Kalunga is a pan-Central-African Bantu conception that among the Chokwe names the supreme creative power in its connection to the great waters and to the realm of the dead. Ethnographers report that the Chokwe believe in a remote supreme being responsible for creation called Kalunga and/or Nzambi; the name Kalunga emphasises the abyssal waters and the threshold between the living and the dead, across which the souls of the deceased pass. Like Nzambi, Kalunga is not the object of a direct sacrificial cult but is approached through the ancestral mahamba. The same term recurs among neighbouring and related peoples (Mbundu, Kongo, Lunda, Ovimbundu) with the layered senses of sea, death and the otherworld.