Liwelelo is the supreme creator of the Sukuma, the largest ethnic group of Tanzania, who live south of Lake Victoria in the north-west of the country. In the Sukuma language the creator is named by several words, chief among them Liwelelo, derived from welelo, 'the firmament' or 'the universe', alongside Lyuba ('the sun'), Lubangwe and Seba. Several of these names carry solar associations, not because the Sukuma worship the sun but because the creator is imagined to shine over the earth and to give it a life-giving force. He is conceived as a transcendent and uncaused being, the omnipotent source of life, health and fertility, who, having made the world, remains remote and uninvolved in daily affairs. In ethnographic accounts the universe is ordered in tiers descending from the creator, through the ancestral dead, to living people and finally to animals, plants and minerals. Because the creator is held to be far off, everyday devotion is directed to him through the ancestors: prayers and offerings of millet beer are made in the homestead, above all in petition for rain and a good harvest.