Mngwa

The Mngwa (“the strange one”) is the “great gray ghost” of East Africa. Natives of the former Tanganyika (now Tanzania) insist that the mngwa is not simba (the lion). They have known of the Mngwa for hundreds of years, describing the animal as an extremely aggressive, gigantic, unknown felid the size of a donkey.

English contact with the animal began, in earnest, in the 1900s. During the 1930s and 1940s, the Mngwa was commonly known by the name Nunda, but because of the books of Gardner Soule (The Mystery Monsters and The Maybe Monsters) and Bernard Heuvelmans, Mngwa is the appellation now more frequently employed. An influential, open-minded discussion of this cryptid appeared in the then-world-famous British scientific journal Discovery in 1938.

In his Nature Parade (1954) romantic naturalist Frank W. Lane writes of his interview with Patrick Bowen, a hunter, who tracked a Mngwa. Bowen remarked that the spoor were like a leopard’s but much larger. The fur was brindled but visibly different from a leopard’s. Lane, a cryptozoologist before the label even existed, speculated that nineteenth-century reports of attacks by the South African chimiset, usually associated with the Nandi Bear, might more plausibly be linked to the Mngwa.

Bernard Heuvelmans theorizes that the Mngwa may be an abnormally colored specimen of some known species or that it may be a larger subspecies of the golden cat (Profelis aurata).

SOURCE:

The Encyclopedia of Loch Monsters,Sasquatch, Chupacabras, and Other Authentic Mysteries of Nature
Written by Loren Coleman and Jerome Clark – Copyright 1999 Loren Coleman and Jerome Clark