Chipekwe

The chipekwe, which Millais spelled Chimpekwe, is a large animal said to have lived in north-east Rhodesia. It is known mostly from second-hand reports by European hunters and writers of the early twentieth century.

The oldest source here tells the story without the name chipekwe. In Beasts and Men (English edition 1912), the German animal collector Carl Hagenbeck wrote that local people had told his two informants of an enormous creature, part elephant and part dragon, living deep in the great swamps. He added that Menges had heard much the same story decades earlier, and that drawings of the animal could be found on cave walls in Central Africa.

Contingent Magazine (2019) places this early in the twentieth century, when Hagenbeck and Hans Schomburgk said they had heard of a saurian of some kind known to African people and to European hunters alike in Northern and Southern Rhodesia. Some Africans took it for the mokele-mbembe; Hagenbeck was convinced it was a brontosaurus.

A form of the name appears in a letter from Millais, printed by Denis D. Lyell in African Adventure (1935). Writing on 22 June 1925, Millais called the animal the Chimpekwe and placed it in north-east Rhodesia. He thought it had died out, though it had probably lived into the early nineteenth century. He had heard local people speak of it but had never met anyone who had seen one. They said it bore horns on the face, as a rhino does, and was the size of a hippo. Millais allowed it might be a myth, but found it odd that several names for it were in use across Africa.

French Wikipedia reports that J. E. Hughes, in his 1933 book on eighteen years at Lake Bangweleu, described an animal killed by the Wa-Ushi on the banks of the Luapula, the river that joins Lake Bangwelo to Lake Moero, and identified it as a chipekwe.