Luchele Ng'anga

Luchele Ng'anga is the mysterious pale ('white' or dawn-bright) diviner of the Bemba migration charter. Falling in with the exiled princes, he read the omen of a fish conjured in a mortar as a command to press eastward across the Luapula toward the Chambeshi plateau, the land the Bemba would settle. He then vanished toward the east, and Bemba tradition held that he would one day return from that direction, an expectation that coloured responses to later prophets and missionaries, as discussed by Roberts and Hinfelaar. Cognate figures appear in neighbouring Lamba tradition.

Domains

• divination

Powers

• to divine omens and guide the migration eastward

Epithets

• Ng'angaAndrew D. Roberts, A History of the Bemba: Political Growth and Change in North-eastern Zambia before 1900, Longman, 1973 (secondary)

Relations

• companion: NkoleHe travelled with and guided the royal brothers Nkole and Chiti during the founding migration.Andrew D. Roberts, A History of the Bemba: Political Growth and Change in North-eastern Zambia before 1900, Longman, 1973 (secondary)
• subordinate to: the High God of StormBemba religious thought casts Luchele Ng'anga as a light-bringing messenger figure associated with the high god Lesa, expected to return from the east.Hugo F. Hinfelaar, Bemba-speaking Women of Zambia in a Century of Religious Change (1892-1992), Brill, 1994 (secondary)

Sources

• Luchele Ng'anga is the pale diviner-prophet who guided the Bemba founding migration eastward and whose promised return shaped later Bemba religious expectation.: Andrew D. Roberts, A History of the Bemba: Political Growth and Change in North-eastern Zambia before 1900, Longman, 1973 (secondary); Hugo F. Hinfelaar, Bemba-speaking Women of Zambia in a Century of Religious Change (1892-1992), Brill, 1994 (secondary)