Shing'weng'we (the all-devouring ogre)

Shing'weng'we is the all-devouring ogre of the most celebrated Sukuma myth, told among the Sukuma of north-western Tanzania both as a prose tale and as part of a long Sukuma song. In the story the monster swallows all the people of the world together with their domestic animals; only one pregnant woman escapes, hiding in a pile of chaff. The son she bears, Masala Kulangwa, grows up, seeks out the ogre, kills it and cuts it open, whereupon his father and all the swallowed people and herds come out alive and the young hero is made chief. The tale was recorded and studied by the Maryknoll missionary-ethnographers Donald Sybertz and Joseph Healey, retold in an illustrated edition by Max Tertrais with the Sukuma painter Charles Ndege, and issued in English, Swahili and Sukuma versions by the Ndoleleji Research Committee of Shinyanga. It is the Sukuma form of the swallowing-monster cycle told widely across Bantu-speaking Africa, distinctive in that both the monster and the hero bear proper names.

Domains

• ogres and monsters
• devouring

Powers

• to swallow whole the people and herds of the earth

Relations

• enemy: Masala Kulangwa (the clever hero who slew Shing'weng'we)

Sources

• Joseph G. Healey and Donald Sybertz, Towards an African Narrative Theology (Nairobi: Paulines Publications Africa, 1996; Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1997), 64-65
• Max Tertrais, The Clever Young Man and the Monster: The Sukuma Myth of Shing'weng'we and Masala-Kulangwa, illustrated by Charles Ndege (Nairobi: Paulines Publications Africa, 2000)
• Donald Sybertz and the Ndoleleji Research Committee, Tears of Joy: An African Story about Heroes and Monsters (Dar es Salaam: Mathews Bookstore & Stationers, 2006)