Zulu

Zulu religion centres on the ancestors, the amadlozi or amathongo, who remain members of the household and are addressed at the cattle byre, at the umsamo at the back of the dwelling, and at the graves. Axel-Ivar Berglund's study of Zulu thought sets out how completely the homestead is a religious space. The byre is where the ancestors are, the beast slaughtered for them is chosen and spoken to, and the arrangement of the homestead maps the relations between the living and the dead.

Above them stands uNkulunkulu, the first being and originator, who is not the object of a cult, and uMvelinqangi, the one who came first. The Lord of the Sky, and uNomkhubulwane with the girls' rites associated with her, belong to a separate register concerned with rain and with the fertility of the land.

Two specialists are distinguished and the distinction matters. The isangoma is called by the ancestors through an affliction diagnosed as a calling, trains under an established practitioner, and divines. The inyanga works with medicines and is trained as a craft. The atlas describes both offices and does not set out the initiation, which is not published here, and notes that both are living professions whose practitioners are registered under South African law.

The Zulu kingdom was consolidated under Shaka in the early nineteenth century out of the smaller Nguni chiefdoms of what is now KwaZulu-Natal, during a period of upheaval across southern Africa. Eileen Krige's survey, compiled from earlier records and from fieldwork, describes the age regiment system, the marriage and cattle arrangements, and the royal ceremonies including the first fruits, at which the king was strengthened.

The kingdom defeated a British invasion force at Isandlwana in January 1879, the heaviest defeat inflicted on the British army by an African state, and was destroyed within six months. The monarchy survived as a traditional institution and continues, with its own succession disputes reaching the South African courts in recent years.

Christian missions arrived from the 1830s, and the most consequential religious development came from Zulu Christians rather than from missionaries. Bengt Sundkler's study of the independent churches describes the Zionist and Ethiopian movements, among them the Nazareth Baptist Church founded by Isaiah Shembe in 1910, which brought together Christian scripture, Zulu dress, dance and the ancestors, and which draws very large gatherings today. Those churches are not a compromise between two religions. They are a third thing that both of the others produced.