Creature record / 1957
1957. A man walks into the hospital at Fort Rosebery, in what was then Northern Rhodesia. He has a severe wound in his chest. He tells the doctor a great bird attacked him in the Bangweulu Swamps. Big, like a bird. A long beak. Large wings. The doctor asks him to draw it. The outline he sketches is not quite a bird. It looks like a pterosaur. No name survives. No date, no hospital record, no drawing. Only the story, passed from book to blog, and the old swamp legend it seemed to confirm. The kongamato. The overwhelmer of boats.
The Bangweulu Swamps lie in the Luapula and Northern provinces of what is now Zambia. In 1923 Frank Melland recorded a local tradition from another swamp in the region, the Jiundu swamp at Mwinilunga. People there spoke of the kongamato. The name meant "overwhelmer of boats". It was described as reddish, with a wingspan of 4 to 7 ft, and was known locally to swoop down on boats, attacking and killing those on board.