Nguni Peoples

The Nguni languages form a tight cluster inside the wider Bantu grouping, spoken across southeastern Africa: Zulu and Xhosa in South Africa, Swazi in Eswatini, Southern Ndebele in South Africa and Northern Ndebele in Zimbabwe, the last of these carried north by the migration of Mzilikazi's followers in the early nineteenth century. The languages are close. A Zulu speaker and a Xhosa speaker can hold a conversation with effort and a good deal of adjustment, which is unusual for a grouping at this level and is what makes this one different from most of the entries in this type.

Where Bantu is a category drawn by outsiders and unused by the people it covers, Nguni is a word in circulation among the peoples themselves as well as among linguists, and the two uses do not pull apart. The cluster is also marked by click consonants, borrowed from Khoisan languages through long contact and intermarriage, which is a reminder that a family tree records descent and not the whole history of a language: Zulu is Bantu by descent and carries sounds it acquired from somewhere else entirely. The cluster also supplies the atlas with a caution about scale. Zulu and Xhosa are separate peoples with separate histories, and grouping them says nothing about the wars, alliances and states that divided them, the Zulu kingdom under Shaka above all.

The religious practice shared across the Nguni peoples centres on the ancestors, the amadlozi or amathongo, who remain part of the household and are approached through the head of the family rather than through a separate priesthood. Cattle are central. The byre is where the ancestors are addressed, an animal slaughtered there is the ordinary means of communication with them, and the animals themselves are a form of wealth, of bridewealth and of relationship rather than simply of food. Above the ancestors stands uNkulunkulu, the great one, and the figure of uMvelinqangi, the first to emerge, with the sky and the rain also addressed.

Diviners, izangoma among the Zulu, are called to their work by the ancestors through illness or dream and are trained by an established practitioner over a long apprenticeship, and they are distinct from herbalists, izinyanga, who work with plants. The distinction between the two roles is one an outsider regularly collapses. All of this is practised now, in cities as well as in the countryside, alongside Christianity in many households, and the atlas describes it rather than presenting it as something that used to happen. The African independent churches of the region, among them the Zionist and Nazareth Baptist congregations, work with much of the same material inside a Christian frame, and the boundary between the two is drawn by the people concerned rather than by an observer.

Sources Zulu Thought-Patterns and SymbolismAxel-Ivar Berglund with Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance: The Culture and History of a South African PeopleJean Comaroff