Chapter 12: South African Religion

The provisional hypothesis by which I try to explain the early stages of religion may be stated in the words of a critic, Mr. Hartland. ‘Apparently it is claimed that the belief in a supreme being came, in some way only to be guessed at, first in order of evolution, and was subsequently obscured and overlaid by belief in ghosts and in a pantheon of lesser divinities.’[1] I was led to these conclusions, first, by observing the reports of belief in a relatively supreme being and maker among tribes who do not worship ancestral spirits (Australians and Andamanese), and, secondly, by remarking the otiose unworshipped supreme being, often credited with the charge of future rewards and punishments, among polytheistic and ancestor-worshipping people too numerous for detailed mention. The supreme being among these races, in some instances a mere shadow of a children’s tale, I conjectured to be a vague survival of such a thing as the Andamanese Puluga, or the Australian Baiame.

Granting the validity of the evidence, the hypothesis appears to colligate the facts. There is a creative being (not a spirit, merely a being) before ghosts are worshipped. Where ghosts are worshipped, and the spiritual deities of polytheism have been developed, and are adored, there is still the unworshipped maker, in various degrees of repose and neglect. That the belief in him ‘came in some way, only to be guessed at, ‘ is true enough. But if I am to have an hypothesis like my neighbours, I have suggested that early man, looking for an origin of things, easily adopted the idea of a maker, usually an unborn man, who was before death, and still exists. Bound this being crystallised affection, fear, and sense of duty; he sanctions morality and early man’s remarkable resistance to the cosmic tendency: his notion of unselfishness. That man should so early conceive a maker and father seems to me very probable; to my critics it is a difficulty. But one of Dr. Callaway’s native informants remarks: ‘When we asked “By what was the sun made?” they said “By Umvelinqangi.” For we used to ask when we were little, thinking that the old men knew all things.’[2] What a savage child naturally asks about, his yet more savage ancestors may have pondered. No speculation seems more inevitable.

As soon as man was a reasoning being he must have wondered about origins; he has usually two answers: creation, complete or partial, and evolution. Like Topsy ‘he ‘specs things growed, ‘ when he does not guess that things were made by somebody. As far as totemism is religious, it accepts the answer of evolution, men were evolved out of lower types, beasts and plants, their totems. But these are not always treated with religious reverence, as sometimes are such creative beings and fathers as Baiame. In many cases, as I have kept on saying, the savage creative being has a deputy, often a demiurge, who exercises authority. Where this is the case, and where ancestor-worship is the working religion, the deputy easily comes to be envisaged as the first man, unborn of human parents, maker of things, or of many things, and culture hero. Mr. Tylor says: ‘In the mythology of Kamchatka the relation between the Creator and the first man is one not of identity, but of parentage.’ It is clear that, in proportion to the exclusive prevalence of ancestor-worship as a working religion, the idea of the Creator might be worn away, and the first man might be identified with him. It would not follow that the idea of creation was totally lost. The first man might be credited with the feat of creation. Mr. Tylor observes that ‘by these consistent manes-worshippers, the Zulus, the first man, Unkulunkulu, is identified with the Creator.’[3]

Mr. Tylor’s statement, of course, involves the opinion that the idea of creation is present to the Zulu mind. Unkulunkulu made things, as Baiame, and Puluga, and other beings did. Like them he is no spirit, but a magnified non-natural man. Unlike them, he is subject to the competition of ancestral ghosts, the more recent the better, in receipt of prayer and sacrifice. Having no special house which claims him as ancestor, and being very remote, he is now believed by many Zulus to be dead. His name is a fable, like that of Atahocan, a thing to amuse or put off children with; they are told to call on Unkulunkulu when their parents want to send them out of the way.

All this is exactly what my theory would lead me to anticipate, if the Zulus had once possessed the idea of an unworshipped creative being, and had lost it under the competition of worshipped, near akin, and serviceable ghosts. Their ancestral character would be reflected on him. It is just as if the Australian Kurnai were to take to ancestor-worship, glorify Tundun, the son and deputy of Mungan-ngaur; neglect Mungan-ngaur, look on Tundun as the creator, and finally neglect him in favour of ancestral spirits less remote, and more closely akin to themselves. This process is very readily conceivable, and, from our point of view, it would look like degeneration in religion, under stress of a new religious motive, the do ut des of sacrifice to ancestral ghosts. That Unkulunkulu should come to be thought dead is the less surprising, as a Zulu in bad luck will be so blasphemous as to declare that the ancestral spirits of his worship are themselves dead. ‘When we sacrifice to them, and pray that a certain disease may cease, and it does not cease, then we begin to quarrel with them, and to deny their existence. And the man who has sacrificed exclaims: “There are no Amadhlozi; although others say there are, but for my part I say that the Amadhlozi of our house died for ever.”’[4]...

