Agogwe

Among the forests and mountains of eastern Africa, from Tanzania and Mozambique north into Kenya, a persistent strand of indigenous oral tradition describes a small, upright, bipedal creature covered in long reddish or rust-colored hair. The Agogwe — known by related names including Kakundakari in the Congo basin and Sehite in Ethiopia — is consistently described as diminutive, standing between three and five feet tall, with a distinctly human-like manner of walking, large eyes, and a face that observers describe as more hominid than simian. Unlike the great apes of the region — chimpanzees, gorillas — the Agogwe is said to walk fully upright rather than knuckle-walking, and its hair color is described as reddish rather than the black common to known African apes.

The most frequently cited Western account comes from Captain William Hichens, a British colonial officer who published a description in the journal Discovery in 1937. Hichens reported that he had personally observed two small, reddish, bipedal creatures in the forest near Wembere, in what is now Tanzania, during a lion hunt in the 1900s. The creatures stood watching him from a clearing before retreating into the bush. Hichens described them as clearly not chimpanzees, noting their upright posture and coloration. A second account published in the same period came from Cuthbert Burgoyne, who described seeing a family of Agogwe near the Mozambique coast in 1927, the adults accompanied by a juvenile.

The discovery of Homo floresiensis in 2004 — a small, bipedal hominin species that survived on the Indonesian island of Flores into the relatively recent past — reinvigorated cryptozoological interest in African small hominid reports. If an archaic hominin could survive undetected in Southeast Asia into the modern era, the argument runs, a similar survival in the biologically rich but relatively under-surveyed forests of eastern Africa cannot be dismissed purely on theoretical grounds. Researchers have also proposed that the Agogwe might represent a small, unknown chimpanzee population whose distinctive reddish coat and more habitually bipedal locomotion have not been formally described.

No specimen of the Agogwe has ever been collected or photographed, and the forests of eastern Africa have been subject to increasing human pressure in recent decades. The tradition's biological credibility rests on the consistency of independent accounts and the genuine possibility of unknown hominids in a region whose paleontological record is the richest in the world for early human evolution.