Mukiti is the great water-serpent who governs the deep river that runs by the village of Tubondo. Able to assume both serpentine and human shape, in his human form he courted and wed Iyangura, the sister of Shemwindo, and installed her in his aquatic domain. He controls the river's creatures and its passage, and his junior sister Musoka guards the calmer upstream shallows. When the infant Mwindo travels the waters toward his aunt, it is Mukiti's realm he must cross; the divinity is thus the master of the aquatic threshold between the human world and the deeper cosmos of the epic.