uNomkhubulwane's mythic role as a princess of heaven who governs rain and fertility has a striking real world counterpart elsewhere in southern Africa: the Rain Queens of the Balobedu people, known by the royal title Modjadji, a line of historical women rulers in what is now Limpopo province, South Africa, who were, and to some extent still are, believed by their own people to possess genuine rainmaking power, an office continuously held by a succession of named, documented queens since at least the eighteenth century, distinct from uNomkhubulwane in being human, dynastic and historically attested rather than mythic, but strikingly similar in the underlying idea that supreme control over rain and fertility is properly a woman's domain. Colonial and later anthropological accounts of the Modjadji dynasty drew wide attention, including reported influence on Rider Haggard's novel She, and the queens' closely guarded rainmaking rituals were treated by neighboring peoples as significant enough that regional leaders reportedly sought the Modjadji's favor for their own territories' rainfall.
The comparison is not one of direct historical connection, Zulu and Balobedu religious traditions developed within a shared broader southern African Bantu world but along separate lines, but it illustrates a recurring regional pattern: across several distinct southern African societies, ultimate authority over rain and the land's fertility is imagined as belonging most properly to a female figure, whether the mythic uNomkhubulwane or a living, historically documented queen whose court neighboring communities petitioned directly for rain.