Kalunga is the name by which the Pende invoke God in his relation to death. The term belongs to a deep Bantu stratum: across Central Africa kalunga evokes the sea, the great deep, the boundary between the world of the living and that of the dead. Among the Pende, Kalunga is both this divine name and the name of the realm to which the dead pass, so that the word names at once the lord of death and death's own country. It stands alongside Nzambi (God as creator) and Mawese (God as giver of custom) as one of the three names of a single supreme being.