BLACK THEOLOGY

2021, VOL. 19, NO. 2, 122–134

https://doi.org/10.1080/14769948.2021.1955179

Recovering African Religions as “World Religions”: The Case

of the Zulu Religion
Willy L. Mafutaa and Chammah J. Kaundab
a
World Christianity, Religion and Society, Princeton Theological Seminary, Princeton, NJ, USA; bCollege of
Theology/United Graduate School of Theology, Yonsei University, Seoul, Korea

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
Drawing from John Hick’s soteriological criterion of religious John Hick; Zulu religion;
pluralism (in his notion of saintliness and morality), this essay uNkulunkulu; world religion;
questions the validity of the Christian putative, normative status particularization of the
to establish Christian-like features for other religions to be global systems
considered a “world religion”. This essay claims that with a
modern understanding of the globalized world, it is no longer the
norm for a non-Christian religion to meet Christian-like features
to be considered a “world religion”. Instead, a universal model is
gaining its reality through concrete particularizations, where no
one religion can claim to serve as the clear and dominant
standard for any other. In this sense, this essay attempts to re-
imagine and construct African Traditional Religions, particularly
the Zulu religion, its deity, uNkulunkulu, and its moral fabric, as a
religious particularization of the global systems.

Introduction
If religion is defined as the concern of the ultimate reality and intrinsic to the socializa-
tion processes, the African people, as gregarious creatures, certainly had religions.
However, the validity of their religions and their moral fabric, as of any non-Christian
religion, was sanctioned using the Christian putative normative status. In effect, it was
the normative rule that to become “a world religion”, one has to meet Christian-like fea-
tures such as fundamental transcendent reference, programmatic reflexivity, differen-
tiation, organization and voluntarization.
Moreover, if they are deemed to become religions, non-Christian religions were
classified as religions of lower status than Christianity. The African Religions, for
example, were given derogatory names such as primitive, animism, juju, worship of
ancestors and fetishist. As religions of lower status, they were considered preparation
evangelica or forerunners to Christianity.1 In this sense, they were judged not to
contain a soteriological predicament. As they lacked a soteriological predicament,
African Religions were, therefore, considered to be non-committal and fundamentally
amoral.

CONTACT Willy L. Mafuta wmafuta1@gmail.com 347, Fleur Drive, New Hampton, IA 50659, USA
1
Wariboko, “Colonialism, Christianity, and Personhood.”
© 2021 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
 BLACK THEOLOGY 123

However, with a modern understanding of the globalized world, the Christian putative
normative status has been questioned and abandoned. To be considered as a “world reli-
gion”, one no longer needs to meet Christian-like features. There is a universal model
gaining reality through concrete particularizations where no one religion can claim to
serve as the clear and dominant standard for any other. This has been argued on socio-
logical as well as on theological and philosophical grounds. While scholars such as
Roland Robertson, John Meyer, Immanuel Wallenstein, Niklas Luhmann, Jose Castella
and Peter Beyer are proponents of the sociological school of thought, others such as
John Hick champions the theological and philosophical approach that refutes the Chris-
tian putative normative status.
This paper is an attempt to re-imagine and construct African Traditional Religions
(ATRs), as religious particularization of the global systems. The paper problematizes
the notion of religion and argues that it stems from the socio-cultural context of the
people as a product of social interaction and does not have to carry Christian like features
to be defined as a such. It challenges the invented western enterprise of ATRs as the
“otherness” that fits their discourse of colonization and the spread of Christianity. It
recovers them as authentic religious systems.
To achieve this aim, the paper first analyses the history of the Zulu people and the con-
struction of their religion particularly, its deity, uNkulunkulu, and its concomitant moral
fabric. What transpires is that uNkulunkulu, as an ultimate concept of the divine, evolved
from references to tribal ancestors and the power of chiefs in contact with Europeans.
Secondly, the paper draws from John Hick religious soteriological criterion to make
the case that the Zulu High Deity/ Ultimate reality is an utterance of the global
systems. As a deity constructed as purity out of syncretisations or hybridization pro-
cesses, and a moral agent, the Zulu deity challenges the very notion of ATRs being
amoral and, therefore, lacking in a salvific predicament. Finally, the paper contends
that the Zulu deity is based on a notion that is constructed as “purity” from which
stems the Zulu saintliness. The presence of this Godly centeredness among the Zulu
delineates the moral fabric of their religion and upholds their moral fruits as equally
as valid as those of any religious global expressions, thus making their religion no
lesser than any other.

