There is a cat in Tanzania that is not a lion and not a leopard, and the people who live there have known about it for longer than anyone can say. They call it the mngwa, which in Swahili means “the strange one”. It is also called the nunda, which means “a fierce animal”. It is described as a gigantic feline, the size of a donkey, with dark grey fur marked like a tabby cat, and it is said to be silent, and fast, and fond of killing people. English contact with the animal began in the early 1900s, when a British official wrote about the mauled bodies of villagers and the tufts of grey fur clutched in their hands. The mngwa has been reported, on and off, for a hundred years since, and it has never been caught, photographed, or explained.
Hichens and the attacks of 1922
The mngwa entered the Western record through a British colonial official named Captain William Hichens. Hichens was the Native Magistrate of Lindi, a town on the coast of Tanganyika, and in 1922 he brought the creature to the attention of the European press, based on the accounts of several of his subjects who claimed to have been attacked by it. Hichens was not a credulous man. He was an administrator, and he wrote down what he saw and what he was told with the care of an official report.
What he saw was disturbing. Several natives had been attacked by the animal, and Hichens saw and wrote about the mangled bodies. The victims were found clutching tufts of grey fur in their hands — a matted mass of greyish hair, such as would come out of a lion’s mane were it grasped and torn in a violent fight, except that the hair was not a lion’s. It was grey, and brindled, and noticeably different from a leopard’s. In one account, an expert in big cats, who was himself among those attacked, said that the animal was neither leopard nor lion.
Hichens thought at first that the attacker was a giant, man-eating lion. But the fur samples and the tracks were different from those of a lion, and the animal’s description did not fit. It was, he wrote, an animal, not a lion or a leopard, but a huge cat as large as a donkey and marked like a tabby. He sent a tuft of the grey hair to a laboratory for analysis. The results were inconclusive.
Patrick Bowen’s hunt
The most detailed account of the mngwa comes from a hunter named Patrick Bowen, who tracked the animal in the 1920s. Bowen told his story to the naturalist Frank W. Lane, who published it in Nature Parade in 1954. Bowen said that a mngwa had carried off a young boy, and that he and another man had followed the animal’s tracks. “The spoor we were following appeared to be that of a leopard as large as the largest lion.” The tracks were like a leopard’s, but much larger, and the fur Bowen found was brindled and visibly different from a leopard’s.
Bowen was convinced by the animal’s tracks and hair samples that this was no species known to science. He did not catch it, and he did not see it clearly, but he followed it, and he believed in it. Lane, who was a cryptozoologist before the label existed, believed him, and went further: he suggested that the attacks reported in the nineteenth century by the Chimis people, which had been attributed to the Nandi Bear, might actually have been attacks by the mngwa.
What the witnesses describe
The descriptions of the mngwa are consistent, and they are specific in a way that sets the animal apart. It is described as the size of a donkey, a gigantic feline, dark grey or black, with brindled fur like a tabby cat, or like a civet, with spots near its eyes. It looks, in the accounts, like a hybrid of a lion and a leopard, but with grey fur. It has saber-teeth in some accounts, sometimes described as tusks. It is said to be able to purr, as smaller cats do, which is unusual for a large cat. It is nocturnal, and it is silent — a silent killer, a grey ghost that comes in the night and leaves no sound behind it.
It is also said to be aggressive in a way that lions and leopards are not. The mngwa does not avoid people. It seeks them out, or at least it does not avoid them, and it attacks without provocation. From 1922 into the 1930s, there were several reports of maulings and killings attributed to it. Given the number of attacks on humans in the area, there have been many hunting expeditions since then. None has been successful.
There is an old, traditional Tanzanian folktale that tells of a sultan’s youngest son who went seeking a murderous feline monster called the nunda, and the nunda appears in Swahili fairy tales collected by Edward Steere in his 1870 anthology Swahili Tales, as told by the natives of Zanzibar. The name, in other words, is older than the British record of it, and the animal is older than the name. The mngwa has been part of the folklore of the region for centuries, and the folklore is part of the reason the British took it seriously. A story told for a thousand years is not necessarily true, but it is not nothing either.
