Leza is the high god of the Ila-speaking peoples of the Kafue plateau, a sky-dweller and creator whose name is also the ordinary Ila word for rain. All things are held to be his making, and he is addressed less by the single name than through a fund of attribute-names: Cilenga the Creator, Lubumba the Moulder, Muninde the giver of thunder and rain, Mutalabala the Everlasting, Namakungwe who strikes without warning, and Shikakunamo the Besetting One who never lets a person be. Sources differ on whether Leza is conceived as personal or as an almost impersonal power of sky and weather, and the Ila do not fix a settled sex upon him. Two narratives cluster about the name: the tale of an old woman, bereft of every child, who cut trees to raise a scaffold to the sky to ask Leza why she must suffer, and who never found him but learned that sorrow is the common lot; and the widespread Middle Zambezi motif in which Leza dispatches the chameleon with word that the dead should live again. Beneath Leza the Ila ranked a descending order of tutelary community divinities and family shades, but he alone was reckoned creator and supreme.