The Expeditions
From the very beginning Mackal and Powell had three aims: firstly, and most ambitiously, to photograph or capture a living mokele-mbembe; secondly, to gather all the information they could about the creature, its habits, its environment and particularly when and where it had been most recently spotted; thirdly, to meet and interview as many eyewitnesses of the beast as possible.
They had chosen their area of search well for they soon found cooperative witnesses who testified to the continued presence of the creatures. Mackal and Powell were in the upper basin of the Likouala-aux-Herbes river, based for a time at the riverside settlement of Epéna, near which a number of sightings had occurred in recent times. They interviewed about a dozen men and women, most of whom had personally witnessed the creature.
One, a high-ranking army officer who had been born in the area and maintained a home there, had seen the creature twice. Once, in 1948, when he had been paddling in a canoe with his mother, upriver from Epéna, they saw a mokele-mbembe crossing the river about thirty feet ahead of them. The same year, also in a canoe, he had actually run into one lying just under the surface in the middle of the river. He vividly described his amazement when the obstruction suddenly moved away and proved to be a monstrous animal.16
Another witness described when, aged seventeen, he had been out in his canoe about 7 a.m. and decided to hunt some monkeys he had spotted. He landed and had just pulled his canoe out of the river when, with a sudden rush of water, a huge animal rose out of the river shallows. It was almost completely visible for several minutes. It had a long reddish-brown neck which, at its base, was as thick as a man’s thigh. It was about thirty feet long and around six feet or so high with a tail longer than its neck.17
Yet another local resident described that as recently as July 1979, just seven months earlier, at a settlement fifty miles downriver from Epéna, a mokele-mbembe had been progressively stranded in a swampy jungle pool by the lowering of the water level with the onset of the dry season. The local people observed it over the course of several months until one day when it emerged from the jungle, walked over a small sandy island and disappeared into the river. It left footprints similar in size to those of elephants, together with claw-marks and a trail of flattened grass six feet wide.18
During these interviews a very intriguing story emerged from several informants. At some time in the past, a mokele-mbembe had actually been captured, killed and subsequently eaten. This was said to have occurred at Lake Tele, about forty-four miles inland from Epéna, deep in the jungle almost midway between the Likouala-aux-Herbes river and a tributary, the Bai.
About forty years earlier, two or three mokele-mbembes had been disrupting the fishing of the local inhabitants who decided to prevent them entering the lake. Around Lake Tele were a number of large lagoon-like pools, each connected by a channel to the main lake. The creatures were living in one of these pools and entering the lake via the channel. The natives chopped down a number of trees, each around six inches across, and sharpened one end. When they knew that the beasts were in the lagoon they drove these heavy stakes across the connecting channel with the points angled uppermost, like a row of medieval pikes. This barrier, they hoped, would keep the monsters out of the main lake. One of the creatures attempted to break through this barrier of stakes and while it was doing so the natives fell upon it with spears, killing it. To celebrate their success, they cut the beast up and ate it. But shortly thereafter, according to the story, all who had eaten the flesh died.19
Mackal and Powell ran out of time and did not make it to Lake Tele. But the next year Mackal returned with a slightly larger team, including, this time, a native Congolese zoologist. While they gathered many more reports of sightings they again failed to see or record any of the beasts at first hand. They did, however, find some evidence which might just derive from the mokele-mbembe.
While they were at Dzeke on the Likouala-aux-Herbes river, they were told of a site a short ride upriver where, about a year before, one of the beasts had been surprised; it had rushed to the river leaving a clear trail behind.
