Kontron is one of the two mythical founders of the donso, the hunters' confraternities whose lore underlies much of Maninka esoteric religion. Invariably named together with Sanene in the hunters' invocations, Kontron belongs to no clan and is celebrated for chastity and purity, qualities the confraternities trace to the primordial pair's expiation of an ancient sin. The legend recounts that two young hunters, driven mad by thirst amid the ruins of old Ghana, killed a newborn to seize the water in its mother's breast; struck dead by God and then resurrected, they vowed to remain pure and became the eternal masters of the bush and its game. Kontron presides over the transmission of hunters' knowledge, the songs of the donso bards, and the handling of nyama, the occult energy released when an animal or person is killed. The ethnographer Youssouf Tata Cissé linked Kontron and Sanene to still older solar and twin figures of Mande cosmology, but the sources differ on their exact identity and even their sex.