Gihanga (Gihanga Ngomijana, 'the Founder'), the divine culture-hero and founder-king of the Nyiginya dynasty in Rwandan oral tradition. He belongs to the Ibimanuka ('those fallen from the heavens'), the celestial royal ancestry that the dynastic poem Ubucurabwenge traces from Nkuba (Lightning, king of the sky) through Kigwa/Sabizeze and Muntu down to Gihanga. As culture-hero he is credited with introducing cattle-keeping, fire, ironworking and the forge, pottery, hunting and woodworking, and with instituting centralized kingship and the dynastic drum Kalinga (Karinga); the perpetual 'Fire of Gihanga' at the royal court, bound to the kingdom's well-being, embodied his founding act. He is the reputed ancestor of the Rwandan kings, succeeded by his son Kanyarwanda I Gahima, eponym of Rwanda. Jan Vansina, applying critical method to the oral corpus, treats Gihanga as a legendary archetype of the transition from clan leadership to monarchy rather than a single historical individual; he is here typed demigod as a divinely-descended, cultically-venerated founder-hero whose direct parents do not figure in this corpus.