The Zulu People and the Construction of a Religion

Historically, the Zulu people belong to one of the Bantu family group or a clan known as
the Ngunis. The Ngunis are believed to have migrated from the south-east of the Demo-
cratic Republic of Congo to Southern Africa during the Bantu migratory movement some
500 years ago. There are two possible hypotheses on the origin of the Bantu. The first
hypothesis argues that the Bantu came from Lake Chad in north-central Africa.
Around 1000 BC, they migrated south, west and east for diverse reasons, among them,
is that they were in the quest of new lands to cultivate. Greenberg, in his research, ident-
ifies Niger-Congo linguistic groups that he believed to be settled around Lake Chad.2
The second hypothesis argues that the Bantu originated south east of the Democratic
Republic of Congo. This hypothesis is based on linguistics, archaeology, and oral
2
Greenburg, Languages of Africa, 6.
124 W. L. MAFUTA AND C. J. KAUNDA

traditions. One proponent of this hypothesis is Guthrie who used a linguistic classifi-
cation called “Proto-Bantu”, to argue that the origin of the Bantu should be located
where there was a high concentration of the Bantu language.3 Guthrie located this
region south east of the actual Democratic Republic of Congo. Archaeological sites
have been discovered, dated around 720 A.D, suggesting that there was indeed a civiliza-
tion in that area and that people migrated from there to other locations. Moreover, some
myths and legends also locate a migratory movement from the dense population south of
the actual Democratic Republic of the Congo to other areas of Africa including South
Africa.
The Zulu had come to be known due to their wartime skills and because of one of their
heroes and Chief, Shaka Zulu. With his ability to wage wars, Shaka turned the Zulu into
one of the most affluent ethnic groups of the Ngunis. It is believed that Shaka ascended to
power by orchestrating the assassination of his benefactor’s son. Shaka was living with his
mother in exile among the Mthethwa ethnic group with Dingiswayo as their chief. Din-
giswayo, in his war campaign, assimilated the Zulu ethnic group as part of his territory.
D.H. Reader believes that at this time the Zulu were a small ethnic group with just over
two thousand people.4
After the death of Shaka’s father and chief of the Zulu, Senzangakhona, in 1816, Shaka
asked Dingiswayo to establish him as the chief of the Zulu. Dingiswayo denied Shaka’s
request and instead installed his son, Sigujana, as the Chief of the Zulu. Deciding to
take over his people, Shaka arranged that Sigujana be killed while he was bathing.
After the death of Sigujana, Shaka was then able to ascend to power. Subsequently,
Shaka waged wars and conquered his neighbours, the Langeni, the Gumbeni, and the
Buthelezi and thus expanded his territory to a vast region that formed the Zulu nation.
The Zulu, as social and communitarian people, certainly possessed religion and mor-
ality. However, the validity of this religion and its moral fabric, as was the case for any
other frontier and colonial people, was subjected to the cycle of denial/discovery of
the western colonial enterprise. This cycle, among the Zulus, could be traced as far
back as 1689. During this time, a group of survivors of the Stavenisee, a shipwrecked
in the Natal area in eastern South Africa, recorded that after spending more than two
years among the Zulus, they were unable to discover the slightest trace of religion.5
Similarly, in 1836, a nephew of a British merchant, Nathaniel Isaacs, denied the idea of
religion among the Zulu. Isaacs contends that the Zulus had no idea of a Deity and could
not comprehend the mystery of creation.6 Isaacs goes further by asserting that the King of
the Zulu, Shaka, himself was ignorant of any notion of a deity. Recalling his conversation
with the King, he wrote, “He (Shaka) had no idea of religion, no symbol by which any-
thing like knowledge of a Supreme Being could be conveyed”.7
For Isaacs, the grossest state of ignorance on what he called the “sublime subject”
escaped King Shaka.8 As King Shaka lacked this sublime subject, so did his people,
argued Isaacs.9 Any form of spiritual practice among the Zulu was no less than a practice
3
Guthrie, “Bantu Origins: A Tentative New Hypothesis,” 10.
4
Reader, Zulu Tribe in Transition, 4.
5
Chidester, Savage Systems, 19.
6
Hexham, Texts on Zulu Religion, 40.
7
Ibid.
8
Chidester, Savage Systems, 120.
9
Hexham, Texts on Zulu Religion, 40.
 BLACK THEOLOGY 125