Mackal and his team, together with a local hunter as guide, visited the site. There, they found that the river bank was fairly firm and covered with grass about three feet high. The thick jungle started some fifty yards in from the bank. ‘Jungle chocolate’ plants grew in profusion with their fruit the size of a small orange. The guide took them to an area where there were a number of small pools and there showed them the trail which had been left. Near the edge of one pool they could see the traces very clearly: ‘Branches, broken and weathered, attested to the passage of some creature 1.5 to 2 metres in height and half as wide. This was certainly the right size for a mokele-mbembe, but, of course, also for a smallish forest elephant.’20 The trail led through the jungle and contained large footprints, a foot or so in diameter, pressed into the soft earth. This trail was readily visible until it entered the grass growing at the river bank where the recent year’s growth had since obscured it.
Their guide pointed this out and explained that originally the grass too had been flattened in a six-foot-wide track leading into the river. He added that no elephant makes such a trail and, in any case, elephants always come out of the river again. The other possibility, that the trail was made by a large crocodile, would seem impossible since crocodiles do not leave foot-wide footprints or break the jungle to a height of six feet.
Mackal realized wryly that this creature they were hunting had been living here when, the year before, he and Powell had been upstream at Epéna.
In all, over the two expeditions Mackal took over thirty detailed descriptions of the beast, of which a little more than half came from eyewitnesses, some of them having seen it several times.
Fascinated by the media reports, other investigators began to also arrange expeditions to this part of Central Africa. Since Mackal’s and Powell’s first there have been over eleven expeditions, occurring almost annually. They include two from Japan and one official Congolese scientific group. None have returned with either photographs or film of the beast. It remains elusive to this day.
The regular arrival of researchers and curious amateurs to the area has had its effect on the local economy. The writer Redmond O’Hanlon, who mounted his own mini-expedition to look for a mokele-mbembe, reported that at Boha, the nearest village to Lake Tele – a mere two days’ walk away – a prominent shack bore a large sign reading: BOHA PILOTE DINOSAURE.21
But the mokele-mbembe may not be the only strange creature in the Likouala swamps. Mackal and Powell collected stories of others, two of which might also represent relict dinosaurs.
The Animal with ‘Planks on its Back’ and Others
Among the interviews which Mackal and Powell conducted, one was decidedly odd. One woman, who had hitherto only repeated local stories about the mokele-mbembe, was leafing through a book of dinosaur illustrations carried by the two scientists when she opened a page which had an illustration of a stegosaurus. She suddenly smiled. ‘Yes, that animal was spoken of by my ancestors. My parents told me about this animal with the planks growing out of its back. I was told to hide behind a tree if I saw it coming through the forest.’22 She explained that this animal, the mbielu-mbielu-mbielu, also spent much of its time in the water and that the ‘planks’ along its back dripped with growths of green algae. She added that she had seen the creature herself on only one occasion – or, at least, had seen its back sticking out of the water.
Mackal, on his second expedition in 1981, was to obtain further information on this animal. He met with an elderly local man, a former civil servant who had previously worked for the French administration. He had maintained very detailed records of all sightings of mokele-mbembes known to him, noting some fifteen sightings and the places where they had occurred. Near the end of the interview he also mentioned the creature with ‘planks on its back’.
He described one which had been a little upriver from Epéna, and which, alt
hough he had not personally observed it, had often been seen around dusk in the dry season, when the water was at its lowest. It had ‘much green vegetable growth on its back’ which was very obvious whenever the creature emerged from the water.23
Mackal also found many of his informants talking of another monster which they called the emela-ntouka, or ‘killer of elephants’. It was said to resemble the mokele-mbembe in being semi-aquatic, having the bulk of an elephant and similar thick strong legs, but it lacked the mokele-mbembe’s long neck and its head had a sharp horn growing out of it.24 It had been known to attack and kill water buffalo or elephants but never to eat them. It too was herbivorous.
Other creatures were also mentioned: there were sightings of a giant snake-like or lizard-like creature with a forked tongue which walked on four short thick legs, the nguma-monene. It was distinguished by a serrated bony ridge running along its back.
