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Whether there was a pre-contact concept of a Supreme Being, uNkulunkulu or God among nineteenth-century Zulu is probably one of the most intriguing questions concerning Zulu 'religion'. Many nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writers influenced by Christianity were interested in the possible existence among the Zulu, and other southern African groups in Natal, of an understanding of Creation, God (or a Supreme Being), Heaven and the hereafter. Many accounts noted that the Zulu appear to have a tradition of uNkulunkulu who sprang from a bed of reeds. Others simply talk of a notion, either conscious or latent, of a Supreme Being. Early European writers, both missionaries and laymen, took belief in God to be critical to determine the existence or absence of 'religion' among southern Africans. The interpretation or 'invention' of uNkulunkulu as God, however, is an example of white systems of understanding being grafted on to African systems that are not necessarily compatible, and it has undermined the importance of ancestors in Zulu religion and their role in the ideology of the Zulu state.
EUROPEAN PERCEPTION OF ABSENCE OF INDIGENOUS RELIGION
The survivors of the Stavenisse shipwreck in the late seventeenth century reported that the 'natives' of Natal had no religion whatsoever (Bird [1888] 1965: 45). One of the earliest accounts comes from the traveller Nathaniel Isaacs ([1836] 1937: 248), who said that they had 'no idea of a deity, no knowledge of a future state [and] they cannot comprehend the mystery of creation'. Reverend Francis Owen, who began his missionary work among the Zulu in 1837, also remarked that they had not the faintest notion of a God (Owen 1926: 94) as did Adulphe Delegorgue, who hunted in the KwaZulu-Natal region in the 1830s and 1840s (Bird [1888] 1965: 485).
Slowly, however, a contrary view began to take root.1 Captain Alien Gardiner and Reverend Joseph Shooter subscribed to the belief that there had been an historical decay of knowledge particularly relating to the notion of a powerful creator of all things, heaven and an afterlife or eternity. When Gardiner questioned the people in the mid-1830s about who made the sun, moon, mountains and rivers, they replied that it was the 'Incosi pezulu', but that they knew nothing more. From his conversation with Umkolwani...