ngoloko are usually said to live in forests, echoing a common trope in global mythology in which forests function as the home of strange, magical, and legendary creatures rarely encountered in everyday life.

Creatures known in Bantu culture as sisimwe display similarities to the ogres of Western mythology, while beings called utuchekulu are roughly analogous to gnomes. The mukupe, alternately known as chinkuwaila, kinyamkela, or mupisi, among other names, are beings sometimes described by Western commentators as goblins, but display physical characteristics believed to be unique to African mythology and are very common in the folklore of indigenous African peoples. Bantu mythologies often present these goblin-like beings as “half-people,” whose bodies are vertically split into a human half and another half that can be made of wax, grass, or nothing at all.

Diviners, Prophets, and Witch-Doctors

Bantu folk beliefs generally accept figures such as prophets and diviners, who are said to have the ability to see and foretell the future. Prophets and diviners are often described as communing with the dead, or with other spiritual beings or deities for the purposes of receiving and relaying messages. Diviners and prophets played a central role in a mysterious 1856–1857 episode known as the Xhosa cattle killings, in which a prophet told a Xhosa tribe that they could restore their great dead chiefs to life by killing all their cattle and divesting themselves of their grain supplies, after which the chiefs would return to lead them in a rout of white European settlers. The ensuing famine is estimated to have resulted in about 25,000 deaths.

Witch-doctors, often depicted as wild and sinister figures by Western commentators, actuality held a position of benevolent authority in traditional Bantu cultures and functioned to uphold the principles of justice. According to Bantu traditions, witch-doctors train as herbalists and diviners and primarily work to detect crimes by supernatural means and ensure their perpetrators are revealed and punished for their actions.

The Vengeance of the Murdered

One noteworthy subgenre of Bantu myths and folktales deals with the mythological origins of social customs, with numerous such stories and beliefs exploring the permissible ways of avenging an unintentional or intentional murder. In Bantu cultures, these customs generally reflect the widely practiced ancient custom of avenging the loss of a life by taking a life. However, various myths and legends also evolved to explain the origins of practices governing unusual situations such as the murder of a relative, and situations in which the person committing the killing cannot be held directly responsible for the act, ukuqunga such as a warrior killing a rival on the battlefield.

Murdering a relative is widely regarded as a particularly horrific act in Bantu cultures, and a person who commits such a killing becomes prone to an affliction the Nyanja people call chirope. The phenomenon of chirope sees the killer become consumed by a guilt-ridden madness that arises from the blood of the murdered person entering the killer’s heart and consuming their body. A person suffering from chirope will go blind and become gaunt with disease and hunger unless they procure a rare and difficult-to-obtain magical charm capable of reversing the condition.

Another story, which circulated widely in the Bantu cultures of modern-day South Africa, tells of a young man who kills his brother during a hunting expedition. In what scholars believe to be the oldest and most authentic version of the story, the brother who committed the murder is banished from his community and becomes a solitary exile. Other versions of the story have the killer’s community members execute him upon learning of the fratricide.

Warriors who kill rivals from enemy armies on the battlefield were believed to be at risk of being haunted by the ghosts of their vanquished foes. To prevent this from happening, warriors would undergo cleansing rituals known in the Zulu language as ukuqunga. In the Zulu tradition, ukuqunga was a long, intricate, and difficult process that involved cutting open the remains of dead opponents before the decedent’s body began to bloat during the putrefaction process. Warriors who failed to perform this ritual put themselves at risk of a type of psychological affliction known to the Zulu as iqungo, which according to legend was caused by the ghost of the dead soldier possessing the body of the warrior that killed them. Notably, the ukuqunga ritual was performed by Zulu warriors on the bodies of British soldiers killed during the 1879 Zulu War. During the Zulu War, the ritual practice was misinterpreted and mischaracterized by British observers as a savage form of postmortem mutilation.

About the Author

Jim Greene is a Canadian expatriate living and working in the European Union. Educated in Canada and the United States, Greene holds a bachelor of arts degree in English and a master of fine arts degree in creative writing. He has been working as an editorial services professional since 2001 and specializes in researching, writing, editing, and updating academic reference materials for students at the secondary and undergraduate levels.

Bibliography

Cartwright, M. (2019). Bantu Migration. World History Encyclopedia. www.worldhistory.org/Bantu‗Migration/.

Gutman, A., & Avanzati, B. (2013). Bantu Languages. The Language Gulper. www.languagesgulper.com/eng/Bantu.html.

Knappert, J. (1977). Bantu Myths and Other Tales. E.J. Brill.

Prins, H.H.T. (2019). Preserving Nature: Artificial Intelligence against Green Violence. Wageningen University & Research. edepot.wur.nl/514745.

Van der Waal, K. (2020). Defining the Term “Bantu.” South African History Online. www.sahistory.org.za/article/defining-term-bantu.

Werner, A. (1933). Myths and Legends of the Bantu. George G. Harrap & Company.