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🦶 CRYPTID SIGHTING · EXP. Nº0555 ACTIVE

Popobawa

Popobawa is filed in cryptid catalogues, including this one, and it does not belong there.

Where and when was Popobawa sighted?

Location
Pemba Island, Zanzibar, Tanzania
Date sighted
Unknown
Coordinates
-5.18, 39.75
Last updated
LOCATION

What is Popobawa?

It is a collective panic that anthropologists documented as it happened. In the first week of February 1995, during Ramadhan, men, women and children in and around Mkoani, in southern Pemba, began reporting a shape-shifting night intruder that crushed their chest until they could not breathe; people stopped sleeping indoors and passed the nights awake around fires. Martin Walsh, who was living on the island, recorded the local explanations as they succeeded one another — a spurned witch-finder, a butchered whale, and only later the ruling party — and the name, remembered from an undated earlier panic and glossed from Swahili popo, bat, and bawa, wing, after the shadow the attacker was said to throw. On Unguja the assaults turned sexual and the response turned lethal: at least two men taken for Popobawa were beaten to death in April 1995, one of them a psychiatric patient from the mainland. The panic ended almost six months before the elections it is usually said to have served. The one-eyed winged monster of the English-language accounts can be dated to a skeptics' newsletter of December 1995, and the cryptid label to a single Wikipedia edit of 29 September 2004.

What is the history of Popobawa?

Popobawa is not a creature waiting to be discovered. It is a collective panic that anthropologists watched happen, in a place with a name and on days that can be listed. The setting matters. Zanzibar was Portuguese, then Omani, then British; the sultanate fell in the revolution of 12 January 1964, and three months later the islands entered a union with Tanganyika. Abeid Amani Karume and his Afro-Shirazi Party governed a closed, quasi-socialist archipelago. Multiparty politics returned only in 1992, and Tanzania's first multiparty elections were called for 22 October 1995. Pemba, the northern island, was and is opposition country. People on Pemba remembered an earlier terror. Martin Walsh, the anthropologist who did the fieldwork, records that it struck the south of the island in the years after the Revolution, and that his research assistant dated it to 1965: as many as ten people a night were said to be assaulted in Mkoani, diviners blamed a spirit, their offerings failed, and a committee of elders appointed by the President finally settled on a man of Makonde origin accused of sorcery against the Pembans who had made him divorce his wife. He was paraded round the island on a lorry and gaoled for life. Walsh is careful about this episode: he has found no contemporary reports of it, and published accounts disagree even about the decade. The modern panic began in early February 1995, during the first week of Ramadhan, in and around the southern Pemban port of Mkoani. Men, women and children woke to what Walsh describes as an amorphous or shape-shifting intruder pressing and crushing their chest and ribs until they could not breathe. Victims were often frozen speechless. Neighbours who carried possessory spirits went into trance and their spirits shouted warnings; the general scene, in his words, was pandemonium until the thing moved on. The spirit was identified as a sheitani and given the name people remembered from before: Popobawa, plural mapopobawa. The attacks worked their way north. People stopped sleeping indoors and spent the nights awake in groups around open fires. Because it was Ramadhan, and consulting a healer was frowned upon during the fast, the usual remedies were closed off. Before anyone framed the crisis politically, southern Pemba blamed a spurned witch-finder from the mainland called Tekelo, who had been thrown off the island without his fee; in Chake Chake a possessory spirit announced instead that the island was being punished because villagers had butchered a beached whale said to be the child of a greater spirit. On 12 March the village of Limbani, outside Wete, had its worst night. Walsh slept through it. His watchman Salim told him afterwards that a trembling white dog had appeared at the gate, then an unknown animal that shook the same way, and then a trembling dwarf that danced around the project Land Rovers before making off — at which point Salim ran for the main road, and the neighbours took the fleeing Salim for Popobawa. By April the panic had crossed to Unguja, and there it turned violent and sexual: Popobawa began to sodomise male and female victims, and mobs killed men taken for its manifestations. On 3 April 1995 one was beaten to death in Zanzibar town. Henriette Jansen, who worked at the Ministry of Health, arrived the next morning to find hundreds of people around the mortuary and wrote it down that day. The body was shown on state television; the parents were interviewed to confirm he was a mainlander who had come to Zanzibar for psychiatric treatment. The crowd did not believe them. Another man was killed at Nungwi on 28 April; the last dated report is 2 May. Then it stopped — almost six months before the elections it is usually said to have served. Walsh's material came overwhelmingly from a Zanzibari woman he calls Jamila, a married research assistant in her early thirties who filled a series of exercise books with incidents and commentary in under a fortnight in April 1995, and who asked not to be named because of the political content of the work. Smaller panics followed in October 2000, July 2001 and February–March 2007. In 2008 Popobawa became a Tanzanian horror film, studied by the film scholar Claudia Böhme; by then it had also become something else abroad.

