Lyangombe, Founder of the Uswezi Cult

Lyangombe is the hero-spirit around whom the uswezi (Buswezi) cult of the Nyamwezi and their neighbours turns; Unyamwezi tradition remembers him as the cult's founder. The Buswezi is a spirit-possession society widespread across western Tanzania among the Nyamwezi, Sumbwa, Ha and Sukuma, which recruits its members from among people possessed by the swezi spirit and heals the affliction by initiating the sufferer; Hans Cory, who joined the society in 1932, left a detailed account of its six-day initiation rites and of its inner circle, the Kweselwa. The cult belongs to the wider Cwezi-Ryangombe complex of the Great Lakes region: the same figure is honoured as Ryangombe, chief of the imandwa spirits, in the kubandwa cults of Rwanda, Burundi and neighbouring Buha, and the society's traditions look back to the Chwezi of the old Kitara kingdoms. In the nineteenth century Nyamwezi (Yeke) migrants under Msiri carried the Ryangombe-Cwezi cult westwards from Unyamwezi and introduced it to the Luba country of Katanga.

Domains

• spirit possession cult
• healing of affliction

Powers

• to preside over the uswezi spirit-possession cult as its legendary founder
• to gather those seized by the swezi spirit into his society and relieve their affliction

Epithets

• Lyangombe

Relations

• subordinate to: Likube, the High One

Sources

• Salvatory Stephen Nyanto, 'Religious Experiences of Life after Death in Buha and Unyamwezi Cosmologies, Western Tanzania,' History Research 6(2), 2016, pp. 80-100.
• David William Cohen, 'The Cwezi Cult,' Journal of African History 9(4), 1968, pp. 651-657.
• Hans Cory, 'The Buswezi,' American Anthropologist 57(5), 1955, pp. 923-952.