Kalunga, creative power of the waters and the realm of the dead

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.

Domains

• death and the underworld
• waters and the sea

Powers

• to hold the realm of the dead beyond the waters
• to embody the creative power that originates the world

Epithets

• Kalûnga

Relations

• ally: Nzambi, the remote supreme creator
• subordinate to: Nzambi, the remote supreme creator

Sources

• Merran McCulloch, The Southern Lunda and Related Peoples (Northern Rhodesia, Belgian Congo, Angola), Ethnographic Survey of Africa, West Central Africa Part I (London: International African Institute, 1951).
• Boris Wastiau, Chokwe, Visions of Africa series (Milan: 5 Continents Editions, 2006).