Timeline: the documented record of Popobawa

  1. 1882 Ludwig Krapf's Dictionary of the Suahili Language, printed in London, records both halves of the name a century before any panic: "Bawa … the wing of a bird" and "Popo … a bat which is fond of mangoes and bananas".
  2. 12 January 1964 The Zanzibar Revolution overthrows the sultanate. Abeid Amani Karume takes power and the islands close to outsiders; three months later they enter the union with Tanganyika that forms Tanzania.
  3. 1965 (disputed) The first Popobawa panic, remembered in the south of Pemba around Mkoani. Walsh's assistant gave the year as 1965; other published accounts say the late 1960s or 1970 or 1971. Walsh states he has found no contemporary reports of it at all.
  4. First week of February 1995 During the first week of Ramadhan, men and women in and around Mkoani, in southern Pemba, begin reporting nocturnal assaults. The attacker is identified as a sheitani and given the remembered name Popobawa.
  5. 12 March 1995 Limbani, on the outskirts of Wete, has its night of crisis. Walsh sleeps through it; his watchman Salim describes a trembling white dog, an unknown animal and a trembling dwarf, then runs — and the neighbours take the fleeing Salim for Popobawa.
  6. 3–4 April 1995 A man is beaten to death in Zanzibar town as a manifestation of Popobawa. Henriette Jansen, working at the Ministry of Health, finds hundreds of people around the mortuary the next morning; state television shows the body and interviews the parents, who say he was a mainlander who had come for psychiatric treatment. The crowd does not believe them.
  7. 28 April – 2 May 1995 A second alleged Popobawa is killed at Nungwi, in the north of Unguja; 2 May is the last dated report of the panic. It ends almost six months before the elections it is usually said to have served.
  8. September–October 1995 In an article on Pemban bat-hunting written that September and published in October in the Mombasa newsletter Mvita, Walsh records that the bat-wing name "is said to be purely metaphorical and based upon descriptions of the frightening shadow cast by the nocturnal attacker". On 2 October Chris McGreal publishes his "Zanzibar Diary" in The Guardian, the article that carries the story to English-language readers.
  9. 22 October 1995 Tanzania holds its first multiparty elections. Many Zanzibaris, above all supporters of the opposition CUF, had read the panic as a government manoeuvre; Walsh's point is that the panic had been over since early May and that the political reading only emerged after several non-political ones.
  10. December 1995 Joe Nickell publishes "The Skeptic-raping Demon of Zanzibar" in Skeptical Briefs, describing "a dwarf's body with a single cyclopian eye … and batlike wings and talons" on McGreal's authority, and identifying the attacks as waking dreams with sleep paralysis. It is the first appearance of the one-eyed image that later fed the cryptid entries.
  11. 29 September 2004, 05:21 UTC Eleven days after the English Wikipedia article is created — by an editor who compares Popobawa to the monster in Jeepers Creepers and to the chupacabra — the user LucasVB files it under Category:Cryptids, at that moment its only category. This is the conversion our own entry inherited, and it can be dated to the minute.
  12. 7 November 2008 Cartoon Network broadcasts "The King of Kumari Kandam", the sixth episode of the cryptozoological cartoon The Secret Saturdays, in which Popobawa is a pink egg-laying animal. The DVD release renames it "devil's cave bird"; Mattel's action figure never reaches shops.
  13. 2009 Walsh publishes "The Politicisation of Popobawa" in the Journal of Humanities of the University of Dodoma, tabulating five panics — the late 1960s or early 1970s, February–May 1995, October 2000, July 2001 and February–March 2007 — and warning that the link between panics and elections "cannot simply be asserted" from local interpretations and a coincidence of timing.
  14. 2017 Indiana University Press publishes Katrina Daly Thompson's Popobawa: Tanzanian Talk, Global Misreadings, the standard monograph. Quoted by Radford from page 167: "I haven't found any references to the legend that assume Popobawa is a real animal except in jest."
  15. 15 May 2018 The Wikipedia editor Bloodofox strips the cryptid categories from the English article, citing the site's rules on undue weight and fringe theories. They are restored on 14 February 2023 and reverted within hours, and restored again on 27 September 2023, which is where they stand.

