Some Zulu Customs and Folk-lore :: THE RAINBOW, LIGHTNING, AND ECLIPSES

THE RAINBOW, LIGHTNING, AND ECLIPSES

The Zulus believe in a glorious being whom they call the Queen of Heaven, of great and wondrous beauty, and the rainbow is supposed to be an emanation of her glory. This “Queen of Heaven” (Inkosikazi) is a different person from the Heavenly Princess, to whom the young girls pray regularly once a year, as described on another page.^[7]

Some believe that there is a gorgeously coloured animal at the point where the rainbow appears to come in contact with the earth, and that it would cause the death of any who caught sight of it.^[8]

The natives as a rule are very superstitious about the lightning; if it has struck anything they say “the heavens did it,” they dare not speak of it by name. A person killed by lightning is buried without ceremony, and there is no mourning for him; a tree which has been struck may not be used for fuel; the flesh of any animal so killed is not to be eaten; huts which have been injured by lightning are abandoned, and very often the whole kraal is removed. Persons living in such a kraal may not visit their friends, nor may their friends visit them, until they have been purified and pronounced clean by the doctor. They are not allowed to dispose of their cattle until they also have been attended to by the doctor: even the milk is considered unclean, and people abstain from drinking it.

An eclipse or an earthquake foretells a great calamity, and the natives are terrified whenever an eclipse takes place. The defeat of Cetshwayo by Usibebu a few hours after an earthquake, which was felt all through Zululand in 1883, naturally confirmed them in the belief that it is an evil omen.^[9]

[7]

The rainbow is called utingo lwenkosikazi, “The Queen’s Bow.” See Callaway, Nursery Tales and Traditions of the Zulus, p. 193. Utingo, however, is not “a bow” in our sense (at any rate not in current Zulu speech), but a bent stick or wattle, such as is used in making the framework of a hut. It is difficult to ascertain anything about this inkosikazi; but the Zulu women hold dances on the hills in honour of some Inkosazana—an echo, it may be, of the story of Jephtha’s daughter.

Mr. Dudley Kidd (The Essential Kafir, p. 112) seems to have confused her with Nomkubulwana, who, as Miss Samuelson expressly tells us, is not the same person. It is not clear whether she is identical with the mysterious being called “Inkosazana,” of whom the late Bishop Callaway says: “The following superstition ... appears to be the relic of some very old worship” (Religious System of the Amazulu, p. 253).

She was supposed to appear, or rather to be heard speaking (for she was never seen), in lonely places, and predicted the future, or gave directions which had to be obeyed by the people. “It is she who introduces many fashions among black men. She orders the children to be weaned earlier than usual.... Sometimes she orders much beer to be made and poured out on the mountain. And all the tribes make beer, each chief and his tribe; the beer is poured on the mountain; and they thus free themselves from blame.... I never heard that they pray to her for anything, for she does not dwell with men, but in the forest, and is unexpectedly met with by a man who has gone out about his own affairs, and he brings back her message.”—Ed.

[8]	The Congo people believe the rainbow to be a snake (chama) as do the Yorubas (Oshumare). (See Mr. Dennett’s At the Back of the Black Man’s Mind (p. 142), and Nigerian Studies (p. 217).—Ed.

[9]

The earthquake referred to took place in 1883, during the night which preceded Cetshwayo’s defeat by Usibebu at Ulundi. My sister (Mrs. Faye) and I were camped out some ten miles from Melmoth, when, about midnight, the wagonette in which we were sleeping was shaken and began to move down hill, but was fortunately stopped after a few yards by a block of wood lying in the grass. The natives who were near us exclaimed that it meant a calamity to the Zulu nation. And in the morning, when we got down from the wagonette, we found a great number of men sitting about looking sad, with their arms over their shoulders (meaning “we are lost”). They told us that Cetshwayo had been killed by Usibebu; in fact, the latter had made a clean sweep of the royal kraal and all the king’s men. In less than an hour later we saw numbers of people, some running, some limping, some crawling past us, who had just managed to escape with their lives. Cetshwayo, wounded badly in the leg, was saved, and taken for protection to Eshowe, where he died early in the following year. (See Mr. Gibson’s The Story of the Zulus, p. 256, new edition.)

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