Imana is the supreme creator and High God of the Banyarwanda of Rwanda and the Barundi of Burundi, the maker and sustainer of the cosmos and the wellspring of all good fortune. Per Maquet (1961) 'Imana, the maker, created Kazikamuntu, the common ancestor of all humans,' and per the dynastic cosmology he is the principal agent behind the celestial origin of the royal line ('it is Imana who engenders'). Imagined with very long arms and figured as the Potter who fashions humans and grants children to the childless (the tale 'Imana and the Childless Couple'), he is benevolent but remote, receiving no direct organized cult and mediating with humanity through the ancestral abazimu and the imandwa spirits (whose king is Babinga and whose cult-hero is Ryangombe). The proverb 'Imana yirirwa ahandi igataha i Rwanda' — 'Imana spends the day elsewhere but comes home to Rwanda to sleep' — expresses the Banyarwanda sense of him as 'Imana yacu,' our own High God. With Christian missionization the name was retained for the Christian God across the Great Lakes.