Is there a rational explanation for Popobawa?

Start with the name, because it is the one thing everybody repeats and it happens to be sound. Ludwig Krapf's Dictionary of the Suahili Language, printed in 1882 — a century before any panic — has "Bawa, s. (la, pl. mabawa), the wing of a bird" and, on the p-pages, "Popo, s. (wa), a bat which is fond of mangoes and bananas". Bat plus wing is correct; the inference from the name to a body is where the reading goes wrong. Walsh, in a piece on Pemban bat-hunting written in September 1995 while the islands were still talking about it, recorded that the designation "is said to be purely metaphorical and based upon descriptions of the frightening shadow cast by the nocturnal attacker", and he repeated the point in 2009. On that account the wing belongs to the shadow the attacker throws at night. The one-eyed, bat-winged, taloned dwarf can be dated. It is in Joe Nickell's "The Skeptic-raping Demon of Zanzibar" in Skeptical Briefs for December 1995, describing "a dwarf's body with a single cyclopian eye, small pointed ears and batlike wings and talons" and citing Chris McGreal's "Zanzibar Diary" in The Guardian of 2 October 1995. It reappears in the Fortean annual Strange Days #2 (1997) as "a terrible one-eyed dwarf with bat-wings and talons". What people in Zanzibar were describing at the time was something else. Jansen's diary for April 1995 has a Popobawa that goes about practically naked with a cow's tail and a jar of medicine, announced by an intolerable stench, and Walsh's informants describe something amorphous that changes shape, with neither an eye nor wings. The physiological explanation is real and has names attached. Nickell identified the attacks in 1995 as a "waking dream" — hypnagogic or hypnopompic hallucination with sleep paralysis — reading it against Peter Huston's 1992 Skeptical Inquirer article on night terrors and the medieval incubus. Shelley Adler's Sleep Paralysis: Night-mares, Nocebos, and the Mind-Body Connection (Rutgers University Press, 2011) lists popobawa in her cross-cultural table of names for the experience, glossed "bat wing — from dark shadow cast" and sourced to Walsh. Swahili has its own word for it: jinamizi, which Walsh translates loosely as nightmare while noting it often means the hallucinations that come with sleep paralysis, and for which the healer Mhamadi Khamis Makame gave him a seven-plant steam treatment on camera on 18 October 2007. The mechanism was already named in the local vocabulary before any outsider proposed it. What the explanation does not license is the tone. Katrina Daly Thompson's Popobawa: Tanzanian Talk, Global Misreadings (Indiana University Press, 2017) attacks Western skeptics who "present themselves as experts who understand Popobawa better than Swahili speakers themselves do" and who "contribute to an ethnocentric grand narrative that depicts the West as the font of science, rationality, and modernity and Africa as the font of fear, irrationality, and backwardness". Both men she names have answered in print: Benjamin Radford (2018) and Nickell (2019), the first insisting that no single explanation covers the case and the second that he had given Western examples of the same panic. Thompson's sentences are quoted here from those two replies, and both authors are parties to the argument. The cryptid label is the part we can date to the minute, and it is ours to answer for. Thompson's own verdict, quoted by Radford from page 167, is blunt: "I haven't found any references to the legend that assume Popobawa is a real animal except in jest." The English Wikipedia article was created on 18 September 2004 by a user called Omoo, who compared the spirit to the monster in the film Jeepers Creepers and to the chupacabra. Eleven days later, on 29 September 2004 at 05:21 UTC, the user LucasVB filed it under Category:Cryptids, at that moment the article's only category. On 1 October 2008 it was moved to Category:Flying cryptids with a one-click gadget. On 15 May 2018 the editor Bloodofox stripped the cryptid categories out, citing Wikipedia's rules on undue weight and fringe theories; they were restored on 14 February 2023 and reverted within hours, and restored again on 27 September 2023, which is where they stand. The Spanish article was created on 31 July 2015 as a translation and given Categoría:Criptozoología two minutes and twenty-three seconds later. Our own entry inherits that chain. The imbalance can be counted. On 4 October 2026 the Internet Archive's full-text search returned 170 texts containing "Popobawa" and 33,986 containing "Sasquatch". The same day OpenAlex returned 35 scholarly works mentioning "Popobawa", against 1,590 for "Sasquatch". Most of the 35 are anthropology, linguistics, African studies, Swahili film and Thompson's book and its reviews; the exceptions include an editorial in the Tanzania Dental Journal, a study of stroke care and two collections on monsters, The Mothman and Other Strange Tales and Darwin and the Monsters. Popobawa's scholarly record sits with Zanzibar and the Swahili language, and the monster guides are a small part of it. There have been attempts at a zoological candidate, and they are recent and traceable. The Rough Guide to Zanzibar (Jens Finke, 2010) states that the endemic Pemba flying fox "evidently inspired Zanzibar's infamous Popobawa hysteria". An episode of the Syfy series Destination Truth in 2008 sent Josh Gates hunting a "bat man" through Stone Town with infrared cameras. The sixth episode of Cartoon Network's cryptozoological cartoon The Secret Saturdays, broadcast on 7 November 2008, turned Popobawa into a pink, egg-laying, quadrupedal animal; its creator Jay Stephens said he chose to "dismiss the accounts of rape as pure myth". The DVD release renamed the creature "devil's cave bird", and Mattel's action figure was never sold in shops. That is the whole zoological case: a guidebook line, a television stunt and a toy that was withdrawn. One claim is left out of this file on purpose. The Guardian reported in October 1995, as quoted by Nickell, that "Zanzibar's main hospital has treated men with bruises, broken ribs and other injuries, which the victims blame on the creature". The passage names no doctor and gives no number. Henriette Jansen, who worked at the Ministry of Health beside the hospital, wrote on 4 April 1995 of hundreds of people at the mortuary and of the dead man on the autopsy table, and her diary says nothing of men treated for injuries. What is documented is the other kind of injury: at least two men beaten to death on Unguja in April 1995, one of them a psychiatric patient from the mainland, and mobs on Pemba that beat unkempt or inarticulate men found wandering at night.