This creature was clearly seen by an American missionary interviewed by Professor Mackal. In late 1971 this pastor was travelling upriver in the Likouala region. The river at that point was about 200 feet wide. Suddenly, ahead of him he saw a creature unlike anything he had ever seen before. It was about thirty feet long and had ‘a back like a saw’. He stopped his outboard and drifted in the current watching as this creature swam across the river, climbed out at the other side and disappeared into the jungle.25
Finally, there were reported in the same area three giant examples of known creatures: a huge crocodile up to fifty feet long which was said to dig out long underground tunnels, which it then inhabited – this was first mentioned in the nineteenth century by a Belgian explorer; a giant turtle with a shell twelve to fifteen feet in diameter; and a large bird, perhaps some kind of eagle, which had a wingspan of almost thirteen feet and which attacked and ate monkeys.
There is clearly much scope for cryptozoologists in Central Africa.
Ancient Man and Extinct Creatures
Many thousands of years ago ancient peoples created visual records of their world. They recorded, in pictures and carvings, their society, the animals they hunted or tamed and, later, events of importance. Amongst these records are some which are very curious indeed: they defy any easy explanation.
At the very beginning of the Egyptian royal dynasty, around 3100 BC, when writing was in its infancy, there was production of highly decorated slate palettes, a ceremonial development of those used for mixing pigments for make-up. A number of these have been found, particularly in Hierakonpolis, the ancient capital of southern Egypt. All are covered with exceptionally skilful carvings of hunting or political scenes. Many animals and humans are shown with great attention to detail. The animals, in particular, are instantly recognizable; there is nothing about them which seems to derive from the realm of fantasy.
It is all the more surprising, then, that two of the palettes found – one now in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford and another in Cairo’s Archaeological Museum – show long-necked creatures identical to the reported characteristics of the mokele-mbembe. The palette of King Narmer in Cairo is particularly forthright. At its centre – framing the circular depression in which pigments could be mixed – are the long curving necks of two strange beasts with strong limbs and long tails. Both these creatures are shown as captive: each has a rope around its neck held tight by Egyptian keepers. This, perhaps, is the nearest the illustrations come to fantasy: no one man could alone restrain such a beast.26
Naturally, as no creatures as these are today accepted by science they have quickly been labelled ‘mythological’. Yet a moment’s study reveals that this conclusion cannot be justified.
Leaving aside modern scientific prejudices, the logic of the palette itself – which is the only logic relevant in this situation – demands that we consider these two long-necked creatures as real, as known, as any of the other animals and humans also depicted. Therefore we cannot avoid concluding that the ancient Egyptians had captured examples of some great beast which either no longer exists or does so only in some distant habitat unknown to science. A beast extraordinarily similar to that reportedly seen in the Congolese swamps.
But the ancient Egyptians were not the earliest humans to record strange creatures which must have inhabited their world and which may still inhabit ours. Millennia earlier, during the last Ice Age, similar monsters were depicted.
It is well known that many caves have been found in Spain and France which hold illustrations made by early man. Some of these are incised by sharp stones; some are drawn in charcoal; others are painted in colour. The most dramatic fact of these illustrations is the very high degree of artistic skill demonstrated by people we otherwise tend to disdain as ‘cavemen’. And further, the very lifelike aspect of the animals represented allows the vast majority of them to be easily identified. Which fact makes it all the more astounding when, on only two known occasions amongst these thousands of illustrations drawn, carved or painted, there are depictions of long-necked animals unlike anything known today.
The first comes from the cave of Pergouset in southern France and is dated to 12,000 or more years ago. It is a well-executed engraving of an animal with a very long neck bearing a head rather similar to a horse. Is it a giraffe? Unlikely because of the almost arctic Ice Age conditions which existed outside. Is it, then, something like a mokele-mbembe? Or perhaps a marine creature rather like Vancouver’s Caddy? No one knows. The archaeologists who drew attention to it in 1997 noted, ‘The very long neck is no accident; the lines have been reinforced or re-cut several times…’27 They speculated that this and other engravings may be fantasies created under the influence of psychedelic drugs. This is possible; but it is much more likely that, as with other drawings, this creature was something seen by the artist living in the world beyond the cave.
