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Vusamazulu Credo Mutwa (21 July 1921 to 25 March 2020) was a Zulu sangoma, or traditional healer, born in Natal. He called himself a sanusi, a high diviner. Several of his stories describe lost civilizations that resemble the Atlantis tale, though they differ sharply from Plato’s account. This page sets out three of them and notes where they come from. For the wider picture, see Sangoma visions from Southern Africa.
Mutwa wrote in English, but he presented his material as Zulu and wider Bantu oral tradition. Scholars dispute how much of it is tradition and how much is his own invention (see the critical debate below).
The Chitauli and the loss of the mind-speech
Source: Mutwa’s 1999 interview with Rick Martin of The SPECTRUM
In this interview Mutwa says that, at first, Earth lay under a thick mist, people lived in peace with nature and spoke to each other through their minds. Then the Chitauli came “in terrible vessels which flew through the air”. He describes them as tall reptile-like beings with long tails. He explains the name this way:
Now, the word Chitauli means “the dictators, the ones who tell us the law”.
Credo Mutwa, interview with Rick Martin, The SPECTRUM, 1999
In his account the Chitauli:
- took away the powers of mind-speech, moving objects with the mind, seeing past and future, and spirit travel;
- gave people speech instead, and “cunningly created different languages” so that people quarrelled;
- set kings and chiefs over the people, saying these rulers had Chitauli blood in them;
- forced people to mine, guiding women to discover copper, gold and silver and then to make alloys such as bronze and brass;
- removed the mist, so that people saw the stars for the first time and began to place God in the sky rather than under the earth.
He links the gold-mining theme to Zecharia Sitchin’s reading of the Sumerian texts, in which gods force humans to mine gold for them. For a different view of that link, see Reptilians.
In the same interview he tells of a land called Amariri, “beyond the setting of the Sun”. Its kings refused the Chitauli’s demands, so the Chitauli “brought down a fire from Heaven” and caused “earthquakes and tidal waves”. Only a few people survived. This is the closest of his stories to Atlantis: a great civilization destroyed for defying its rulers.
The First People, the iron creatures and the Great Flood
Source: Indaba, My Children (1964)
Mutwa’s creation story opens Indaba, My Children. The Great Mother, Ninavanhu-Ma, rises from the ashes of the battle between Fire and Cold. She creates the stars, the sun and the earth. The Great Spirit gives her a companion she does not want: the monstrous Tree of Life. Their children include the Kaa-U-La birds and the first humans, the red-skinned Amarire. Compare this with the Zulu tradition on Unkulunkulu.
The age of the First People ends through Za-Ha-Rrellel, a deformed child who grows up hating people. From the iron ore in his cave he makes creatures called Bjaauni, or Tokoloshes, which kill people and animals. Later he rules an empire where people grow so lazy they cannot walk, and where towns are built of pure gold. Za-Ha-Rrellel seeks forbidden knowledge and makes an artificial sun to mock the gods. A storm, floods and earthquakes destroy the empire. The Bjaauni rebel, and Odu, the strongest of them, kills Za-Ha-Rrellel. Ma spares Odu and Amarava, who become the parents of the Second People, the ancestors of humans today.
The scholar Agnieszka Podolecka writes that Tokoloshes are known in Zulu and other South African traditions, but that this version, with the Tokoloshes made of iron as tools for killing the First People, is “entirely Mutwa’s creation”. For other African flood traditions, see African Flood stories and Great Flood Stories World wide.
Mutwa’s own visions
- Initiation: Mutwa fell seriously ill in 1937. His grandfather, a healer, nursed him back to health. He then trained as a sangoma under his grandfather and his aunt Mynah, and was initiated about two years later.
- Abduction account: in the 1999 interview Mutwa says that in 1959, in the Inyangani mountains of what is now Zimbabwe, he was taken by the Mantindane (“the tormentor”), Grey-like beings he calls “servants of the Chitauli”. He describes a robot “made entirely out of metal”, and visions of half-destroyed cities “half-drowned in a reddish, muddish water”.
- The Necklace of the Mysteries: a necklace of symbols that Mutwa said told the story of Africa and humanity. In a 2010 interview with David Icke, Mutwa says it was taken from him by force in Swaziland.
Readers who see these visions as access to a shared memory of the past may compare them with the Akashic Records. The Chitauli also invite comparison with the Nommo of the Dogon, who came from the sky as benevolent teachers, and with Bashar’s accounts of extraterrestrial contact.
Critical debate
Mutwa is a controversial figure. In a 2002 study, the historian of religion David Chidester traced how others used Mutwa’s authority: to authenticate curios in the 1950s, apartheid’s separations in the 1960s to 1980s, and New Age causes in the 1990s. He concludes:
Although he has sometimes been accused of being a fake, Credo Mutwa, I argue, has been doing authentic religious work by reformulating enduring motifs of indigenous religion, even when his authenticity is certified by aliens.
David Chidester, Journal for the Study of Religion 15(2), 2002
Other scholars are harsher. Podolecka (2018) reports that academics have often rejected him as a fake, and that sangomas she interviewed do not recognise his myths as Zulu tradition.
Two further points weigh on his reputation:
- His collaboration with David Icke on The Reptilian Agenda tied him to conspiracy theories.
- He made statements in support of apartheid, including in his book My People: The Writings of a Zulu Witch-Doctor.
Historical background
Southern Africa did have a gold-trading civilization. The Mapungubwe kingdom in the Limpopo valley moved its capital to Mapungubwe Hill around 1220 and exported gold to the east coast, before its people dispersed around 1300. Bantu-speaking farming communities, who brought iron working, had reached what is now KwaZulu-Natal by about 300 AD. No archaeological trace of a Chitauli civilization or of Amariri has been found.
Conclusion
Mutwa’s stories retell the Atlantis theme in a Southern African setting: a first humanity that lost its mind-speech to the Chitauli, an Amariri destroyed by fire and tidal waves, and an empire of iron creatures ended by a flood. Whether they preserve old tradition or are Mutwa’s own synthesis, they remain among the most vivid modern African accounts of a lost civilization.
