Mbegha is the founder-hero and first king of the Shambaa, celebrated in the most famous of all Shambaa myths, of which Feierman recorded more than two dozen versions. A hunter from the Ngulu hills south of Shambaai, he was cast out by his kin, who denied him his inheritance because he was a kigego, a child of ill omen said to have cut his upper teeth first and to bring death to his relatives. Coming north as a stranger, he rid the people of Ziai and then Bumbuli of the wild pigs destroying their crops, and was rewarded with a wife, the daughter of Mbogho; when he killed a lion that had been taking the cattle, the people made him king. As Simba Mwene, the Lion King, he is remembered as the origin of the rain magic on which the fertility of the land depends, and his name, echoing mbega the colobus monkey, marks him as a being poised between the human and the animal, the settled village and the untamed forest. His myth is the charter of the Kilindi dynasty, whose capital his son Bughe founded at Vugha.