Can you visit Popobawa?

Nothing on Pemba is marked as a Popobawa site. The map pin on this file sits at 5.18 S 39.75 E, which is not Mkoani: it falls about 7 km south of Wete and about 23 km north of Mkoani, where the panic of 1995 began. Mkoani stands at the southern end of Pemba, at 5.384 S 39.714 E, and is the island's passenger ferry port for the crossing to Zanzibar Town on Unguja. Pemba Airport, IATA code PMA, lies about 7 km south-east of Chake Chake in the middle of the island. Chake Chake holds the island's hospital and most of its accommodation. Wete, at 5.116 S 39.755 E, is the town where Martin Walsh was living in 1995; Limbani, whose worst night was 12 March 1995, is on its outskirts. The Pemba flying fox (Pteropus voeltzkowi) is endemic to the island. It is seen at Ngezi Forest Reserve in the north-west, 1,440 hectares of mostly primary forest established in 1959, where local guides run walks. It is a large fruit bat brought back from near-extinction by a protection programme. The risk in raising the subject falls on the person answering rather than on the person asking. In 1995 at least two men were beaten to death on Unguja as suspected mapopobawa, one of them a mainlander who had come for psychiatric treatment, and mobs on Pemba beat strangers found walking at night; Walsh's material includes a man seized at the Kojani ferry crossing and thrashed with sticks and stones because his bag held roots and charms [6]. Walsh's research assistant asked not to be named for that reason. Thompson's book sets out how far the talk is bound up with sex between men [11]. Zanzibar also has a penal code of its own: section 150 of the Zanzibar Penal Code of 1934 punishes carnal knowledge "against the order of nature" with imprisonment for a term not exceeding fourteen years. That is the Human Dignity Trust country profile, whose page carries a last-updated date of 19 December 2025 and was consulted on 10 September 2026 [17]. Ramadhan, the month in which the panic began, changes daytime life across the islands.