of superstition mused Isaacs. He called the Zulu, “the most superstitious creatures on the
face of the earth”.10 The discovery of the Zulu religion, however, started to emerge when
talk of the annexation of Natal as a British colony was underway and when trade between
the two nations was flourishing around 1843. In this context, Allan Gardiner, a British
missionary, who had lived among the Zulu at the time of King Dingane, recognized
the presence of religion, and subsequently, the belief in a supreme being, among the
Zulu. Narrating his encounter with a group of Zulu prisoners taken from Port Natal
to Dingane’s kraal, Gardiner wrote:
From the conversation that I have had with the prisoners during the period of halting, it
appears that they have always had some indistinct idea of a Supreme Being. Nonha’s
words, in reply to some inquiries on this point, were these – ‘we always believed that
there was an Inkosi-pezula (a great chief above) who, before there was a world, came
down and made it; he made men, and we knew also that there were white men’.11

With the discovery of religious systems among the Zulu, a way was paved to annex Natal as
a British colony. As they discovered the presence of religion among the Zulu, missionaries
and colonialists depicted the Zulu religious systems as inferior to European/North Amer-
ican conceptualisations. Furthermore, as they continued to gain land and participate in the
mercantile economy that needed labour, missionaries and colonialists became entrusted
with the quest of finding affinities between their religion and the Zulu people. For mission-
aries, this was an effective method to transfer and impress the meaning of Christianity
upon the corresponding feature of the Zulu’s religions.12 It was also a way to convince
the Zulu that Christianity was not a foreign religion, rather a religion that suited their reli-
gious systems. In most cases, however, finding affinities was a convenient way to facilitate
the announcement of the Christian gospel to Africans.

Hick’s High Deity/Ultimate Reality as Global Utterance

In his soteriological criterion, Hick delineates the construction of salvific particular reli-
gious expressions as the global uttering of religious global systems. He validates any
global religious transcendental apprehension as authentic in its particular religio-cultural
context. According to him, if salvation is defined as a gradual transformation from
natural self-centeredness to a radically new orientation centred in God and manifested
in the fruit of Spirit, then it takes place in all major religions.13
Hick views the global religious transcendental apprehension as structured either by
the concept of a deity, which presides over the theistic traditions or by the concept of
the absolute, which presides over the non-theistic traditions.14 This, according to
Hick, results in human apprehension producing an experienced divine personae, such
as Yahweh, the Heavenly Father, Allah, Vishnu, Shiva and metaphysical impersonae,
such as Brahman, the Tao, Dharmakaya, and Sunyata, to which human beings orient
themselves in worship or meditation.15 Hick contends that this act of worship and
10
Chidester, Savage Systems, 120.
11
Hexham, Texts on Zulu Religion, 67.
12
Kiernan, “African Traditional Religions in South Africa,” 15–27.
13
Hick, An Interpretation of Religion, 10.
14
Ibid., 14.
15
Ibid.
126 W. L. MAFUTA AND C. J. KAUNDA

