The Agogwe is a little downy, woolly-haired unknown biped reported throughout East Africa. Said to have yellowish, reddish skin underneath its rust-colored hair, the Agogwe allegedly inhabits the forest of this remote region.
One of the most discussed sightings occurred around 1900 when Captain William Hichens was sent on an official lion hunt to this region. While there, waiting in a forest clearing for a man-eating lion, he saw (as he would write in 1937) “two small, brown, furry creatures come from the dense forest on one side of the glade and disappear into the thickets on the other. They were like little men, about four feet high, walking upright, but dad in russet hair. ”
The native hunter said they were agogwe, the little furry men. Hichens made efforts to find them, but without success, in the impenetrable forest. In support of Hichens’s story, Cuthbert Burgoyne wrote a letter to the London magazine Discovery in 1938, noting that he and his wife had seen something similar while coasting Portuguese East Africa in a Japanese cargo boat in 1927. Close enough to shore to see things on the beach using a “glass of twelve magnifications,” they spied a troupe of feeding baboons, apparently picking up shellfish or crabs.
“As we watched, two little brown men walked together out of the bush and down amongst the baboons. They were certainly not any known monkey and yet they must have been akin or they would have disturbed the baboons. They were too far away to see in detail, but these small human-like animals were probably between four and five feet tall, quite upright and graceful in figure. At the time I was thrilled as they were quite evidently no beast of which I had heard or read. Later a friend and big game hunter told me he was in Portuguese East Africa with his wife and three hunters, and saw a mother, father and child, of apparently a similar anima! species, walk across the further side of a bush clearing. The natives loudly forbade him to shoot.”
These primitive, hairy, long-haired beings of small size are known by a variety of names throughout Africa. The Agogwe of East Africa match exactly the descriptions of little reddish-haired sehi/e of the Ivory Coast, where, in the 1940s, numerous reports were heard, even though no known pygmies at all live there.
The cryptozoologist Bernard Heuvelmans believes these small African creatures may be Proto-Pygmies, proto-bushmen, or australopithecine (gracile species). In On the Track of Unknown Animals, Heuvelmans comments: “Now there is no known ape, even among the anthropoids, which normally walks upright on its hind legs . .. . Perhaps the agogwe are therefore really little men.»
SOURCE:
Cryptozoology A to Z – The Encyclopedia of Loch Monsters, Sasquatch, Chupacabras, and Other Authentic Mysteries of Nature – Written by Loren Coleman and Jerome Clark – Copyright 1999