The dimu (plural marimu) is the ogre of Kaguru and wider Bantu folktale, a cannibalistic monster that is never quite human even when it wears human form. Reflex of a very old and widely diffused Bantu figure, it stalks the tales as a devourer of the unwary, often appearing as a suitor, a stranger or a leopard and unmasked by some grotesque sign such as a second mouth concealed at the back of its head. Where the trickster cycle probes the everyday morality of cunning and greed, the ogre embodies a starker danger, the threat of a predatory otherness at the edge of the human world, and the stories that feature it dwell on vigilance, cleverness and the narrow escapes by which victims outlast the monster.