Paranormal record / 1995
February 1995. The first week of Ramadhan. On the island of Pemba, off the coast of Tanzania, people began to complain of attacks in the night. The attacker had a name. Popobawa. A shetani, a spirit, whose name means bat wing, for the dark shadow it casts when it strikes. Sleepers woke unable to move, with something on their chest. Within weeks the panic had crossed to Unguja and was rampaging through Zanzibar Town. Families sat awake by fires outside their homes. Then, on the night of 3 April, a mob killed a visitor from the mainland. They thought he was Popobawa.
Popobawa is a shetani, a spirit. Its name joins popo, bat, and bawa, wing. It describes the dark shadow the spirit casts when it attacks at night, not its form. It is a shapeshifter, taking human and animal forms. Pemba had known it before, in 1965, shortly after that island's political revolution. One 1960s episode is said to have ended when President Sheikh Abeid A. Karume publicly challenged it.