There are so many rivers in the world, so many remote places; In this extremely desolate region, people's lives have been fraught with violence and bloodshed for more than a hundred years; This is the Congo.
The African river monster we want to explore is in this country, a country lost in the heart of Africa, a land full of legends and myths.
The giant catfish is called a river monster, how big is it?
In the Congo River, there is a ghost called Mamiwata, which is said to lure fishermen to the bottom of the river and imprison them forever; The story is far-fetched, and perhaps not; Whether these legends are nonsense, or whether there is indeed something lurking in the deep water.
Locals have a story that some fish are said to be large enough to sometimes drag fishermen out of their canoes and drown in the water. The people in the villages along the river are more superstitious, believing that there is a ghost in the river called "Mamiwata", but is this ghost in the water the rare giant catfish?
The filament catfish, with a maximum length of about 2.4 meters and a weight of about 136 kg, is a behemoth in all the rivers of the world. Catfish are basically scaleless and have tentacles, but there are many species of catfish, except for Antarctica, each continent is inhabited by about three thousand different catfish, and there are more than two hundred different catfish living in the Congo River alone; And after the catfish leave the water, they can live for a long time.
Catfish in the Amazon can be large enough to swallow people, so there is a reason to live in this Congo River with fish of similar size; Along the coast of the Congo River inland, there is a village called Penga, where the villagers make a living from fishing. Locals there say that a man was once killed by being dragged into the water by an oversized catfish from a canoe boat.
One morning, as usual, he went out to check on his fishing line, and never came back, and two days later someone found his body, one of his fish hooks, hooked on his shirt, pierced into his arm, and from the situation of his body and the fishing line, it can be inferred that while he was pulling the fishing line, he was hooked by the fishing hook, and he was pulled into the water in the boat; On the other hook of the same fishing line, a huge catfish is hooked, and the size of the catfish alone is about 50 centimeters wide and weighs more than 50 kilograms; According to locals, there is the largest catfish in the area.
Dangerous fishing methods for fishermen in the village of Penga on the Congo River
Locals call the Congo River the Muzadi River, meaning the river that engulfs all rivers; Together with countless tributaries, it forms the second largest flowing river in the world, flowing nearly 4,800 kilometers from the Atlantic coastline to the heart of Africa, ranking second in the world. In such a large river, the presence of huge catfish does not seem impossible.
Catfish are most active at night, swimming into shoals and probing prey with their tentacles, and are one of the top predators in the Congo River. The people of the village of Penga mainly live by catching it. The fishermen of Punta Ponga would generally go out fishing alone, they would paddle a canoe, take fifty to a hundred fishing hooks, and go deep into the middle part of the river from the river to the middle part of the river, placing fishing hooks and fishing lines along the way, the canoes were small and wobbly, which was dangerous for the fisherman, and a fishing hook that did not pay attention would hook the hands and feet.
And the fishing line is equally dangerous, are one by one fishing line, if there are big fish, the fisherman in the line when the canoe shakes very badly, will be dragged into the water, if also hooked by the fish hook, the fisherman is very likely to be on the surface of the water, in this case, even if not 100 kg of catfish, even if the 10 kg catfish will drag you into the deep water and drown.
Even in such dangerous conditions, the fishermen of Ponga had to fish in deep water, which was the lifeblood for them and everything in their lives.
What exactly is the river ghost Mamiwata
Mamiwata is a creature that the people of The Village of Punka fear and make them feel dangerous. And it seems to me that the real danger is not the ghosts, not the fish monsters, but the process of trying to round them up and the desperate practices of the fishermen.
Perhaps Mamiwata is not a supernatural creature, or perhaps it is simply a product of culture, a cryptic version of the fishermen's burial in the water.
summary
Mamiwata's luring the fisherman to his death is just a story imagined, but we will not debunk it in the end, because to them "the truth is as terrible as the legend".
Mamiwata does exist, but it is not a ghost, not a fish monster, nor a giant catfish; Rather, it is a fact of the reality of their lives, as locals have to get food from this sinister and mysterious river every day