The Name in the Zulu Bible

When nineteenth-century missionaries translated the Bible into isiZulu they had to choose a word for God, and they took the existing names uNkulunkulu and uMvelinqangi. This choice has shaped the concept ever since. The missionary Henry Callaway, whose 1868 collection of Zulu testimony remains a much-cited (and much-scrutinised) early source, gathered a range of Zulu statements about uNkulunkulu that do not all agree, some describing a creator and some a first ancestor, and the very act of collecting them through mission questioning affected the answers.

Today, for many Zulu-speaking Christians, uNkulunkulu simply means God, while in traditional usage the older sense of the remote first being persists alongside the central veneration of the amadlozi. The word therefore carries two layers of meaning at once, and reading the older tradition means reading past the Christian sense the same name now also holds.