Abominable Science

by Daniel Loxton

  Figure 6.5 The 66-foot cement Diplodocus was the largest replica of the life-size prehistoric animals that Carl Hagenbeck installed on the grounds of his zoo. (Photograph from Travel, January 1917, courtesy of David Goldman)

  Hagenbeck’s alleged African “dinosaur, seemingly akin to the brontosaurus,” made news around the globe, but it was nothing more than third-hand rumor, presented without details—except for that of location. According to the case that started the cryptozoological legend of Mokele Mbembe, the creature was “said to inhabit the interior of Rhodesia” (a British colonial territory that comprised present-day Zambia and Zimbabwe), an area 1,200 miles from the Lake Tele region of the Congo Basin, where Mokele Mbembe is currently supposed to reside. And while newspaper readers in Europe and America found it perfectly plausible that the primitive giants newly mounted as skeletons in their museums could still lurk in the heart of the “dark continent” alongside the “bloodthirsty savages,” it is important to understand that reactions in the African colonial press were less enthusiastic.30 “There may be no truth whatever in the story, and probably there is not,” opined the Uganda Herald.31 The resident zoologist at the Rhodesia Museum, E. C. Chubb, had nothing but polite scorn for Hagenbeck’s claim. Having recently spent a month doing field research in the region where Hagenbeck’s dinosaur was said to reside, reported the African press, Chubb “regretted that he did not meet with the creature on his travels, nor did he hear any rumours of its existence. In fact not only was this the first time that this land edition of the Great Sea Serpent has been sprung upon him, but with due deference to Hagenbeck he begged to doubt the existence of such a monster.” After all, if it were true, “it is curious that nothing has been heard of it before through local native sources”—and, besides, the half-elephant, half-dragon description suggested a biologically impossible chimera, rather than a dinosaur.32 While equally skeptical, another man wrote in response to Chubb that he had heard tales of a monster when in the same region of Rhodesia—and had, he said, talked to “two natives who said they had actually seen it.” The creature he described was not a sauropod, however, but something more like a plesiosaur—or even more like an imaginary chimera. It had “paddles or flippers” that it “used to propel itself with. The general description was the head of a crocodile, with rhino horns, neck like a python, body of a hippo and a crocodile tail, all of tremendous size.”33 In a private letter to Chubb that he evidently shared with the Buluwayo Chronicle (which ran it under the headline “The ‘Brontosaurus’: More Hearsay”), another writer reported rumors of a “three-horned water rhino” that “kills the hippo in Lake Bangweolo” and lives in swamps in that region.34

  In 1911, another famous German adventurer, Lieutenant Paul Graetz, collected further tales—and, he said, some physical evidence—about a creature that was known to the locals of the Lake Bangweulu region of Zambia as nsanga. Graetz was a celebrity, having become the first person to cross Africa in an automobile (a two-year journey), and in June 1911 he set out to cross the continent again—this time by motorboat. Widely circulated press hype about his aim to reach “parts of central Africa, which are at present practically unexplored” and “in particular Lake Banguelo” attracted some backlash from people familiar with those regions.35 One correspondent wrote “ridiculing the pretentions [sic] of Lieut. Graetz” to explore “the mysterious Lake Bangweolo. The correspondent says he lived there for years, shot over it, fished it, and says hundreds of white men have thoroughly explored this hunters’ paradise.” He added, “The stories of the Clupekwe (the mythical Brontosaurus) are just legends” and explained that regional folklore describes dozens of equally fabulous monsters, including “a wonderful animal in shape like the lion, but of monstrous size, which even frightens the lordly elephant.”36 Despite this warning, Graetz reached Lake Bangweulu at the end of October and found people willing to tell tales of monsters. He wrote, “The crocodile is found only in very isolated specimens in Lake Bangweulu … but in the swamp lives the nsanga, much feared by the natives, a degenerate saurian which one might well confuse with the crocodile, were it not that its skin has no scales and its toes are armed with claws. I did not succeed in shooting a nsanga, but … I came by some strips of its skin.”37

