Creature record / 1922
Lindi, Tanganyika Territory. 1922. Native constables guarded the market square through the night. One of them came to relieve the midnight watch and found the post empty. After a search, the missing constable turned up underneath a stall, terribly mutilated. Clenched in the victim's hand was a matted mass of greyish hair. Two men said they had been passing the market that night. They saw an enormous brindled cat leap out of the shadows and pounce. A couple of nights later, a second askari died the same way, grey fur in a clenched fist. Then the killings moved up and down the coast. People had a name for the killer. The mngwa. The strange one.
Lindi sits on Lindi Bay, on the Indian Ocean coast of what was then Tanganyika Territory. In 1922 native constables guarded the town's market square at night, in four-hour shifts. Lions were no threat here. As Capt. William Hichens later wrote, "in many years no lion had been known to come into the town." Swahili tradition did know a great killer cat, though. In the folk tale "Sultan Majnun", collected by Edward Steere, a Sultan's cat kills animals, then people, and becomes a nunda.