Mpande's - University of Zululand Institutional Repository

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integration between the Zulu kingdom and the British in both the Natal
Colony and the Cape Colony.
While the IlllssIOnanes came to KwaZulu as agents of the British
government, Gospel and western way of life, Mpande used missionary
connections to keep colonial threats of invasion in check. During
Mpande's reign, the Zulu people adhered to traditional norms and values,
believing that the spirits of the dead live long. Ancestral honour and
worship of the Supreme Being (Umvelinqangi) were pre-eminent and
education merely informal, based on imitation and observation. At the
time when Mpande thought that the missionaries might strengthen his
position, ordinary Zulus were frightened by the gospel that evoked terrors
of damnation and hell. They were told that non-believers in Christianity
would be thrown in a fiery furnace where they would bum eternal of
infinity. Zulus who became proselytes of the missionaries were pestered
to recant by their neighbours.
A packaged Christianity ill liturgy presentation, hymnody and
organisation brought about ecclesiastical alienation among the Zulu
people in Mpande's time. During the 1860's, in forms of religious
expreSSIOns the Christian Western "civilisation" received greater
considerations than the potentialities of Mpande's people and their
inheritance.