The Mwindo epic is the reason Nyanga is documented at all outside a small region of the eastern Congo forest. In 1956 Daniel Biebuyck and Kahombo Mateene recorded a full performance from She-Karisi Candi Rureke over twelve days, and published the Nyanga text with a facing translation in 1969. The result was one of the first African oral epics available to outside readers in the language in which it was actually performed, rather than in summary or paraphrase, and it changed the argument about whether sub-Saharan Africa had epic at all. The narrative follows Mwindo, born from his mother's palm after his father the chief had ordered every male child killed, who is carried through the underworld, the sky and the water world, defeats a dragon, is disciplined by the lightning god for killing without need, and returns to rule with a lesson about restraint.
The performance is not narration alone. Rureke sang, spoke, danced and mimed, with a chorus and percussion, and the published edition marks which passages were sung, which spoken and which addressed directly to the audience, so the printed book preserves more of the event than a transcript would. Biebuyck recorded three further versions of the epic from other Nyanga narrators in later years, and they differ from Rureke's in episode order, in the number of trials Mwindo undergoes and in how far the lightning god's rebuke is pressed. That variation is the ordinary condition of an oral epic and the reason a single published text should never be treated as the work itself.