INKOSAZANA

Goddess

Inkosazana, in Zulu iNkosazana yezulu, the princess of the sky, is one of the great feminine figures of the Zulu religion, more widely known under the name of Nomkhubulwana. The ethnographers of the twentieth century, from Eileen Krige to Axel-Ivar Berglund, describe her as a celestial virgin who shows herself in spring, veiled in mist or fine rain, and whose passage makes the fields turn green. She presides over the fertility of the crops, watches over young girls and conveys messages to the diviners. Her traditional cult presents a remarkable trait: it belongs to women. In spring, the young girls cultivated a field for her set apart and brewed beer; during certain rites, they put on men's clothes and drove the cattle. Max Gluckman analysed these ceremonies as rituals of inversion in which the social order is suspended for a time. Berglund reports that she also appears in dreams and near stretches of water, certain narratives lending her the form of a fish woman, and that one avoids looking her in the face. Her rites, fallen dormant over the course of the twentieth century, are enjoying a revival in KwaZulu-Natal, where ceremonies in her honour have been relaunched to accompany the protection of young girls. Inkosazana thus remains a living figure of Zulu spirituality.