meditation is found in all great religious traditions and embodies different perceptions
and conceptions of, and correspondingly different responses to, “The Real”.16 He
defines the Real or Ultimate Reality as a non-exclusive, neutral and a non-imperialistic
term that is different from the notion of the Supreme Being or God. For Hick, the
notion of a Supreme Being is subject to misunderstanding and is linguistically imperia-
listic to non-Christian religions. The Real, however, is a generic name that is affirmed in
the varying forms of transcendent religious beliefs that abandons the notion of exclusive
property of any one tradition.17
It was by appealing to Immanuel Kant’s philosophical principles that distinguish
explicitly an entity as it is in itself and as it appears as a perception that Hick constructed
his Real/Ultimate Reality. Kant argued that the properties of something as experienced
depend upon the mode of intuition of the subject; this object as appearance, however,
needs to be distinguished from itself as an object in itself.18 Out of this postulation,
Kant drew two principles, the noumenon and the phenomenon. The noumenal world
exists independently of our perception of it and the phenomenal world is that same
world as it appears to our human consciousness.19
The corollary, the noumenal Real, for Hick, is thought of and experienced by different
human mentalities, forming and formed by different religious traditions, as the range of
gods and absolutes, which the phenomenology of religion reports.20 Moreover, the nou-
menal Real is postulated by humankind as a pre-supposition, not of the moral life, but of
religious experience and the religious life, whilst the gods, those mystically known
Brahman, Sunyata and so on, are phenomenal manifestations of the Real, occurring
within the realm of religious experience.21 In other terms, Hick constructed two funda-
mental expressions in the apprehension of the Real; the postulated presence of the Real to
the human life, of which it is the ground, and the cognitive structure of our conscious-
ness, with its capacity to respond to the meaning or character of our environment,
including its religious character.22
Subsequently, it is about different ways of being human, developed within the civiliza-
tions and cultures of the earth, that the Real, apprehended through the concept of God, is
experienced specifically as the God of Israel, or as the Holy Trinity, or as Shiva, or as
Allah, or as Vishnu or uNkulunkulu.
It is about other forms of life that the Real, apprehended through the concept of the
Absolute, is experienced as Brahman, or as Nirvana, or as Supreme Being, or as
Sunyata.23 Because of this apprehension that exceeds the scope of human thought,
argues Hick, the reality of what we call God needs to move beyond the anthropomorphic
god figure of theistic piety. In this sense, the distinction between the Real per se and the
Real as humanly known occurs within all the global religious traditions.
Viewed from the perspective of the global religious world systems, Hick’s analysis
suggests that the apprehension of the Ultimate Reality occurs within the framework of

16
Ibid.
17
Ibid.
18
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 266.
19
Ibid., 266.
20
Hick, An Interpretation of Religion, 242.
21
Ibid., 243.
22
Ibid., 244.
23
Ibid., 245.
 BLACK THEOLOGY 127

religious particularization – the socio-cultural peculiarity of human experiences – and as

such negates the universal Real as normative. In this sense, uNkulunkulu, for example, a
high deity in the Zulu religious tradition, appears as a particularization of the apprehen-
sion of the Real in the global religious society. This particularization, forming and formed
through syncretic processes, is no lesser than the Supreme Being/God of Christianity.
Unfortunately, early missionaries and anthropologists never saw in uNkulunkulu an
equal to the Supreme Being/God of Christianity. For them, uNkulunkulu was not a par-
ticularization of the Ultimate reality but the projection of the Supreme/ God of Christian-
ity. This flawed assumption was constructed on the ground of economic need. In effect,
as they gained land and needed labour to participate in the mercantile economy, mission-
aries and anthropologists turned to the quest of finding affinities between their religion
and the African people. They believed that finding affinities with African religions was an
effective method to transfer and impress upon them the corresponding feature of Chris-
tian meaning.24 In this sense, they understood uNkulunkulu as the African expression of
the Supreme/God of Christianity.
Moreover, missionaries and anthropologists were convinced that finding affinities
with African religions was a convenient way to facilitate the announcement of the Chris-
tian gospel to the Africans and convince them that Christianity was not a foreign religion,
but rather a religion that suited their religious systems. Rosalind Shaw calls these
attempts to establish affinities, “residual categories”. According to her, they entailed
implicit negative religious discrimination.25 Shaw contends that African religions, in
these attempts, were defined in contrast to “great religious systems”, and were accorded
a positive evaluation solely on the basis that they had contributed historically to and over-
lapped with the latter.26 In this sense, muses Shaw, the “primal” category, meaning
African religions, was given greater solidity by the ascription to it of certain features,
which render the religious forms in question as if they were more alike than they are,
and at the same time as closely overlapping with, but essentially inferior to,
Christianity.27
Accordingly, argues Shaw, once those categories were distinguished from “great reli-
gions” in a relationship of binary opposition, “primal religions” were thus re-assimilated
to them in a relationship of what she called “subordinate resemblance”.28 This binary
opposition of “traditional/world religion”, according to Shaw, is one variety of what
Vincent Mudimbe called “ideologies of otherness” where the invention of traditional reli-
gions was, in fact, a function of the wider invention of residual categories within tra-
ditional religious studies.29 In Shaw’s analysis, the missionary apprehension of
uNkulunkulu as a projection of the Supreme Being/God of Christianity is an example
of a residual category. This has been attested throughout the history of Zulu tradition
religion.
In 1853, for example, John William Colenso, the Anglican Bishop of Natal, contended
that although the Zulu people did not know their Supreme Being, they, nevertheless, had