Thus I can easily suppose that the Zulus once had an idea of a creative being; that they reduced him, on the lines described, to a first man; that they neglected him in favour of serviceable ghosts; and that they now think him extinct; like the ghosts themselves when they cease to be serviceable.

Mr. Hartland’s theory is the reverse of mine. He says: ‘In fact, so far as can be gathered, the very idea of creation was foreign to their minds.’... ‘The earth was in existence first, before Unkulunkulu as yet existed.’[5] But heaven, and the sun, and all things were not in existence before Unkulunkulu: he made them, according to other native witnesses, and Dr. Callaway, in his first page, says that the Zulus regard Unkulunkulu as the Creator.

The evidence, as Mr. Hartland urges with truth, is ‘contradictory.’ But its contradictions contradict his statement that ‘the very idea of creation was foreign to their minds.’ Many witnesses attest the existence in the Zulu mind of the idea of creation.

‘It was said at first, before the arrival of missionaries, if we asked, “By what were the stones made?” “They were made by Umvelinqangi.”’ ‘The ancients used to say, before the arrival of the missionaries, that all things were made by Umvelinqangi; but they were not acquainted with his name.’ ‘The natives, ‘ says Dr. Callaway, ‘cannot tell you his name, except it be Umvelinqangi.’[6] ‘The sun and moon we referred to Unkulunkulu, together with all the things in this world, and yonder heaven we referred to Unkulunkulu ... We said all was made by Unkulunkulu.’[7] ‘At first we saw that they were made by Unkulunkulu, but ... we worshipped those whom we had seen with our eyes’ (the ghosts of their fathers), ‘so then we began to ask all things of the Amadhlozi.’ This convenient Zulu, Umpengula Mbanda, states my very hypothesis.[8] But he seems to have been a Christian convert, and probably constructed his theory after he heard of the Christian God. ‘We seek out the Amadhlozi that we may not be always thinking about Unkulunkulu.’ So spiritualists are more interested in ghosts than in the Christian God. ‘In process of time we have come to worship the Amadhlozi only, because we knew not what to say about Unkulunkulu, ‘ just as the spiritualist ‘knows what to say’ about his aunt, who speaks to him through the celebrated Mrs. Piper.[9]

Dr. Callaway consulted a very old Zulu, Ukoto, whose aunt was the mother of King Chaka (Utshaka). Mr. Rider Haggard dates Chaka about 1813-1828. With him began seventy years of Zulu conquest and revolution, in which old ideas might be obliterated. Ukoto answered Dr. Callaway’s inquiries thus: ‘When we were children it was said the Lord is in heaven ... We heard it said that the Creator of the world (Umdabuko) is the Lord which is above. When I was growing up, it used to be said the Creator of the world is above.’[10]

So far we must either reject most respectable evidence, going back to the earliest years of last century, before the Zulu period of revolution, or dismiss Mr. Hartland’s opinion that the very idea of creation is foreign to the Zulu mind. A very old woman, whose childhood was prior to Chaka’s initiation of the revolutionary period of conquest (1813), being interrogated by the Zulu, Umpengula, said that ‘when we asked of the origin of corn, the old people said “it came from the Creator who created all things. But we do not know him.” The old people said ‘the Creator of all things is in heaven.’[11] The old woman then abounded in contradictions. She said that Unkulunkulu was the Creator in heaven, but only the day before she had denied this. Dr. Callaway thought not that her mind was wandering, but that ‘there appears in this account to be rather the intermixture of several faiths, which might have met and contended or amalgamated at the time to which she alludes’--the early days of Chaka--’ 1. Primitive faith in a heavenly Lord or Creator. 2. The ancestor-worshipping faith, which confounds the Creator with the first man. 3. The Christian faith, again directing the attention of the natives to a God who is not anthropomorphic’ She might also, in a part of her tale, allude to the fabled ascension of the father of King Chaka prior to 1813.

From my point of view, Dr. Callaway’s theory seems possible. The memories and ideas of people who were ‘ancient, ‘ when Chaka and this old woman were young, before the Zulus entered on a ‘wolf age, a war age, ‘ went far back into the Zulu past, when their belief may have been nearer to that kind of savage deism which Waitz regards as unborrowed and indigenous to Africa.[12] Another very old man, Ubebe, who had fought against Chaka, said: ‘As to the source of being’ (Umdabuko), ‘I know only that which is in heaven. The ancient men said Umdakuko is above ... for the Lord gives them life.’ Umdabuko, source of life, may be ‘local or personal, the place in which man was created, or the person who created him.’ ... Here the Umdabuko is called ‘the lord which gives them life.’[13] Here, too, the evidence is of Zulu antiquity, the words of the ancients of Chaka’s time. The use of the same name for a person and a place is familiar to us in ‘Zeus’ and ‘Hades, ‘ and we use ‘Heaven’ ourselves for God, as in ‘the will of Heaven.’ The old man uses Umdabuko as a personal name; elsewhere it is equivalent to Uthlanga, the impersonal metaphysical source of being, not identical with UmHlanga, ‘a bed of reeds, ‘ from which mankind arose in Zulu myth. ‘Umhlanga is the place where they broke off, or out came, from Uhlanga.’[14]

