Flipper
New member
I'm gonna mess this story up, but I'll try from recollection...
I used to have a friend that was a geologist. He had formerly worked with a scientist who had spent some time exploring some remote regions of Africa. That man told stories to my friend of the natives in the remote region who had a word - "Mochilimimbe" (no clue on the spelling; pronounced "Mo-kill-ee-mim-bay", as I recall) - for a "beast" that lived there and was seen on very rare occasion. The name meant something like "stops up rivers" because it was supposedly huge. The picture they drew of the creature was a dinosaur-looking creature.
For what it's worth.
Moleke-Mbebe? It's supposed to live up in Lake Tele in the Congo, and a number of cryptozoological expeditions have been sent (including a couple of YEC-funded ones, I think) to find the critter, or at least some evidence beyond anecdotal accounts that it exists.
All have come back empty-handed. The story got some extra oomph because a local government scientist claimed to have seen the creature, but he hasn't been exactly consistent with his story.
A guy called Redmond O'Hanlon wrote a rather fantastic book about his experience going to look for the creature with the scientist. It's a part of the Congo that is rife with superstition and animism, and the Lake is considered sacred. His expedition was unsuccessful, and he was given a whole bunch of contradictory accounts about the monster from different people, including the scientist, Marcellin.
He was told, for example, that it resembled a dinosaur, but also he was told that it was invisible to the eyes of man. One of his guides also told him that Marcellin had made his eyewitness account up so that he could get paid to lead charter expeditions in search of the creature.
It seems likely that Moleke-Mbebe seems more like a mythical story from a sacred place than an account of a real animal.
Anyone interested in Africa would probably find O'Hanlon's book "No Mercy: A Journey Into the Heart of the Congo" fascinating, because it explores the weird and uneasy African nexus created between the harsh environment, high mortality rates, culture, desperation and spiritualism. It's a pretty messed-up story.