The woman's heart-rending scream broke the silence of a small village on the shores of Lake Tanganyika. In the dim morning light on the sand, still fresh with dew, lay a shapeless pile of bone and meat that had just been human.
Gradually, residents gathered around the remains. All were silent. And one, stepping closer, picked up some gray hair.
- Mngwa!
This word echoed among the rest of the inhabitants.
- Mngwa! repeated another, bending over the footprints in the wet sand.
It found itself a new victim.
Mngwa is another secret of Africa. In Swahili it is called mu-ngwa, which means invisible.
Very often Africans confuse this animal (also called nunda) with nandi-ber (nandi bear). While another African mysterious beast, the chemosit, is presented in many forms, the Mngwa is a primordially feline creature - a mechanism of precise muscles that act like steel springs when jumping, powerful, fail-safe claws and teeth. And while the scene of the first is spread to the south right up to the Transvaal, the second has a very limited area - the shores of Lake Tanganyika.
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An African tiger the size of a donkey … An unknown animal the size of a lion …
“It can be assumed that such an animal does not exist,” writes W. Hichens. - But I have heard so many times about his victims that for me there is no doubt that this unknown creature is found in the deep forests by the lake. Many parts of this forest have not yet known man."
Legends of Sultan Majnun
We can say that the mngwa is as much a mythical animal for the fishermen of Tanganyika as a werewolf is for our Western European forests. He appears in many Swahili stories and poems. Captain Hitchens quotes the song of the warrior Leongo Fumo va Ba-Uriu:
Sikae muyini kuwa kitu duni
nangie mwituni haliwa na mngwa.
(I don't live in the city so I don't get lazy.
I dive into the forest to be devoured by the mngwa.)
This song is 1150 years old. Today this image still lives on among the local population.
If we turn to the legend of Sultan Majnun, cited by Edward Steele in Swahili Tales, we can see that there this image occupies the same place as the dragon in the legends of the East. Judge for yourself.
Once the Sultan's cat ran away from home and went "a little" to hunt in the chicken coop. The guards asked the Sultan for permission to kill the cat, but he replied: "My cat and my chickens."
The cat finished with the chickens and took up the sheep and cows, did not even forget the camels. And each time the Sultan would not let the cat be killed, saying that everyone he killed belongs to him, the Sultan. All this lasted until one day the cat lifted the three sons of the Sultan. This time Majnun changed his policy: "This is no longer a cat, this is a nunda!"
The seventh son of the Sultan decides to kill the evil animal. He kills a large dog and returns home with a song:
Mama wee niulaga
Nunda mia watu.
(Oh mama, I killed the man-eating nundu.)
But the mother hesitated. The young man then killed a civet, a zebra, a giraffe, a rhinoceros, an elephant, thinking every time that he had killed a nundu, and every time his mother said that he was wrong.
And then one day, warned that he would not be allowed home without the corpse of the nunda, the young man went deep into the forest and there he saw a real killer:
“It should be nunda. Mother told me that her ears are small and they are small. Mother told me that it should be broad in bone, not oblong. She is. She should have two spots, like a civet, and she does. The tail is as short as the one mentioned by the mother, and all the signs are there."
The young man killed her with a gun. His mother greeted him with a song:
Mwanangu ndiyiyi
Nunda mla watu!
(Oh son, she's yours, ogre nunda!)
The end of the story is classic: the son inherits the power of his father, marries a beautiful girl and lives for a long time in love and harmony with the people. This legend has one important aspect. She tries to bring the nundu closer to all known animals - a cat.
The monster doesn't like the police
What is Mngwa? Some kind of mythical animal, born of the imagination of Africans. So they thought until the 1920s.
Today, as Frank Lane says with his characteristic humor, a series of events that took place on the shores of Lake Tanganyika have transferred the Nundu from the land of fantasy to the category of government reports.
The dossier collected by Captain Hitchens on this matter is the most detailed. The first message takes us back to 1922 in the town of Lindy.
“Local merchants left all their wares in the town's main square every evening to resume trading in the morning. In order to protect the goods from thieves, an askari remained near them - a local policeman who took turns with two colleagues every four hours.
Having come to replace his comrade, Askari did not find him on the spot. Looking around, he saw him - torn to pieces. A white officer who arrived at the scene of the murder stated that the soldier had been the victim of a lion. The dead man's hand was convulsively gripping a lock of gray wool from the lion's mane. But not a single lion has been seen near the town for many years.
The next morning we were sitting and discussing this story with the local headman, when an Arab governor came to us, with two frightened residents. They saw the very giant cat that tore the askari to pieces.
Livali said that the nunda had already visited the villages. This is not a lion or a leopard, but a type of giant cat as tall as a donkey and a tabby coloration (like our regular cat). That night, another policeman was torn to shreds. His twisted fingers had the same hair …"
An atmosphere of fear and suspicion was established in the village. The number of soldiers doubled. They started talking about witchcraft. Confident that it was a lion, Hitchens sent this hair to headquarters, which was supposed to be from a lion. The answer was unexpected. Hair is uncharacteristic for a mane and generally does not belong to a lion. It must be some other cat.
Poisoned meat was spread everywhere, traps were set - no one was caught. The police combed the entire area around. Alas! The killings continued. And one day, unexpectedly, both began and ended.
They resumed only after a ten-year hiatus, at the end of the 30s. Referring again to Hitchens's notes:
“Quite a long time ago, in Mching, a small village on the banks of the Tanganyika, I was called to a stretcher, on which lay a man who was attacked by a large animal. He said it was Mngwa. He was an experienced hunter of lions, leopards and other predators.
He could not be mistaken in recognizing the predator attacking him as an unknown monster. And he could not lie to him: after all, his honor was at stake. The locals clearly have three names in their language - simba (lion), nsui (leopard) and mngwa - something in between all large cats."
Dr. Patrick Bowen, who made so many skeptical remarks about the actions of the nandi bear, attributing them to the atrocities of the sorcerers, turned out to be of a completely different opinion regarding the mngwa. The fact is that he saw the trail of this creature with his own eyes.
Accompanied by the famous Boer hunter, Bowen came to the village, where not long before the Mngwa had killed a man. Walking in the footsteps of the culprit of the misfortunes, both at first thought that the tracks belonged to a large lion. But then they reached sandy soil, where the prints were clearly visible. The footprints looked more like the footprints of a giant leopard, but not a lion.
The wool found on the stakes of the kraal, where the mngwa operated, was speckled, but not at all like the hair of a leopard …