Masala Kulangwa, whose name is glossed 'the smart or clever person who understands quickly', is the boy-hero of the central Sukuma myth. The ogre Shing'weng'we had swallowed all the people of the world and their domestic animals; only one pregnant woman escaped by hiding in a pile of chaff, and the son she bore in secret was Masala Kulangwa. Learning from his mother why the world stood empty, he vowed to find the monster, at first triumphantly killing a grasshopper and other small creatures and asking her whether each was Shing'weng'we, until at last he met the ogre itself, slew it, and cut it open, releasing his father and all the swallowed people and animals alive. When in cutting he accidentally nicked the ear of an old woman, she reviled and bewitched him, and he first sought out medicine to heal her; the restored people then raised him in the chief's chair as chief of the whole world, with his mother honored as queen mother. Recorded among the Sukuma by Donald Sybertz and Joseph Healey and retold by Max Tertrais, the tale has also been read in Sukuma Christian narrative theology as a story of deliverance, with the clever young deliverer's mother compared to the mother of the savior.