Sources consulted

  1. Martin T. Walsh, «The Politicisation of Popobawa: Changing Explanations of a Collective Panic in Zanzibar» — Journal of Humanities (University of Dodoma) 1(1): 23–33, 2009 academic
  2. Henriette Jansen, «Popobawa is Dead!» — Tanzanian Affairs 53: 22–24 (dated diary entries of 4 April, 5 April and 4 May 1995), 1996 report
  3. Joe Nickell, «Investigative Files: The Skeptic-raping Demon of Zanzibar» — Skeptical Briefs (CSICOP), December 1995, p. 7, 1995 report
  4. Ludwig Krapf, «A Dictionary of the Suahili Language (entries "Bawa" and "Popo")» — London: Trübner & Co., 1882 book
  5. Martin T. Walsh, «Eating Bats on Pemba Island: A Local Innovation or Cultural Borrowing?» — Mvita: Newsletter of the Regional Centre for the Study of Archaeology in Eastern and Southern Africa (Mombasa) 6: 15–18, written September 1995; republished on East African Notes and Records, 1995 report
  6. Martin T. Walsh, «Kojani versus Popobawa» — East African Notes and Records, 26 June 2010, 2010 web
  7. Martin T. Walsh, «A Recipe for Dispelling Nightmares (jinamizi and the nyungu steam treatment, filmed 18 October 2007)» — East African Notes and Records, July 2019, 2019 web
  8. Benjamin Radford, «Popobawa vs. the Skeptics» — Center for Inquiry, 25 April 2018 (quotes Thompson 2017 with page numbers), 2018 web
  9. Wikipedia contributors, «Popobawa: full revision history of the English and Spanish Wikipedia articles» — Wikimedia API, revisions 2004-09-18 to 2026-06-21, 2026 archive
  10. Russ Dobler, «That Time a Raping Demon Appeared on Cartoon Network: The Popobawa» — Skeptical Inquirer, 9 May 2019, 2019 web
  11. Katrina Daly Thompson, «Popobawa: Tanzanian Talk, Global Misreadings» — Bloomington: Indiana University Press, xii + 226 pp., ISBN 978-0253024565 (consulted through the reviews and through the page-numbered quotations in Radford 2018 and Nickell 2019), 2017 book
  12. Joe Nickell, «Zanzibar's Popobawa Demon Still Attacking Skeptics» — Center for Inquiry, Investigative Briefs, 2019 web
  13. Shelley R. Adler, «Sleep Paralysis: Night-mares, Nocebos, and the Mind-Body Connection (popobawa listed in the cross-cultural table, glossed from Walsh 2009)» — New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2011 book
  14. Michael Newton, «Hidden Animals: A Field Guide to Batsquatch, Chupacabra, and Other Elusive Creatures (Popobawa chapter)» — Santa Barbara: Greenwood Press, 2009 book
  15. Jens Finke, «The Rough Guide to Zanzibar (Pemba flying fox "evidently inspired" the Popobawa hysteria)» — London: Rough Guides, 2010 book
  16. Marie-Aude Fouéré, «Katrina Daly Thompson — Popobawa. Tanzanian Talk, Global Misreadings (review)» — Cahiers d'Études africaines, 2020 academic
  17. Human Dignity Trust, «Tanzania: country profile (Zanzibar's separate penal code and its provisions on same-sex sexual activity)» — Human Dignity Trust, 2026 web

Reviewed by V. Serrano on 2026-08-14 · How we verify our content

📎 Source: Enigma Atlas

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