KONGAMATO

Opening

Kongamato is a flying animal from the swamps of what is now north-western Zambia, recorded by the colonial officer Frank Melland in his 1923 book In Witch-Bound Africa, an account of the Kaonde people. Melland was told the name meant "overwhelmer of boats." It was described as a reddish, featherless, bat-winged creature with a beak full of teeth, and it was dangerous to people in canoes. When Melland showed his informants pictures of pterodactyls, they picked those out. That one step, a picture shown and a picture chosen, is what turned a regional legend into a cryptid.

Timeline

1923Melland publishes In Witch-Bound Africa. He places the animal in the Jiundu swamp, in the Mwinilunga area of Northern Rhodesia, and describes a charm people carried against it. He didn't see it himself.

1925The journalist G. Ward Price, covering the Prince of Wales's African tour, reports a local man injured in a swamp who picked out a pterodactyl picture as his attacker.

1932Ivan Sanderson reports being dived on by a huge dark winged animal in Cameroon, far to the north-west. Cryptid writers often combine this with Kongamato, although Sanderson used a different local name.

1950sFurther second-hand reports from Northern Rhodesia, including a 1956 sighting of two animals by an engineer, J.P.F. Brown, and a 1957 hospital patient with a chest wound who is said to have drawn a winged attacker.

No specimen, carcass, bone, or photograph has been collected in the century since Melland.

Key figures

Frank Melland is the original source. He was a colonial administrator writing ethnography, and he was careful to record Kongamato as what he was told rather than what he saw.

His Kaonde informants are the people the legend belongs to. What they meant by Kongamato before anyone showed them a pterodactyl is mostly lost.

Ivan Sanderson and later cryptozoologists turned the name into a claim about surviving pterosaurs.

Physical and documentary trail

The trail: Melland's 1923 book, and later travel and newspaper accounts that repeat or extend it. Nothing physical has been collected.

The picture test is the weakest step. Showing someone a picture of one animal and asking if that's what they saw is a leading question. It tells you the picture looked more like the creature than the other pictures did, not that the creature is that animal.

Things you might not know

• Its wingspan is given as 4 to 7 feet. That is about 1.2 to 2.1 metres.
• It has no feathers. Accounts describe smooth reddish skin and a beak full of teeth, sometimes with a tail.
• Sanderson suggested a bat. Ivan Sanderson thought it might be a hammerhead bat, Africa's largest bat.
• A museum director suggested a stork. Reay Smithers of Southern Rhodesia's National Museum proposed the shoebill in 1957.
• Nesting birds may explain the boat attacks. Rick Emmer suggested saddle-billed or marabou storks defending their nests could lie behind the legend's name.

Competing explanations

A surviving pterosaur. Pterosaurs are last known from the fossil record 66 million years ago. There is no later fossil, and any population big enough to survive would be hard to miss.

A known animal seen badly or remembered big. The shoebill and the saddle-billed stork are large, have odd bills, and live in these swamps. The hammer-headed bat is Africa's largest bat. All three fit parts of the description.

A spirit or danger story. Melland recorded Kongamato alongside charms and other beliefs. It may have been a way of talking about the dangers of the swamp as much as a single animal.

Later life of the case

Kongamato is a regular in pterosaur-survival writing, and in some young-earth creationist material, where it's used as supposed evidence that dinosaurs lived recently. Those uses rely on Melland's book, the picture test, and the reports that came after it. None of them adds new evidence.

Finding

A real Kaonde legend, recorded honestly by Melland and then pushed into pterosaur territory by a leading picture test and later writers. Large storks and bats in the same swamps fit the description well enough. A living pterosaur needs a specimen, and there isn't one.

What still will not resolve: what Kongamato meant to the people who named it, before the pictures.