The Chewa Creation Myth

The Beginnings of Life

In the beginning there was Chiuta-God and the earth.
Chiuta lived above in the sky
and below him was the earth, waterless and without life.
One day, clouds began to cover the sky;
lightning flared and peals of thunder were heard.
Then the sky opened and from it Chiuta-God,
the first human pair and all the animals
descended in a shower of rain.
They alighted on a flat-topped hill by the name of Kaphiri-Ntiwa,
in the mountains of Dzala-Nyama.
After their descent the soft surface hardened and turned into rock.
On this rock the imprints of their feet
as well as the spoors of many animals can still be seen.
There can be seen two pairs of human feet;
the man’s larger than the woman’s.
There are also imprints of a hoe, a winnowing basket, and a mortar.
Plants and trees grew up, yielding abundant food.God, men and animals lived together in happiness and peace.

The Cataclysm

One day, man accidentally invented fire
by playing with two twirling sticks, one soft, the other hard. They warned him to stop, but he did not want to listen.
In the end the grass was set alight, and there was great confusion.
Among the animals, the dog and goat fled to man for safety;
but the elephant, the lion and their companions ran away,
full of rage against man.
The chameleon escaped by climbing a tree.
He called out to God to follow him,
but Chiuta-God replied that he was too old to climb.
In the end the spider spun a thread lifting him up on high.
Thus God was driven from the earth by the wickedness of man.
As he ascended, he pronounced that
Henceforth man must die and join him in the sky.

Tied to and flowing from this story is the belief in traditional Chewa religion that with the rains come spirits and in the dry season, with the inevitable grass fires that occur the spirits return to the sky. Many of the roles of the chiefs are far more than being a local administrative leader but rather they have a clear religious role. Most of the spirits are actually ancestor spirits and the chief is tasked with performing rituals in the dry season that call for the return of the beneficial ancestor spirits who will bring the rain down with them upon their return. The chief is in the same family line as these ancestor spirits so it is left to him (and sometimes her) to interact with their ‘relatives’. These rituals partly occur in sacred groves that have been protected for centuries and where fire is forbidden and also where the chief’s ancestors are buried. Often these groves are managed by a priestess called the Banda who possibly traces back millennia and may be an institution taken over from the former people of Malawi I have mentioned before that are related to the Kalahari bushmen and the pygmies.
Some of the ideas surrounding chiefs sound truly like the Arthurian legends such as wearing pouches of earth around their neck from their area of control. There would also be a tooth from the recently deceased chief in the pouch to show the continuation of leadership because just as a tooth doesn’t decay neither does the continued leadership of the chiefly line. If the chief did something against the spirits he could fall ill and if the chief is ill then his land is ill. Droughts, pests, fire, infertility of the soil, all could result until the proper balance was returned.
Contrast this with Arthurian stories that state the King is the land and the land is the King. What befalls the king befalls the land and in the some of the King Arthur stories the land experiences drought and ruin after the King is maimed. These Arthurian legends came out of Celtic beliefs so it is interesting to see the connections.