Ilembo is the hunter-pioneer who stands at the head of the dynastic traditions of the Babinza, the chiefly clan credited with planting the earliest chiefdoms of Usukuma, the Sukuma country south of Lake Victoria. In the traditions gathered from the chiefly houses, Ilembo leads the venturing of Babinza settlers into new hunting grounds, and the founding women who accompany the pioneers — remembered in the tradition as 'the girls' — knit the newcomers to the country through their marriages. The historian Buluda Itandala took the generations of Ilembo, the war-leader Nkanda and the founding women as the armature of his chronology of the Babinza, whose consolidation of the sparsely settled Lake Victoria hinterland is conventionally placed around the sixteenth century. As founding ancestors of the chiefly lines, the pioneers of this tradition belong to the honored dead of the Sukuma royal houses.