Zulu tradition holds that uNkulunkulu, whose name means the Great Great One or the Old Old One, either emerges directly from a bed of reeds, uhlanga, or breaks off from the reeds as their own natural growth, becoming the first being to exist in a form recognizably continuous with the world as it now stands. From that same reed bed, uNkulunkulu is credited with bringing forth the first human beings and the first cattle, establishing at a stroke both human society and the pastoral economy that has long been central to Zulu life and to related Nguni-speaking peoples of southern Africa more broadly.
uNkulunkulu is further credited with teaching the first people practical knowledge essential to survival: how to make fire, how to hunt, and how to cultivate the land, transmitting the basic technologies of settled life much as culture-bringing figures do in many other traditions around the world, before the narrative shifts its attention away from him toward the people and ancestors he has set in motion. The reed bed itself, uhlanga, is treated in the tradition less as a single location than as a conceptual point of origin, a place before place, from which all subsequent lineages and clans ultimately trace their descent.