Harriet Ngubane was born in 1929 at Inchanga, a rural area near Pietermaritzburg, kwaZulu-Natal (KZN). She was brought up as a Roman Catholic but grew to embrace African-centred belief systems, including notions of how humanity and the world came into being. Ngubane was particularly fascinated with the centrality of the female figure, Nomkhubulwane, the goddess of fertility in Zulu cosmology.