Ng'wana Malundi (the legendary elephant-hunter and culture-hero)

Ng'wana Malundi (widely Swahilized as Mwanamalundi) is a legendary Sukuma elephant-hunter who, in the ethnomusicological record, has attained the status of a trickster culture-hero. His name is attached to kahena, the song-genre of the legendary elephant-hunter, performed within the Bagika strand of the competitive Sukuma dance societies, and he stands at the imaginative head of the nineteenth-century bayege (elephant-hunter) associations whose songs commemorate the bravery and medicines of the hunt. Beyond the hunting songs, a large body of popular Sukuma oral tradition exalts Mwanamalundi as a wonder-worker and rainmaker credited with marvels such as parting and walking over the sea near Zanzibar, causing trees and crops to wither or revive at a gesture, and leaving footprints stamped into rock. These tales blur the line between a remembered nineteenth-century personage and a folkloric hero; the registry records him here as the individuated culture-hero of the hunters' song tradition, while noting the broader legendary cycle attached to his name.

Domains

• hunting
• trickery
• music and dance

Powers

• to hunt the elephant by craft and potent medicine
• to overcome adversaries by cunning and wonder-working

Epithets

• Ng'wana Malundi

Sources

• Frank Gunderson, Sukuma Labor Songs from Western Tanzania: 'We Never Sleep, We Dream of Farming' (Leiden: Brill, 2010)
• Frank Gunderson, 'We Will Leave Signs: The Intertextual Song Praxis of Elephant Hunters (Bayege) within the Greater Sukuma Region of Western Tanzania', History and Anthropology 19, no. 4 (2008): 339-357