Inyanga

Inyanga is a Gangrel elder and a member of the Chicago primogen.

As a mortal, she was a shaman who lived among the African nation that would later become the Zulus. Her exact sorcerous powers are uncertain, but she was capable of shapeshifting and was well-versed in knowledge of the ways of the spirits. In the 5th century, a vampire called "The Egyptian" began feeding on her people. She attacked the creature with her sorcery, and the two fought to the point where each was nearly finished by the other. The struggle finally ended when her foe, barely stronger than her, Embraced her as she was near death. Over the next week, Inyanga and the Egyptian taught one another their respective secrets; at the end of the week, when her sire sought to return to her people and make them his herd, Inyanga impaled him through the heart with a spear, and watched him burn in the sunrise.

In a battle with a rogue Malkavian in 1537, Inyanga was forced into torpor. She had her loyal retainer ship her torpid form to the Americas, where she lay in the care of her retainer's mortal descendants for two centuries. Upon awakening in Baltimore, her hunger caused her to slay her last remaining caretaker in a frenzy, and she fled the city in shame. Inyanga thus traveled to Chicago, seemingly out of curiosity towards the rise of Prince Maxwell &mdash; the first black Prince of any American city. She arrived in 1852, and soon joined the city's primogen. Inyanga retained her seat in the primogen after Maxwell was ousted by Lodin in 1871, and became a recurring thorn in Lodin's side. During the aftermath of the War of Chicago in 1993, in which Lodin was destroyed by either Kindred or Garou, Inyanga acted alone to negotiate a temporary and fragile peace accord with the Garou, though she presented herself to the Garou as the representative of the city's Kindred.

Although the Gangrel clan withdrew from the Camarilla in 1999, Inyanga retained both her position in the primogen and her somewhat nominal ties to the sect. When her clanmate Beckett traveled to Chicago in 2001, Inyanga and other members of the primogen spoke with him about the new breed of hunters, though she was the only one not to treat him with overt suspicion or to impede his investigation. Later, in 2003, Inyanga and a number of her most renowned clanmates assisted the ex-Justicar Xaviar and ex-Archon Theo Bell in the destruction of an infernal slave ring that had been preying on the vulnerability of the newly-independent Gangrel.