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.