In this edition of the Paranormal Alphabet we head on over to Africa to the Congo Basin Region where a monster known as the Mokele Mbembe is said to inhabit within the swampy waters that are hidden away in the dense and mostly untouched rainforests within the basin. Mokele Mbembe is interpreted from the Lingala dialect as meaning “one who stops the flow of rivers” and another lesser known name of the creature is Emeula Natuka which in the Bomitaba dialect is interpreted as meaning “eater of the tops of the palms”.
Reports of dinosaur-like cryptids in Africa isn’t so uncommon and many types have been reported from the Nsanga, the Jago-Nini to the Amali. And is it not possible that in such a densely forested continent with many isolated and vast areas that still remain largely untouched by the modern world that some kind of surviving dinosaur or a close ancestor of one could still be hidden away among small groups here? I would not say it is completely out of the question, although it can be very hard to believe as many are described as so-large you’d expect something conclusive of them would have been caught by now.
The Mokele Mbembe is described as looking like a large reptile-type creature with a long neck and tail, reminiscent of a dinosaur with some saying it looks like a Brontosaurus and that its diet is that of a herbivore, although some stories have described it also possessing a single horn or large long tooth that it has used to defend itself, such as by killing elephants. It is also said to roar aggressively if humans or other animals get too close and will also kill anything that gets close enough, which means the animal or whatever it is could be highly territorial. This described behavior also reminds me of the hippopotamus, a mostly herbivorous but extremely territorial and dangerous animal.
Some locals believe the Mokele Mbembe is spiritual rather than physical and a number of locals have also said they believe the animal has since died out. There is a story from local pygmies in the area telling of how they erected wooden stakes in an attempt to have an area to safely fish within without the danger of being attacked and killed by the creature, but in response the Mokele Mbembe creatures attacked the stakes, the tribesmen attacked them back in defense, killing one of the creatures which they later cooked up and consumed in a celebratory feast but the tale ends with everyone who had eaten some of the creature having died.
Sightings of the creature are most prominent in the Likouala region within the Republic of the Congo and is where many expeditions have taken place in an attempt to find and discover the animal. Sightings of the creature have also been reported less prominently in other countries within the Congo Basin Region such as Cameroon, Gabon and the Central African Republic. Sightings of the creature have first been recorded as far back as the 17th Century when Europeans first made contact with the indigenous peoples of the area, but it is likely unrecorded sightings of the creature have happened long since before that time.
The first recorded report in 1776 comes from a French missionary Abbe Leu Bonventure where he reported coming across the pugmarks of the creature with a circumference of 3 feet and said that although he had not actually seen the creature itself it must have been monstrous.
There have been over 50 recorded expeditions to find the creature either as a main or side objective.
The expeditions to find this creature have been dangerous for participants due to the relatively unexplored nature and sheer isolation of the area it is meant to inhabit as well as the dangers from this swampy terrain, the local fauna and isolated tribes in the area that have attacked the expeditions in the past, disease has also hampered many expeditions.
As missionaries begun going through the area in the 19th Century the recorded reports of the sightings of the Mokele Mbembe multiplied and there have been noted a stark similarity in the stories told by people from a vast plethora of cultures there. The discovery of the Okapi by westerners in 1901 within the Congo Region, an animal believed by them to have been extinct up until that point, with many of the locals of the area referring to it as a striped donkey or unicorn, fueled excitement that the Mokele Mbembe could yet also be discovered, other discoveries also included the white rhino and mountain gorilla, which had been talked about by natives of which scientists disputed their existence until their discovery. The Okapi even became the emblem of the International Society of Cryptozoology. There have been claims from many of the expeditions of discovering large footprints that may belong to the creature deep within the rainforests.
An expedition was launched in 1920 by the Smithsonian Institute in Washington D.C sending a 32-member team of men to the area. The expedition claimed to find some compelling evidence such as unknown tracks along a river and strange roaring sounds emanating from an unexplored swamp that they could not identify with a known animal. Unfortunately, the expedition ended with 4 members being crushed to death and a number of others injured after a train they were traveling on to an area where a tribe had claimed to see the creature derailed.
A different expedition in 1932 by Ivan Sanderson, an American Cryptozoologist, was one expedition that also found a set of unusual tracks, with some explanation being they could have been from Hippopotamus, but that the animals were not known to exist in the area of Central Africa they were in. Later on, in the expedition while boating Ivan also claimed to see something descend into the water which he says was larger than a hippopotamus and believed it to be the Mokele Mbembe.
The arrival and havoc caused by World War 1 and then World War 2 unfortunately lead to a stall of these western expeditions to the area with only a select few happening since then but nothing on quite the scale seen from colonial expeditions before the outbreak of the wars.
Expeditions since this time have included collecting eyewitness testimonies and even collection of sound recordings of noises apparently made by the unknown creature such as a recording collected by Herman Regusters in 1980 supposedly made by the beast, which can be found and listened to on Youtube. Another interesting account comes from Marcellin Agnaga, a zoologist, in his expedition to Lake Tele in April 1983 where he described he and his team witness the creature raise its long neck out of the water.
A particular expedition in 1985-86 by William J. Gibbons from the UK is noted for bringing back the remains of a monkey he was unable to identify which ended up being classified as a new subspecies of crestless mangabey. He also believes that the Mokele Mbembe exists, so much so that he returned 6-years later in 1992 for another expedition alongside Rory Nugent, an American explorer. Together they traversed through much of the unexplored Bai River, Nugent also snapped two photos of something unidentified in the water. There are not many alleged photos out there of the Mokele Mbembe.
One of the only pieces of alleged video evidence that exists of the Mokele Mbembe came from a Japanese film crew expedition in 1987 (some sources seem to say 1992) led by Tatsuo Watanabe. The blurry video captured in Lake Tele appears to show the creature with its long neck and head lifted up out of the water, although sceptics have disputed the video saying it may simply be two men in a canoe with one of them standing up, creating the illusion of a large creature with its neck and head raised up.
Sceptics believe that there is a strong possibility that the Mokele Mbembe is simple mis-identification of another existing animal, for example in 2001 on a BBC short documentary series called Congo, Spirits of the Forest (episode 2), in an interview with Bayaka pygmies, the locals identified the Mokele Mbembe as a Rhinoceros when shown an illustrated manual of wildlife. The Rhinoceros is not a common animal within the Congo Basin Region and it is possible that rare encounters with these animals by the locals evolved into or played a part in the legend of the Mokele Mbembe.
There is also speculation that other described dinosaur-like cryptids in the area are actually also just the Mokele Mbembe or some type of variation of it.
Next up in the Paranormal Alphabet will be O where we will go over the Owlman.
Thank you for reading this post, if you have any queries please Email me, you can find my Email in the Contacts & Community section. Please also follow The Weekly Rambler on Twitter and Facebook which you can access through the buttons at the bottom of this website. You can also use the social media buttons under each blogpost to share with your family, friends and associates. You can also subscribe to Email notifications at the right-side of this website to know whenever a new post goes up (you can easily unsubscribe from this at any time through a button in each Email notification), or alternatively you can use an RSS Feed Reader. Please also join my FB Group The Weekly Ramblers Readers Group where readers can more easily talk with each other and also with me whenever I am on, you can also find it in Community.