  How did the notion of a dinosaur in Rhodesia in 1909 morph into the legend of a dinosaur half a continent away in the Congo today? Whatever the description of this Rhodesian monster (or monsters), sauropods were all the rage in Europe and America. The international press latched onto the idea of a living African sauropod and never let go. We can infer that this African dinosaur was a cultural creation, a creature from the imagination projected onto the African landscape because it was projected everywhere—eventually including the Congo (figure 6.6). “Rumours about creatures of this kind have been reported in a ring of country 2,000 miles in diameter,” explained Bernard Heuvelmans.38 This is not an exaggeration. In 1910, for example, a character named Charles Brookes came forward to say that “pygmies” from the southern rim of the Sahara Desert had told him that colossal dinosaurs lived around “great lakes existing in the heart of the desert itself”—along with giant humans.39 Notably, he cited direct inspiration from Carnegie’s sauropod skeleton: “[T]he 80-foot diplodocus, now in the Paris Museum of Natural History … brings back to my mind many stories I heard from natives and pigmies … regarding monsters that are still in existence.”40 (Perhaps also notably, he was pursuing government funds to mount an expedition.) Brookes’s claimed dinosaurs, living 1,000 miles or more from Lake Tele, the home territory of Mokele Mbembe, were still close neighbors compared with the Brontosaurus reported in 1921 in South Africa. Allegedly spotted lurking in the Orange River by multiple witnesses on multiple occasions, this “strange, gigantic beast … swims in the rapids and is so tall that he stands upon his feet and stretches his neck into the trees, where he devours the topmost branches.”41 These Orange River sightings took place almost as far from Lake Tele as New York is from Los Angeles.

  Rather than recording genuine ethnozoological knowledge of a population of animals in the Congo Basin, the Mokele Mbembe lore is a distillation of many creatively varied stories from widely separated regions. Nonetheless, there are signs that a recognizable version of the modern Mokele Mbembe tradition existed in the Congo by 1913—even if most of the dinosaur sightings in Africa were occurring elsewhere across the continent. That year, according to Willy Ley, a German officer named Ludwig Freiherr von Stein zu Lausnitz led an expedition into the interior of what was then the German colony of Kamerun. He is reported by Ley to have written a detailed manuscript that deals in part with “narratives of the natives” concerning a creature they called mokéle-mbêmbe:

  Figure 6.6 The canonical Mokele Mbembe’s alleged Congo Basin habitat is highlighted in this map of Africa (Lake Tele is near the center), but reports have placed relict African dinosaurs in many other regions of the vast continent, thousands of miles apart. This map indicates just a few of the early reports of Brontosaurus-like animals in Africa. (Illustration by Daniel Loxton)

  The animal is said to be of a brownish-gray color with a smooth skin, its size is approximately that of an elephant; at least that of a hippopotamus. It is said to have a long and very flexible neck and only one tooth but a very long one; some say it is a horn. A few spoke about a long, muscular tail like that of an alligator. Canoes coming near it are said to be doomed; the animal is said to attack the vessels at once and to kill the crews but without eating the bodies. The creature is said to live in the caves that have been washed out by the river in the clay of its shores at sharp bends. It is said to climb the shores even at daytime in search of food; its diet is said to be entirely vegetable. This feature disagrees with a possible explanation as a myth. The preferred plant was shown to me, it is a kind of liana with large white blossoms, with a milky sap and applelike fruits. At the Ssômbo River I was shown a path said to have been made by this animal in order to get at its food. The path was fresh and there were plants of the desc
ribed type nearby. But since there were too many tracks of elephants, hippos, and other large mammals it was impossible to make out a particular spoor with any amount of certainty.42

  This account is obviously extremely important. If correct, it establishes a reasonably early date of development for the Mokele Mbembe legend in form and name, and even (arguably) suggests some now-canonical details. However, important questions of provenance have yet to be resolved. As Heuvelmans notes, this “report was never published, because Germany lost interest in the Cameroons when she lost the colony itself after the 1914–18 war, but it still exists in manuscript.”43 Stein’s important account is known to the cryptozoological literature only from the fragment translated by Ley in the 1940s—and the background for it is known only from Ley’s brief discussion. When was the manuscript written, and does it still exist? Is Ley’s translation accurate? What were the circumstances of Stein’s expedition? What other relevant information does the manuscript contain? Reliance on Ley regarding these questions is a major gap in scholarship about Mokele Mbembe. (There is possible partial corroboration for this account—or possible refutation—in a recollection from Chalmers Mitchell, secretary of the Zoological Society of London. Commenting in 1919 on a current yarn about a Congo dinosaur, Mitchell recalled a remark made by former Kaiser Wilhelm: “When visiting the London Zoo he described the existence of a similar pre-historic monster in German East Africa.”44 German East Africa was on the opposite side of the continent from Cameroon.)