The second example is even more enigmatic. In the Spanish cave of Casares, also dating from the Ice Age, is an incised illustration of a group of three monstrous, dinosaur-like, creatures. Two are large, perhaps adults, and the third is small, seemingly a young animal. They all have long necks, substantial but ill-defined bodies and strange reptilian heads. They look dangerous.28
As in the other cases, the logic of the caves themselves suggests that these are creatures which have been actually witnessed by the artists while outside the enclosed safety of the deep caverns.
Were our ancestors, until comparatively recently, confronted by true monsters as they hunted in the forests or fished in the rivers? These drawings would seem to prove that this was so. In any case, whatever the truth, to dismiss these creatures as ‘mythological’ or ‘fantasy’ is to cast premature judgement upon them and risk ignoring potentially important historical data.
Perhaps somewhere we will dig up their bones. Unless, of course, they were maritime or partly aquatic river-dwellers – in which case their bones have probably long been washed far out to sea.
Flying Monsters
Between 1911 and 1922 Englishman Frank Melland served the British colonial authorities as a district magistrate in what is now Zambia. He had a keen interest in natural history and had been made a Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute, the Royal Geographical Society and the Zoological Society. In 1923, when he returned to England, he published In Witch-bound Africa, a study of the tribal shamanism which he had observed during his colonial service. In it he described how his zoological interests were piqued one day when he was told of a special magic charm used on certain river crossings to avoid the attack of some greatly feared creature the natives called the kongamato.
When he asked, ‘What is the kongamato?’ he received a surprising answer. It was a type of bird, his informants said, or rather, a flying creature like a lizard with bat-like wings, wings which were four to seven feet across. Not only this, its beak contained many sharp teeth. Melland wrote: ‘I sent for two books which I had at my house, containing pictures of pterodactyls, and every native present immediately and unhesitatingly picked it out and identified it as a kongamato.’29 It was said to
live in the jungle swamplands, in particular those up the Mwombezhi river which arises near the border with Zaïre.
Further south, in Zimbabwe, tales of a similar creature have emerged. The English journalist G. Ward Price related a story told to him by a colonial officer whose administrative region contained a huge swamp which was so feared by the local people that they generally refused to enter it.
One man, however, proved sufficiently foolhardy as to venture in. He emerged some time later with a deep wound in his chest reporting that he had been attacked by a large bird with a long beak. The colonial officer obtained a book containing illustrations of prehistoric creatures and showed these to the wounded man. He looked through it without comment until he came upon an illustration of a pterodactyl. He cried out and immediately fled.
The officer said to Price, ‘It seems to me quite possible that in that vast, unpenetrated area pterodactyls still survive.’30
But it is not only the peoples native to the area who have seen these strange creatures. In 1941 a British army officer and his men witnessed one flying above them.
That year, Lieutenant Colonel A. C. Simonds was in the Sudan under the command of Orde Wingate who was preparing his invasion of Ethiopia to restore the exiled emperor Haile Selassie. As part of the preliminary strategy, Simonds, commanding a very small group of officers and men, was ordered south. He and his men left the southern Sudan town of Roseires and crossed into Ethiopia, heading east through the jungle towards the Belaya highlands which they reached fifteen days later. It was during this march that they all saw a strange flying creature fitting the description of a pterodactyl.
In a private memoir written for his daughter, Lieutenant Colonel Simonds described what happened:
On our march we were continually seeing and hearing wild animals, and although I told this story when I came back to civilization I do not think anyone believes me, even now. All of us saw an enormous bird gliding above us which seemed to have a second sort of wing on the end of its wing tip – almost like a hand. There was a great wing-span, and then another little wing-span. When I arrived in Cairo, I reported this to naturalists, who, having checked the information, said that what I had seen was a Pterodactylos which had been extinct for over a million years!31