Old Ubebe said to Umpengula: ‘Do you not understand that we said Unkulunkulu made all things that we see or touch.’ And Unkulunkulu, he added, was a man, and now a dead man; then he considered, and added: ‘It is evident that all things were not made by a man who is dead; they were made by one who now is.’ He began with the creator vouched for by the other old people; he relapsed into the confusion of him with the first man, and either reverted to the original idea, or to a natural reflection of his own. Dr. Callaway found Ubebe declaring that tradition averred the maker to have been a man, but that the missionaries averred the Creator to be ‘the heavenly Lord.’ ‘The old men said that Unkulunkulu was an ancestor and nothing more, an ancient man who begat men, and gave origin to all things.’[15] In fact the primal being of lower savages, Andamanese and Australians, is a man, without human limitations, and creative. My hypothesis, like Dr. Callaway’s, is that Ubebe and the rest wandered between three faiths: a faith analogous to that of the Andamanese and Australians; that faith modified by ancestor-worship carried to a great pitch--the creator being identified with the first man, and the doctrine of the missionaries. It is no wonder that these ancients are confused, but perhaps my hypothesis, which is Dr. Callaway’s, so far, helps to explain their contradictions. ‘They talk of Providence, but I reckon there is One above he, ‘ said the British agriculturist, quite as confused as Ubebe.

Dr. Callaway interrogated another very old man, Ulangeni. He denied that Utikxo, his name for God, was a Hottentot word, introduced by missionaries, misled by what Dr. Callaway thinks their erroneous idea that the Hottentot Utikxo represented a lofty and refined theistic belief. Ulangeni utterly rejected with extreme contempt the idea that his tribe borrowed Utikxo from a people broken and contaminated by the Dutch.[16] ‘We have learnt nothing of them.’ In Ulangeni’s opinion, Utikxo created Unkulunkulu, but, being invisible, was disregarded in favour of his visible deputy, as Mungan-ngaur might come to be disregarded in favour of Tundun. ‘And so they said Unkulunkulu was God.’ I am grateful to Ulangeni for again anticipating my humble theory. He gave a humorous account of the arrival of the first missionary, Unyegana (Gardiner?), of his ‘jabbering, ‘ of his promise to give news of Utikxo, and of the controversies of Zulu theologians. A native convert won the day and composed a hymn: all this is recorded by Umpengula. With all respect for Ulangeni, he appears to have been in the wrong about Utikxo. Kolb (1729) gives Gounja Ticquoa (Utikxo) as the Hottentot word for a supreme deity; but, if Dr. Callaway is right, Kolb was in error.

‘Nothing is more easy than to inquire of heathen savages the nature of their creed, and during the conversation to impart to them great truths and ideas which they never heard before, and presently to have these come back to one as articles of their own original faith... ‘[17]

But Kolb’s Hottentots, as Dr. Callaway notes, say that Ticquoa ‘is a good man’ They did not get that from Kolb, or any missionary: as I have said it is the regular preanimistic savage theory, as in Australia and the Andaman Isles. Later investigations down to Hahn tell us of Tsui Goab, ‘wounded knee, ‘ a Hottentot being who is only an idealised medicine-man. Shaw says that ‘the older Kaffirs used to speak of Umdali, the Creator;’ but Moffat found no trace of anything higher than Morimo, another mythical first ancestor, who came out of the earth. Livingstone asserts just the reverse. ‘There is no necessity for beginning to tell even the most degraded of these people of the existence of God, or of a future state, the facts being universally admitted.’[18] As to the Bechuana Morimo, Mr. Hartland gives the etymology of his name: it is said to be derived from gorimo, above, with the singular prefix mo. It would thus mean ‘Him who is above.’ But why, then, did Morimo come out of a hole in the earth? Was he once ‘He who is above, ‘ and was he confused with the first man? The plural, Barimo, seems to mean the spirits of the dead. Molsino, teste Cassilis, is used for an ancestral ghost. Mr. Hartland is ‘inclined to regard Morimo not as a once supreme deity fading away, but as a god in process of becoming.’[19] I feel that I have no grounds whereon to base even a conjecture.