Bunzi
Bunzi is the great territorial deity of the Woyo people of Ngoyo, on the Atlantic coast just north of the Congo mouth, within the wider Kongo cultural world. In the recorded myth she is the daughter of Mboze, the Great Mother, conceived by Mboze's son Makanga; when the enraged Kuitikuiti killed Mboze, the dying goddess gave birth to Bunzi, who assumed the rain-making office. Bunzi is pictured as a many-coloured serpent who gives rain, fertility and abundant harvests, and Harold Scheub records her production of the rainbow. Constant Tastevin's notes, analysed by Zdenka Volavka, name Bunsi among the three principal tutelary spirits of Ngoyo, and the kingdom's rulers drew their legitimacy from her shrine complex; de Heusch shows how her birth-myth founds the ideology of sacred kingship on the Loango-Ngoyo coast. Her name travelled with enslaved Kongo people to Haiti, where spirits of the Bunzi family appear among the lwa.
Parentage
- parent: Mboze
Children
Domains
- rain
- fertility
- kingship
Powers
- to give rain and abundant harvests to those who honour her
- to appear as a many-coloured cosmic serpent and produce the rainbow
- to confer legitimacy on the rulers of the coastal kingdoms
Relations
- mother of: LusunziBunzi gave birth to the water spirit Lusunzi, whose regular visits to his mother bring the spring tide (kalema) into the Congo estuary.Jan Knappert, Myths and Legends of the Congo (Heinemann, 1971) (secondary)
Sources
- Bunzi is the serpent goddess of rain, fertility and royal legitimacy of the Woyo kingdom of Ngoyo, born of the dying Great Mother Mboze.: Jan Knappert, Myths and Legends of the Congo (Heinemann, 1971) (secondary); Zdenka Volavka, Crown and Ritual: The Royal Insignia of Ngoyo (University of Toronto Press, 1998) (secondary); Luc de Heusch, Le roi de Kongo et les monstres sacrés: Mythes et rites bantous III (Gallimard, 2000) (secondary)