  Whatever the provenance of Stein’s manuscript, it was in any event unknown to the public. So how did the “African Brontosaurus” legend—originally focused on Rhodesia—become entrenched as a belief about the Congo? In some ways, either location is equally suitable for a Western media legend about an African dinosaur: both regions feature vast, lush swamps and river systems, making them seem to early-twentieth-century audiences like the perfect habitat for sauropods. As one 1909 response to Hagenbeck’s dinosaur claims conceded, “Those creatures lived under conditions probably not very dissimilar from those that obtain to-day in the swamps around Lake Bangweolo and Lake Mweru.”45 As we now know, sauropods were not swamp dwellers and did not spend their time immersed in lakes or rivers—but in those days, people incorrectly imagined just that. In the public imagination, all sauropods were essentially Mokele Mbembe.

  Nonetheless, it was a specific case that brought the Rhodesian dinosaur to “the Congo”—though only just. In 1919, London newspapers rang with astonishing dinosaur news from “the native village of Fungurume” in the Belgian Congo (the southeastern corner of the present-day Democratic Republic of the Congo), a mere 250 miles from Lake Bangweulu in Rhodesia:

  The head of the local museum here has received information from a Mr. Lepage, who was in charge of railway construction in the Belgian Congo, of an exciting adventure last month. While Lepage was hunting one day in October he came upon an extraordinary monster, which charged at him. Lepage fired but was forced to flee, with the monster in chase. The animal before long gave up the chase and Lepage was able to examine it through his binoculars. The animal, he says, was about 24 ft. in length, with a long pointed snout adorned with tusks like horns and a short horn above the nostrils. The front feet were like those of a horse and the hind hoofs were cloven. There was a scaly hump on the monster’s shoulders. The animal later charged through the native village of Fungurume, destroying the huts and killing some of the native dwellers.46

  As the horror of World War I unfolded, Africa’s dinosaurs seem to have vanished—but with the dawn of peace, the world was once again ready for an entertaining monster mystery. Headlines buzzed with the news of Lepage’s sighting, with some newspapers explicitly likening this encounter to those in Conan Doyle’s The Lost World.47 It was swiftly followed by a report from a second man:

  A Belgian prospector and big game hunter, named Mr. Gapelle, who has returned here from the interior of the Congo, states that he followed up a strange spoor for 12 miles and at length sighted a beast certainly of the rhinoceros order with large scales reaching far down its body. The animal, he says, has a very thick kangaroo-like tail, a horn on its snout, and a hump on its back. Mr. Gapelle fired some shots at the beast, which threw up its head and disappeared into a swamp. The American Smithsonian expedition was in search of the mysterious monster referred to above when it met a serious railway accident, in which several persons were killed.48

  It is important to note that Lepage’s and Gapelle’s accounts do not describe sauropods and that they were set 1,000 miles from the regions where cryptozoologists now seek Mokele Mbembe. But these were not the only flaws. Fearing that the tales “may grievously harm scientific research,” a correspondent knowledgeable in the details of the cases wrote to explain how they had unfolded as a practical joke. “I have absolute authority to say that the whole report is fabulous,” he wrote, “and I trust that the same publicity will be given to the correction that was given to the rumour.”49 The stories swiftly came apart under a crossfire of critiques from people who knew the joker, David Le Page. “It is all a yarn,” one wrote to a relative in England. “A missionary arrived at Fungwrame mine … on his way south and stayed at the mine to mess, waiting for a train. Dave le Page, whom I know well, pulled the missionary’s leg by reciting the yarn…. The missionary gave an account to the Press just as it appeared. The story caused a lot of amusement up here.”50 This exposé was confirmed in detail two years later by a Mrs. Simon, who had been in Fungurume when the lark took off. She explained to the papers that Le Page, “well-known in Southern Rhodesia for his elastic imagination,” fooled a Mr. Raymer, who then communicated the bogus yarn to the head of the Port Elizabeth Museum. The museum director, in turn, passed it to the press.51 Speaking to the remaining detail of the story, Wentworth D. Gray wrote as the representative of the Smithsonian African Expedition to say that the explorers were not, in fact, hunting dinosaurs. Moreover, he pointed out, Gapelle “does not exist except in the imagination of a second practical joker, who ingeniously coined the name” as an anagram of Le Page.52 And yet, predictably, the unraveling of Le Page’s story did little to dampen its inspirational effect. Copycat sightings soon emerged—one of a monster “with a head like a lion, with fangs resembling a walrus, 18 feet in length, and its body covered with scales and spottings like a leopard”53—and brave souls set off in search of dinosaurs: “Amongst the British big game shooters who are leaving in quest of the alleged Brontosaurus is Capt. Lester Stevens, who is taking with him the dog ‘Laddie,’ who is half a sheep dog and half a wolf,” the press announced, adding, “Capt. Stevens believes that the giant reptile lives in a subterranean lake.”54