The theories
The most influential theory about the mngwa comes from Bernard Heuvelmans, who discussed the animal in On the Track of Unknown Animals and returned to it in a 1986 article in the journal Cryptozoology. Heuvelmans suggested that the mngwa might be an abnormally coloured specimen of some known species — a colour morph, like the king cheetah, a rare variant of the cheetah with a different coat pattern. A large leopard, or a lion, with an unusual grey, brindled coat, could look like a new species to people who had never seen one before, and could account for the tufts of grey fur and the leopard-like tracks.
Heuvelmans went further. In his 1986 article, he proposed that the mngwa might be a larger subspecies of the African golden cat, Profelis aurata, a small, forest-dwelling cat of Central and West Africa that is rarely seen and poorly understood. A golden cat, grown large and living in the open savanna, could match the description: grey, brindled, silent, and unlike any cat the local people knew. It is a neat theory, and it has the virtue of proposing a real animal, not a monster.
The sceptical view
No body, no skeleton, no photograph, no DNA sample and no verified footprint has ever established the existence of the mngwa. That is the hard fact at the centre of the story, and it has not changed since 1922. Everything known about the animal comes from the accounts of Hichens and Bowen and the local tradition, and the local tradition is oral, not written, and has never been independently verified.
Sceptics point out that Tanzania is full of large cats, and that large cats kill people. A lion, or a leopard, that has learned to hunt humans will kill again and again, and will leave mauled bodies behind it. The grey fur clutched in the victims’ hands could have been the fur of any animal, or it could have been vegetation, or it could have been a detail added in the retelling. The hair sample Hichens sent to the laboratory came back inconclusive, which is what an inconclusive sample does: it proves nothing, and it disproves nothing.
Why the story endures
The mngwa endures because Hichens was a careful witness, and because Bowen was a careful hunter, and because the grey fur is a detail that does not fit. A story about a monster is easy to dismiss. A story about a colonial official who saw mauled bodies and sent hair to a laboratory is harder. The mngwa has a paper trail, and the paper trail was written by men who knew the animals of East Africa and who said, plainly, that this one was different.
And it endures because Tanzania is still there, and the savanna is still there, and the night is still dark, and a person walking home through the bush at dusk can still imagine something grey moving in the grass, silent, and watching. The mngwa may be a lion, or a leopard, or a golden cat, or nothing at all. But the fear is real, and the fear is the story.
What is documented, and what is not
Documented facts: The mngwa, also called the nunda, is a gigantic feline-like creature said to live in Tanzania, described as the size of a donkey with dark grey, brindled fur like a tabby cat. In 1922, William Hichens, Native Magistrate of Lindi, reported attacks by the animal and sent a tuft of grey hair to a laboratory for analysis; the results were inconclusive. Hichens wrote in 1937 that the attacks had begun again. In 1938, a discussion of the animal appeared in the British journal Discovery. The hunter Patrick Bowen tracked a mngwa in the 1920s after it carried off a boy, and described tracks like a leopard’s but much larger, with brindled fur visibly different from a leopard’s, as published by Frank W. Lane in Nature Parade (1954). The nunda appears in Swahili tales collected by Edward Steere in 1870. No body, skeleton, photograph or DNA sample of the mngwa exists.
Unverified or disputed claims: That a donkey-sized grey cat lives in Tanzania rests entirely on eyewitness testimony and on tufts of fur, none of it independently verified. That the animal killed people in the 1920s and 1930s is reported, not documented by any official record beyond Hichens’s own accounts. The claim, repeated in some secondary sources, that hair samples confirmed the mngwa as a new species is false: Hichens’s laboratory analysis was inconclusive. Bernard Heuvelmans’s suggestions that the mngwa is an abnormally coloured known species or a larger subspecies of the African golden cat are hypotheses, not findings. The suggestion that nineteenth-century attacks attributed to the Nandi Bear were the work of the mngwa is speculation by Frank W. Lane.
Sources
- https://theunexplainedmysteries.com/Mngwa-Grey-Ghost.html
- https://Monstropedia.org/index.php?title=Mngwa
- https://listverse.com/2012/12/24/10-cryptids-that-could-be-real/
- https://www.scarystudies.com/mngwa/