The Agogwe is a small, upright, hair-covered creature reported from East Africa. Almost everything known about it comes from two short pieces in the London magazine Discovery in 1937 and 1938: an article by a British colonial official, Captain William Hichens, and a letter in reply from a wine merchant, Cuthbert Burgoyne.[1][2] Both men described “little men” about four feet tall and covered in brownish hair. Both also admitted that what they saw might have been a monkey. No photograph, specimen or new first-hand sighting has been reported since.
| Type | Reported small hair-covered biped (“crypto-hominid”) |
|---|---|
| Region | Central Tanzania (Hichens); coastal Mozambique (Burgoyne) |
| Reported size | About 4 to 5 feet (1.2–1.5 m) tall |
| Reported appearance | Upright, covered in russet or brown hair |
| Key sources | W. Hichens, Discovery, Dec. 1937; C. Burgoyne, Discovery, Feb. 1938 |
| Physical evidence | None |
Hichens’ sighting
In December 1937 Hichens published “African Mystery Beasts” in Discovery. He described waiting in a forest clearing during an official hunt for a man-eating lion, near the Usure and Simbiti forests on the western side of the Wembere plains in what was then Tanganyika (today’s Singida region of Tanzania). Two small brown creatures emerged from the forest and crossed the clearing on two legs. He compared them to little men about four feet high, covered in russet hair. His local hunter told him they were agogwe. Hichens said he later searched for them without success, and he left the question open: they might have been monkeys, but if so, he wrote, they were “no ordinary monkeys.”[1]
Sources do not agree on exactly when the sighting happened. The article was written well after the event, and some later writers place it around the turn of the twentieth century.
Burgoyne’s letter
Two months later, Cuthbert Burgoyne replied with his own account. In 1927, from a Japanese cargo ship off the coast of Portuguese East Africa (now Mozambique), he was watching a troop of baboons on a sloping beach through a telescope. Two small brown figures, which he described as little men, walked out of the bush together and down among the baboons. He estimated them at four to five feet tall and was sure they were not any monkey he knew. He added a secondhand story from a big-game hunter friend who had seen a family of similar creatures inland and was told by local people not to shoot them.[2]
Burgoyne’s sighting took place hundreds of miles from Hichens’ and at a distance, from a moving ship. It is often listed as a second Agogwe report, but nothing links the two except their general description.
Later history of the name
The French-Belgian zoologist Bernard Heuvelmans included these accounts in his landmark book On the Track of Unknown Animals (French 1955; English 1958), and from there the Agogwe entered the standard lists of cryptozoology.[3][4] Later writers have sometimes merged it with other “little hairy people” reported in Africa, such as the kakundakari described by the collector Charles Cordier in the Congo.[5] Mid-century newspaper features repeated the stories, but they added no new eyewitnesses.
Many modern retellings describe Agogwe working together in groups, stealing tools or acting as guardians of the forest. None of those details comes from Hichens or Burgoyne.
Who were the witnesses?
William Hichens (died 1944) was a British colonial administrator in Tanganyika who held the rank of captain. His Discovery article was part of a series on “African Mystery Beasts,” which also discussed other East African animals that hunters and administrators reported but zoologists had never described. Hichens is the person who brought the word agogwe into English. Writing for a popular science magazine, he presented the creatures as an open question rather than a discovery.[1][5]
Cuthbert Burgoyne (1875–1955) was a wine merchant, the son of the wine shipper P. B. Burgoyne, not a naturalist, as some retellings claim. He wrote in because Hichens’ article reminded him of what he had seen ten years earlier. Neither man appears to have tried to profit from the story or to have built a reputation on it, which is one reason cryptozoologists have taken their accounts seriously.[2][5]
How the story spread
Between the Discovery pieces and Heuvelmans’ book, the Agogwe also reached American newspapers. A newspaper feature in May 1950 and a 1960 article by the popular science writer Gardner Soule on East Africa’s unexplained animals both repeated the description of four- to five-foot creatures with russet or brown hair. Neither reported a new witness. They show how a pair of magazine items from the 1930s became a stock entry in mid-century “mysteries of Africa” journalism, and from there in cryptozoology guides.[6][7]
How good is the evidence?
