Mulungu

Mulungu is the high god and creator of the Kaguru, a matrilineal Bantu people of the Ukaguru highlands in central Tanzania. Conceived as dwelling above in the sky and identified with the ordering of rain, sun and fertility, he is a distant and largely aloof power who made the world and its living kinds but does not intervene in the small affairs of daily life. Practical religion among the Kaguru centres not on Mulungu but on the shades of the matrilineal dead, propitiated with beer and animal offerings at clan grave-groves; the creator is invoked mainly at moments of collective crisis such as drought or epidemic. Sources note that the name belongs to a family of cognate Bantu high-god terms (Swahili Mungu) and that his character is austere and only loosely personified, so that little narrative attaches to him beyond the fact of creation itself.

Domains

• creation
• sky and heavens
• rain and fertility

Powers

• created the world and humankind
• sends or withholds rain in time of drought

Sources

• T. O. Beidelman, The Kaguru: A Matrilineal People of East Africa (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1971), chapter on religion.
• T. O. Beidelman, 'East African Religions: Northeast Bantu Religions,' in Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. Lindsay Jones, 2nd ed. (2005).
• T. O. Beidelman, 'Right and Left Hand among the Kaguru: A Note on Symbolic Classification,' Africa 34(3) (1964).