24
Kiernan, “African Traditional Religions in South Africa,” 15.
25
Shaw, “The Invention of African Traditional Religion,” 339–353, 341.
26
Ibid., 341.
27
Ibid.
28
Ibid., 342.
29
Ibid.
128 W. L. MAFUTA AND C. J. KAUNDA

two names to refer to him: uNkulunkulu and uMvelinqangi.30 According to Colenso,

uNkulunkulu was the Zulu name for the Christian God and as such, he recommended
it be adopted by all missionary bodies. Similar to Colenso, the German philologist,
Wilhem Bleek, based on linguistic evidence and despite finding no evidence of
worship of uNkulunkulu, contended that the term uNkulunkulu approximated the Chris-
tian concept of God.31 Some scholars, however, resisted the construction of the residual
category. George Champion, for example, although not denying the presence of an ulti-
mate deity among the Zulu, questioned, however, its affinity to the Christian Supreme
Being. Writing to Francis Owen, an Anglican priest, Champion expressed:
The Zulu have no word in their language to express the sublime object of our worship.
The word used in Caffre land and which has been introduced here by Europeans, and
hence known to some of the Zoolous is Uteeko, or as the Missionaries were it Utixo,
but it has a harsh and difficult click in it and has no meaning being a word of Hottentot
extraction. The word Unkulunkulu, a real Zoolu word with an emphatic signification ‘the
great, great’ is objected to by our American friends as a suitable name for the great God,
on the ground of its being applied by the natives to a certain ancient chief, whom they
supposed to have sprung from a reed, and concerning whom they believe various
other things inconsistent with a Deity. It is also the name of certain worm which
makes a covering for itself with grass. They recommend therefore the introduction of
the Hebrew name Elohim, which is easy of pronunciation, besides possessing other
obvious excellencies. 32

Despite the uncertainty of the term, uNkulunkulu, as a residual category, became

entrenched in the missionary scholarship and had come to represent the dominant
school of thought. Outsiders, Africanists and insiders, first-generation African theolo-
gians, propagated this notion all over Africa. Placid Tempels, for example, thought
that “God” in ATRs is the same deity as that presented in Christianity, that divinities
and spirits are mediums linking “God” to humans and that “God” was, at the most, pro-
nounced as a vital force.33 Similarly, E.G. Parrinder attributed the concept of “God”
among African traditional religions.34
For his part, John Mbiti was convinced that Africans do not worship a God different
from the Western Christian God. In effect, he found a similar natural, moral, intrinsic,
eternal and ethical attributes of the Christian God in the deities of many African commu-
nities. For Mbiti, the God of the Bible has been at work in Africa and is the same deity
known and worshiped by Africans.35 Moreover, for him, missionaries did not bring God
to Africa but God brought missionaries to Africa.36 Tempels’, Parrinder’s and Mbiti’s
perception of the God of the Bible as the same as the African Ultimate Reality has
been shared by many other Africanists including but not limited to Kenyatta, Idowu,
Nyamiti, Setliloane, Mushete and Mulago.
These scholars, in their theological construction, were more attuned to address
African religions in Western Hellenic garments. As Okot p.Bitek put it, they dress up