  Modern Testimony

  The modern cryptozoological legend of the Mokele Mbembe of Lake Tele grew slowly. Through the 1940s and 1950s, early cryptozoological authors Willy Ley, Ivan Sanderson, and Bernard Heuvelmans picked up and discussed the turn-of-the-century “African Brontosaurus” idea.55 It was a question, Sanderson wrote, “doubtless born of wishful thinking, that all of us have probably at one time or another asked ourselves—namely, could there be a few dinosaurs still living in the remoter corners of the world?” In the 1960s, independent explorer James H. Powell Jr. took up this very question, inspired by the material collected by Heuvelmans (and by the correspondence he struck up with Heuvelmans, Sanderson, and Ley). “Of these early accounts,” Powell wrote, “none was more tantalizing than that of the Baron [Ludwig Freiherr] von Stein zu Lausnitz from northern Congo.” As with so many popular ideas, the person who first seizes the reins sets the course. By zeroing in on Stein’s report, and resolving to pursue it, Powell did just that. In 1972, he received a grant from the Exploration Fund of the Explorer’s Club to study crocodiles in the region. Unable to get an entry visa for what was then the People’s Republic of the Congo, Powell used the Explorers Club grant to pursue the African dinosaur (or at least to ask questions about it) in neighboring Gabon and Cameroon in 1976 and in Gabon again in 1979.56 Meanwhile,
he had introduced himself to Roy Mackal, who had been investigating reports of the Loch Ness monster. Together, they ventured to the Republic of the Congo in 1980—and in doing so began the fully modern cryptozoological legend of Mokele Mbembe.

  As detailed by Mackal, numerous sighting reports, traditional descriptions, and dubious yarns have accumulated over the years, although they differ greatly in details and are highly inconsistent about many important physical features.57 Most accounts come from a variety of local peoples, often in the form of hearsay. It is hard to determine how much Moklele Mbembe testimony is based on actual events and how much is based on legends that have been passed down and distorted through retelling. Worse, it is impossible to know how much of the lore of this cryptid has been invented to meet the expectations of foreign guests. As one of Carl Hagenbeck’s colonial-era animal wilderness scouts explained, it was next to impossible to get reliable information on the alleged Rhodesian dinosaur because “the natives, wishing to please the white visitor and hoping for a valuable gift at the same time, are only too ready to assert that they know of an animal in their territory with blue skin, six legs, one eye, and four tusks. The size is entirely up to the questioner; the native will tell him what he thinks the white man wants to hear.”58 Neither this flexibility nor this conflict of interest vanished with the end of colonialism. For an example of the first, consider that one of Powell’s informants in Gabon told him in 1976 that he had never seen the beast, only to dramatically change his story three years later. By 1979, the man was claiming to have, decades earlier, built a hut from which he staked out the monster for many days and many nights and finally watched it emerge from the water. He was now able to obligingly take Powell to the exact spot where he had seen the creature climb from the river, but objected in apparent fear when Powell attempted to take a depth sounding. “I have never seen a man more truly terrified,” wrote Powell, seemingly unconcerned that the same man had previously denied seeing the creature at all. “If he were acting, then he ought to be in Hollywood picking up Academy Awards.” (Nor did Powell seem troubled that most of the people in the area did not recognize a picture of a Diplodocus—or that one villager explicitly told Powell that the regional name n’yamala described an imaginary animal.)59