Among the Pende (Bapende) of the Kwilu and Kasai regions of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, God is invoked under three names — Nzambi, Kalunga, and Mawese — each foregrounding a different facet of a single supreme being. Nzambi, a name shared widely across Central African Bantu peoples, designates God as the creator and the 'great chief', but a distant one: he made all things and everything belongs to him, yet he does not intervene directly in daily affairs. That role falls to the ancestral dead, who are the immediate masters of life. De Sousberghe, the principal ethnographer of the Pende, reports that Nzambi is probably the most recent of the three names to enter Pende usage.