Taken on their own terms, both reports have real weaknesses. Hichens saw the creatures briefly, across a clearing, while waiting tensely for a lion, and he wrote about it years later. Burgoyne watched from a ship offshore, through a telescope, with nothing nearby to compare sizes against except the baboons themselves. Judging an animal’s height at a distance without a familiar object beside it is notoriously unreliable, and a slightly larger animal that stands upright reads instantly as “a little man.”
Primates also stand up more often than people expect. Baboons, vervets and other African monkeys rise onto their hind legs to look over tall grass, to carry food, or when they are alarmed, and they can walk a few steps that way. Two animals crossing a clearing on their hind legs would be unusual but not impossible. Both witnesses raised this possibility themselves.
The more ambitious idea, that the Agogwe was a surviving small hominin, has gained some interest from discoveries since the 1930s. The small-bodied Homo floresiensis lived on the Indonesian island of Flores until roughly 60,000 years ago, and the small-brained Homo naledi lived in South Africa between about 335,000 and 236,000 years ago, much later than its primitive anatomy would suggest. Both finds show that small hominins persisted longer than scientists once assumed. Neither, however, comes anywhere close to the twentieth century, and no bones, tools or other traces of a recent small hominin have ever been found in East Africa.[8][9]
Possible explanations
- Monkeys or baboons. Both witnesses raised this themselves. Baboons and some monkeys stand and walk upright for short distances, and a brief glimpse at a distance, across a glade or a beach, could make one look strikingly human.
- An unknown primate. Cryptozoologists have proposed an undiscovered ape or a surviving small hominin. The discovery of the small extinct human Homo floresiensis in Indonesia in 2003 revived such ideas. No African evidence supports them, and there is no fossil or physical trace of a recent small hominin in East Africa.
- Stories of “little people.” Many African cultures, like cultures worldwide, have traditions of small forest beings. A local name offered to a visiting hunter may refer to a spirit or folklore figure rather than a specific animal.
- Memory and retelling. Hichens wrote years after the event, and Burgoyne responded to Hichens’ article, which may have shaped how he described his own sighting.
For small hairy bipeds reported elsewhere, see the Almas of Central Asia. The Nandi Bear is another famous East African mystery animal.
References
- William Hichens, “African Mystery Beasts,” Discovery: A Monthly Popular Journal of Knowledge 18 (December 1937): 369–373.
- Cuthbert Burgoyne, “Little Furry Men” (letter), Discovery 19 (February 1938): 582.
- Bernard Heuvelmans, On the Track of Unknown Animals (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1958; French original 1955).
- George M. Eberhart, Mysterious Creatures: A Guide to Cryptozoology (Santa Barbara: ABC-Clio, 2002), s.v. “Agogwe.”
- “Agogwe,” Kook Science, and Wikipedia, for bibliographic details of the Discovery articles.
- “A Ceremonial Dancer,” The News Leader, 4 May 1950, p. 14, as cited in Wikipedia, “Agogwe.”
- Gardner Soule, “Man-Killing, Pony Sized Cat Baffles East African Hunters,” The Dispatch, 3 November 1960, p. 5.
- T. Sutikna et al., “Revised stratigraphy and chronology for Homo floresiensis at Liang Bua in Indonesia,” Nature 532 (2016): 366–369.
- P. H. G. M. Dirks et al., “The age of Homo naledi and associated sediments in the Rising Star Cave, South Africa,” eLife 6 (2017): e24231.
Correction note (October 2026): This entry was rewritten from the original published accounts. An earlier version called Burgoyne a naturalist and placed his 1927 sighting in Tanzania; he was a wine merchant and the sighting was off the coast of Mozambique. Claims that Agogwe work in groups, communicate with gestures, steal tools or have supernatural powers do not appear in the sources and have been removed. The illustration above is an artistic impression.