Kyala is the high divinity of the Nyakyusa and the being whose name the earliest missionaries adopted, from 1891, to render the Christian God. In older testimony he is not a transcendent creator but one of several remote hero-ancestors who receive sacrifice on behalf of clustered chiefdoms, a 'lord' approached for rain, health and increase. Nyakyusa of Monica Wilson's generation differed over where he dwelt: older people placed him below, among the shades, while younger people set him above, in the region called kumwanya, the sky. In the charter of origins he is one of four god-like brothers who came from Ukinga bringing fire, iron-working and new crops, and in some versions the power to model cattle in clay and breathe life into them.