COUNTRY FILE · AFRICA
Cryptids of Tanzania
What cryptids are in Tanzania? The best-known are Popobawa, Mngwa and Agogwe.
Tanzania’s most talked-about mystery is not an animal at all but a spirit. The Popobawa – its Swahili name joins popo, “bat”, and bawa, “wing” – is a malevolent shetani of the Zanzibar islands, said to arrive at night as a bat-winged shadow and attack people in their sleep. Reports began on Pemba around 1965 and have returned in waves ever since, most dramatically in 1995, when panic swept Unguja and people slept outdoors in groups; in 2007 the fear reached Dar es Salaam. Scholars have linked the outbreaks to sleep paralysis, rumour and times of political tension, but on the islands the Popobawa is spoken of seriously, not as a tourist mascot.
Cryptids reported in Tanzania
Popobawa
Pemba and Unguja islands, Zanzibar, and coastal Tanzania
A shape-shifting night spirit of Zanzibar whose “bat-wing” shadow has sparked waves of panic since the 1960s, most famously in 1995.
REGIONAL LEGEND BIG CAT · 1937Mngwa
Coastal forest near Lindi and Mchinga, southern Tanzania
A donkey-sized, tabby-striped man-eating cat of Tanzania’s southern coast, blamed for killings in colonial-era Lindi but never identified.
REGIONAL LEGEND HOMINID · 1937Agogwe
Forests west of the Wembere plains, central Tanzania
Small, upright, russet-haired “little men” glimpsed by a colonial officer in Tanzanian forest – East Africa’s best-known mystery hominid.
LOCAL LEGENDThe legends of Tanzania
The mainland has its own legends, many of them preserved by the colonial writer William Hichens, whose 1937 article in Discovery magazine introduced two of East Africa’s best-known cryptids. From the coastal bush around Lindi and Mchinga in the south came the mngwa, a donkey-sized, tabby-striped cat blamed for killings in the colonial era. From the forests west of the Wembere plains in central Tanzania came the agogwe – small, upright, russet-haired “little men” that Hichens said he glimpsed crossing a forest glade during a lion hunt.
Modern visitors meet these stories in very different places. Stone Town on Unguja, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is where most travellers first hear about the Popobawa, while Pemba remains greener, quieter and less visited. On the southern coast, the ruins of Kilwa Kisiwani and Songo Mnara – once among the richest ports of the Swahili world – lie not far from the mngwa’s old hunting grounds.
Hotspots
The quieter of Zanzibar’s two main islands, where the first Popobawa reports surfaced in the 1960s.
Historic capital of Unguja, centre of the 1995 Popobawa panic and a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Southern coastal bush where the mngwa was blamed for killings in colonial Tanganyika.
UNESCO-listed ruins of medieval Swahili trading towns on the southern coast near mngwa country.
Remote country whose forests to the west are the setting of Hichens’s agogwe sighting.
Sightings timeline
- 1927Figures among the baboons Agogwe
Cuthbert Burgoyne and his wife, watching from a cargo ship close to shore, said they saw two small, light-brown, upright human-like figures walking among a troop of baboons on a beach. He described the encounter in a 1938 letter to Discovery.
- December 1937Hichens describes the Lindi killings Mngwa
In Discovery magazine, William Hichens recalled that while he was serving on the coast, an animal locals called a mngwa prowled Lindi at night, killing several villagers and a police officer posted at the market. Patrols were doubled but the animal was never trapped or shot.
- December 1937The hunter of Mchinga Mngwa
In the same article Hichens described a skilled local hunter brought to him terribly mauled, who insisted the attacker was a mngwa rather than a lion or leopard. Hichens took this as strong evidence because the man had often tracked big cats for Europeans.
- December 1937Hichens’s account is published Agogwe
In Discovery, William Hichens described seeing two small, russet-haired creatures about four feet tall walking upright across a forest glade during an official lion hunt some years before. He searched but could not find them in the near-impenetrable bush, and wrote that they were not any monkey he knew from Tanganyika.
- c. 1965First reports on Pemba Popobawa
Accounts collected by anthropologists place the spirit’s first appearance on Pemba in the mid-1960s, shortly after the Zanzibar Revolution. Local tradition holds that an early outbreak ended only when President Abeid Karume publicly challenged the spirit to appear.
- Night of April 3, 1995The 1995 panic turns deadly Popobawa
At the height of a months-long scare, a crowd killed a man it believed was the Popobawa; he was later identified as a psychiatric patient from the mainland. Residents across the islands were sleeping outdoors in groups, and the panic later spread to rural areas before fading.
- February 2007Fear reaches Dar es Salaam Popobawa
The BBC reported men in parts of Tanzania’s largest city staying awake or sleeping outside in groups, some smearing themselves with pig’s oil as protection. Its correspondent noted that there were no actual sightings and that few people admitted to believing in the demon.
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