30
Colenso, “The Diocese of Natal.”
31
Bleek, “Researches into the Relations between the Hottentots and Kafirs.”
32
Owen, The Diary of the Rev. Francis Owen, M.A., missionary with Dingaan in 1837–38, 89.
33
Tempels, Bantu Philosophy, 46.
34
Parrinder, African Traditional Religion, 33.
35
Mbiti, Introduction to African Religion, 40.
36
Ibid.
 BLACK THEOLOGY 129

African deities with Hellenic robes and parade them before the Western world.37 They
studied African religions in light of Christianity, thus, they were committed to “Christian
theology” as an ideological driving force or “propaganda”, even “apologetic” of Christian
mission. In this sense, their theological efforts were centred more on the inculturation of
African Christianities. They were involved in what David Westerlund called “the Chris-
tianization of ATRs”.38 or as Jennifer Weir stresses, “The interpretation or “invention” of
uNkulunkulu as [Christian] God, … is an example of white systems of understanding
being grafted on to African systems that are not necessarily compatible, and it has under-
mined the importance of ancestors in Zulu religion and their role in the ideology of the
Zulu state”.39
Nevertheless, both outsider and insider scholars, African religions as religious systems
could not have been constructed apart from the Christian putative normative status.
Thus, they invented a residual category as a fundamental transcendent reference in the
image of monotheist Christianity. It is as if to say, African religions are religions as
long as they have a God who is ultimately transcendent, both present in the world and
yet beyond comprehension, a God who is ultimately un-representable and invisible,
supra-empirical and spiritual, in short, a Christian God.40
Some other scholars rejected this approach of residual category and attempted to re-
instate the Zulu high deity and subsequently African religions, in their own right, as auth-
entic African religions.41 Afrocentric scholars, for example, were determined to construct
African religions as intrinsically rooted in African cosmogony. In her construction of the
Zulu deity, for example, Ana Maria Ferreira went as far as tracing uNkunlunkulu back to
the Kemic concept of the Egyptian cosmogony. She argued that the concept of One
Supreme God governing African cosmogony was inconsistent with the spiritual values
and ethical responsibilities of the human being in Africans’ holistic sense of oneness
of humankind and nature.42
For Ferreira, the idea of a deity or what she called “the meaning of oneness of humankind
with nature” is traced to the Kemic concept of Ma’at which was understood as the balance
and harmonious order of creation where the spirit and matter are inseparable.43 Thus, she
attributed the origin of the Ngunis, the ethnic group from which the Zulu descended, to
Egypt via the Red Sea corridor and Ethiopia.44 According to Ferreira, like the Egyptians,
Sub Saharan Africans believed that the fundamental principle of creation was the equili-
brium of opposites, a perfectly established energy, whose force regulates the universe.45
This harmony that pre-exists chaos is translated into Ma’at, the organizing principle of
human society, the creative spirit of phenomena and the eternal order of the universe.46
These cosmological and ethical concepts, according to Ferreira, were recreated
through oral tradition, narratives of creation, passed from generation to generation,

37
p.Bitek, African Religion in Western Scholarship, 80.
38
Westerlund, African Religion in African Scholarship, 89.
39
Weir, “Whose uNkulunkulu?”
40
Beyer and Beaman, Religion, Globalization, and Culture, 172.
41
Maluleke, “Half a Century of African Christian Theologies.”
42
Ferreira, “Reevaluating Zulu Religion,” 347–363, 347.
43
Ibid., 355.
44
Ibid.
45
Ibid., 356.
46
Asante, Kemet, Afrocentricity, and Knowledge, 84.
130 W. L. MAFUTA AND C. J. KAUNDA

symbolizing the spirit of the ancestors considered to be the guardian of an individual’s

