MOKÈLÉ-MBÈMBÉ, mythical creature said to look like a brontosaurus that lives in the Congo River Basin. It is usually described as being the size of an elephant, with smooth, hairless brown or gray skin, three clawed toes, a long neck and tail, a small head, and a single tooth or horn. The name Mokèlé-Mbèmbé translates to “one who stops the flow of rivers.” Local legends from the Likouala aux Herbes River area, as recorded by German officers more than a century ago, describe the creature as hiding in river caves and killing fishermen who pass by.
While Bantu religion and folklore include many varied tales of animal spirits and river guardians, the legend of Mokèlé-Mbèmbé is clearly more rooted in the Western colonial imagination than in Indigenous tradition. The first written mention of it occurs in 1776 in the French missionary Abbé Lievain Bonaventure Proyart’s History of Loango, Kakonga, and Other Kingdoms in Africa, in which he describes hearing his fellow missionaries tell of discovering the clawlike footprints of a giant animal. The legend gained in popularity when the German showman and exotic-animal dealer Carl Hagenbeck published his book Beasts and Men in 1909. He described hearing reports of a half-elephant, half-dragon that lived in Rhodesia and suggested it might be a living sauropod dinosaur. While this claim took up no more than a paragraph of the book, it garnered global attention, including a Washington Post article with the headline “Brontosaurus Still Lives.” This was the era in which the first mounted dinosaur skeletons were appearing in natural-history museums in cities like New York and London, kicking off a dinosaur frenzy in the Western popular imagination.
More rumored sightings of “African dinosaurs” were reported in the 1910s from the Sahara to South Africa. The legend became attached to the Congo River Basin after two particularly exciting encounters were published in London newspapers in 1919: first a railway worker described being chased by a twenty-four-foot-long monster with a giant snout, a horn and two tusks, cloven feet, and a scaly hump; shortly thereafter a big-game hunter claimed he’d pursued a giant rhinoceros with reptilian scales and a thick kangaroo-like tail and watched it disappear into a swamp.
The modern pseudoscience of cryptozoology—the study of animals whose existence is disputed—took off in the middle of the century with the publication of On the Track of Unknown Animals by the zoologists Ivan T. Sanderson and Bernard Heuvelmans, who wrote about the elusive African dinosaur alongside accounts of the Loch Ness Monster and the Abominable Snowman. Herpetologist James H. Powell began making expeditions to the Congo in the 1970s in hopes of spotting the giant reptile. In 1980 he was joined by Loch Ness Monster researcher Roy Mackel, who in 1987 published the most widely known book about Mokèlé-Mbèmbé, A Living Dinosaur? In Search of Mokele-Mbembe.
By this time a cottage industry had sprung up in the Congo to serve the dinosaur-hunting foreigners, and locals became incentivized to keep the myth going. Mackel’s book is full of breathless tales of encounters with Mokèlé-Mbèmbé from Congolese people, including one of a Pygmy tribe who supposedly killed and ate the monster. (All who ate the meat were said to have died shortly thereafter of a mysterious illness.)
The legend of Mokèlé-Mbèmbé has been of particular interest to so-called Young Earth creationists, who believe that the Earth is only between six thousand and ten thousand years old; the discovery of a living dinosaur would supposedly upend the current understanding of evolution and the fossil record and thus provide proof for their timeline. Many modern expeditions in search of Mokèlé-Mbèmbé have been funded and/or led by such groups.