Nnungu
Makonde · deity · Makonde traditional religion; continuing · Recorded classification
Nnungu is the Supreme Being of the Makonde Bantu of the Mueda and Ruvuma plateau. He is conceived as remote and largely uninvolved in daily life; ordinary religious attention is directed instead to the ancestral spirits (mahoka), who act as intermediaries between the living and the high god. Nnungu is appealed to above all in times of severe drought, when the community gathers to pray for rain. The name continues the widespread Proto-Bantu Supreme-Being term *mʊ̀-dʊ̀ngʊ̀, surviving as Mungu in Swahili, Mlungu in Yao and Mulungu in Chichewa, and is shared in cognate form across much of Bantu-speaking East and Central Africa.
Domains
- rain and sky
- supreme creator
Powers
- to grant or withhold the rains in answer to communal prayer
Sources
- Nnungu is the supreme high god of the Makonde, a remote sky-and-rain divinity reached through the ancestral spirits and invoked communally in drought.: Dias, Jorge, and Margot Dias. Os Macondes de Moçambique. 4 vols. Lisboa: Centro de Estudos de Antropologia Cultural / Junta de Investigações do Ultramar, 1964. (secondary); Asante, Molefi Kete, and Ama Mazama, eds. Encyclopedia of African Religion. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 2009. (secondary)