quest for the generative force of cosmic harmony.47 In this sense, she located uNkulun-
kulu, uNkululu, or O(n)kulukulu as emerging from narratives of creation from different
Zulu ethnic sources as one consistent concept of a First Creator.48 The problem with
Afrocentric scholars, such as Ferreira, is her entanglement with Egyptian civilization.
It is unfortunate, that most Afrocentrists have failed to envision African religious
systems of sub-Sahara Africa without any implicit or explicit connection to Egyptian civi-
lization. These scholars tend to talk of Africa as if there is not a cultural demarcation
between the North and South. The geographical and cultural demarcation between
these two regions gives rise to different apprehension of the idea of a deity. In this
sense, to argue that everything African needs to evolve from Egyptian civilization is
revisionist.
Non-Afrocentric scholars, such as Irving Hexham, have attributed the idea of uNku-
lunkulu to social institutions of Zulu traditions. Hexham shared the view that the idea of
uNkunlunkulu, in the Zulu mythology, referred to the first ancestor, the one who had
created the nation by giving it its basic technology. It was an idea that did not have
any implications of deity, mused Hexham.49 For him, it was only after the Europeans
heard the natives refer to uNkulunkulu as the “old one”, the one who had given the
tribe its beginning that they started to co-opt it for their own theological discussions
and explanations of the Zulu. It was only then that the word gradually came to be
used by the Zulu with connotations of deity attached to it.50
Similarly, Henry Callaway attributed the notion of uNkulunkulu as the first ancestor,
the old-old one as in the use of great in great-great-grandfather, without any transcen-
dental attribute.51 According to Callaway, uNkulunkulu was not eternal or immortal.
He was a being who had existed in the past and, as part of that existence, had made
those who formed the first group of people. uNkulunkulu had been created before he
gave people’s ancestors, doctors, diviners and medicines.52 In this sense, argued Call-
away, uNkulunkulu was a common term used in each household, family and lineage
of the Zulu. It was not fixed and could belong to several families.53
It is contested on whether uNkulunkulu originated from Egyptian civilization, as Fer-
reira has argued, or was constructed from contact with Europeans, as Hexham has con-
tended, and that it did not, at first, carry the idea of transcendence, as Callaway has
argued. What is not in dispute, is its validity as a high god, or deity and ways in
which uNkulunkulu was subjected to a denial/discovery discourse instituted by the
Western colonialists, missionaries and anthropologists. In effect, it was common for
the Europeans to deny the notion of a deity when it ran against their agenda and to dis-
cover it when it favoured their colonial enterprise. In other words, the Europeans
invented a theory of “otherness” where indigenous people were seen as subjects of con-
quest and not as fellow humans.

47
Ferreira, “Reevaluating Zulu Religion,” 358.
48
Ibid., 358.
49
Hexham, “Lord of the Sky-King of the Earth,” 273.
50
Ibid.
51
Callaway, The Religious Systems of the Amazulu, 17.
52
Ibid., 40.
53
Ibid.
 BLACK THEOLOGY 131

