Zulu

The order of powers in Zulu tradition is layered, and the layer that matters most in daily life is the nearest one.

At the top is uNkulunkulu, the first and greatest, associated with the origin of people and of the world. He is not the object of regular observance. The powers addressed continually are the amadlozi, the ancestral shades of the lineage, who remain concerned with the living, who are aware of conduct, and whose attention is understood to bear directly on health, fertility and fortune.

This is why the household rather than the temple is the unit. Observance is conducted at the homestead, under the authority of its head, at the times and for the reasons that the family's own circumstances dictate, and the material of it is the family's.

Ancestry is therefore the mechanism by which the order grows. A person who dies does not leave the community but changes position within it. There is no separate class of gods that a human being might be promoted into; the shades are the relevant powers, and they are relatives.

Alongside these stand figures associated with the sky and with rain, and a body of specialists whose offices are entered by training and by call.

Zulu traditional religion is living, is practised today, and is listed by this atlas as a restricted tradition. What is held within families and within initiated offices is not reproduced here.

The Zulu are among the most written-about peoples in southern Africa, and almost all of that writing was produced in the course of conquering, converting or governing them.

The nineteenth-century record is dominated by missionaries and colonial officials. Some of it is detailed and some of it is careful, and all of it was gathered by people who had already decided what the religion was for. The single most influential early collection was compiled by a missionary who worked closely with Zulu informants and who was, in the process, converted to the view that the tradition contained more than he had been sent to replace; his material remains valuable and remains shaped by the encounter that produced it.

Colonial administration added another archive with its own purposes, and the wars of the later nineteenth century generated a literature interested in the Zulu as adversaries.

The tradition's own transmission runs through izibongo, the praise poetry that records lineage, character and event and that is performed by trained praise singers, and through the instruction given within families and within the offices of diviner and herbalist. It was not composed for outsiders and much of it does not travel.

From the twentieth century onward, South African scholars, including Zulu scholars writing about their own tradition, have supplied the corrective. The atlas records the structure of the religious order and leaves what families and office holders hold with them.