Observations placeholder
Mircea Eliade - The Bantu cosmology
Identifier
011355
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
"Bantu is used as a general label for 300-600 ethnic groups in Africa who speak Bantu languages, distributed from Cameroon east across Central Africa and Eastern Africa to Southern Africa. There are about 250 Bantu languages by the criterion of mutual intelligibility, though the distinction between language and dialect is often unclear, and Ethnologue counts 535 languages.
The Bantu family is fragmented into hundreds of individual groups, none of them larger than a few million people (the largest being the Zulu with some 10 million). The Bantu language Swahili with its 5-10 million native speakers is of super-regional importance as tens of millions fluently command it as a second language."
A description of the experience
Mircea Eliade – Patterns in Comparative religion
Generally, the Supreme Being gives place to a demiurge whom he has himself created and who, in his name and following his instructions, sets the world in order; or to a sun god. So, for certain Bantu peoples the demiurge Unkulunkulu is the creator of the human race, but is subordinate to the supreme being of the sky Utikxo, although he has since pushed the latter into the shade.