High Deity as Moral Agency in Religious Particularizations

It was argued that high deity in non-Christian religions was not the principal spiritual
and moral agency directly affecting human life, making, therefore, these religions non-
committal and fundamentally amoral.54 High gods in African Tradition Religions, for
example, were regarded as morally distant and non-active moral retributors. This so-
called moral indifference of the supreme creator god and the absence of a retributive
eschatology have led some observers to conclude that ethical concerns were not
central to African religions.55 These observers failed to note that in African religions,
the maintenance of essential moral norms is performed by spiritual agents of much
lower standing: namely, ancestors, living chiefs as practitioners of politics and spiritual
acts, and spirits of nature, or ghosts. This morally vital work is carried out amidst the
affairs of living members of the community, and reward and punishment, though
mediated by spiritual entities, occur within this life.56 In Zulu’s cosmogony, for
example, this hierarchical attribution is represented as follows (Figure 1).
In this cosmological hierarchy, the high god is the supreme authority who is morally
good. Ancestors are dead individuals, who while alive, did well within the community.
Their attributes as ancestors are, in fact, a reward for their community involvement
while they were alive. They are the moral guardians as well as enforcers of the commu-
nities’ apparatus such as customs and rituals. Their presence and conduct impinge on the
life of the common Zulu. Individuals, who have lived in non-conformity to the rules and
regulations of the community by committing immoral acts, upon their death become
Spirits of nature. They wander in Zulu cosmogony and are responsible for evil acts
and causing harm to the common people. This interrelationship between humans and
spiritual beings reveals moral content that shows the degree to which the Zulu religion
is shaped by moral concerns.
Missionaries and Western elites, by failing to observe this moral presence of the
religio-societal dynamic among African religions’ practitioners, propagated their pater-
nalistic notion of African religions being fundamentally amoral. They treated Africans
as savages without any moral ability and reduced them to the status of beasts and
animals. Hick’s postulation of the presence of saints as moral agents in global religious
systems, however, challenges these paternalistic assumptions that were grounded on a
Christian putative normative status.
For Hick, by virtue of the soteriological criterion, individuals in global religious
systems are saved/liberated, and as such, have moved from self-centeredness to
Reality-centeredness. In other words, these individuals produce the fruit of saintliness
that is found in theistic as well as non-theistic religions. The presence of saints in
these religious systems underpins the notion that morality is not exclusive to Christian-
ity. It also challenges the notion of the moral superiority of Christianity over other reli-
gious traditions.
Arguing along these lines, Hick contends, “I have not found that people of the other
world religions are, in general, on a different moral and spiritual level from Christians.

54
Green, “Religion and Morality in the African Traditional Setting,” 4.
55
Ibid., 4.
56
Ibid., 11.
132 W. L. MAFUTA AND C. J. KAUNDA

Figure 1. Zulu cosmological hierarchy.

They seem on average to be neither better nor worse than are Christians”.57 Moreover, he
wrote:
The move from Christian inclusivism to pluralism, although in one way seems so natural
and inevitable, sets Christianity in a new and to some an alarming light in which there
can no longer be any a priori assumption of overall superiority. Today, we cannot help
feeling that the question of superiority has to be posed as an empirical issue, to be settled
(if indeed it can be settled) by examination of the facts.58

Hick’s own encounter with people of different faiths in England led him to establish that
good and evil are incommensurable. In effect, after factually observing and reading his-
torical accounts of people of faiths other than Christianity, he concluded that the virtues
and vices seem to spread more or less evenly among human beings, regardless of whether
they are Christians or Jews, Muslims, Hindus or Buddhists.59 In this sense, morality
appears as a function of human nature that generates the invisible dimension of moral
value, argued Hick.60

Conclusion
Based on Hick’s factual observation, one can only conclude that the Christian putative
moral norm does not stand. There is no such thing as the moral superiority of Christian-
ity over non-Christian religions. Each religion carries a moral function that is intrinsi-
cally related to the socio-religious systems of a given society. In the Zulu religion, it is
in the apprehension of the Ultimate Reality or uNkulunkulu that individuals measure
their moral acts. The presence of saints, including the ancestors and the living chiefs,
57
Hick, “A Pluralistic View,” 29–59 (39).
58
Hick, The Myth of Christian Uniqueness, 23.
59
Hick, An Interpretation of Religion, 98.
60
Ibid.
 BLACK THEOLOGY 133

in Zulu religion sanctions what Kant called “the deep structure of universal moral and
religious reason”. This deep structure of moral consideration reveals the interpersonal
relationships of the common people within themselves and with living chiefs, spirits of
nature, and ancestors. The Zulu constantly live in a moral dynamic with one another
and with deities. On this consideration alone, it is difficult to dismiss this interpersonal
moral dynamic and label it as inferior to Christianity.

Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on Contributors
Willy L Mafuta, PhD, ThD,World Christianity and Society, Princeton Theologically Seminary,
Princeton, New Jersey, USA
Chammah J. Kaunda, PhD, College of Theology and the United Graduate School of Theology,
Yonsei University.

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