While I enjoy the original article, it falls under a very common problem in how it depicts Mokele-Mbembe, Mbielu-Mbielu-Mbielu or other such “dinosaur cryptids”.
The article presented quite uncritically three things I have issue with; the presence of dinosaurs in Africa, that the names given by the African population to those creatures were those mentioned prior and that native Africans don’t know about dinosaurs.
The first point is the easiest to mentioned why I have issues with, the belief of lost worlds, or late surviving dinosaurs in the 3rd world is born from European colonialism, the idea that some places were primitive, savage or “behind the times”. And needed Europe’s “enlightened” ideas to be shown to them.
The second point couldn’t be further from the truth. Those names are gibberish in the local languages. When actual Lingala speakers heard those words, they either thought they were complete gibberish, or that it meant things quite different from what the Europeans claimed, such as Mokele-Mbembe meaning Rainbow according to the president of the Kivu Department. Mokele-Mbembe, Mbielu-Mbielu-Mbielu and most others dinosaur cryptids in Africa that you can think of were made up by Europeans, with no native equivalent exiting prior. And nowadays native africans only use those cryptids to get money from Europeans, as even in the middle of the African woodlands capitalism means that you gotta buy food, water, defense against mosquitoes, defense against wildlife, clothes, shelter and whatever else you might need.
And about the third, European books, comics, tvs and movies have been circulating throught the African interior for a really long time, even the average person in the middle of the goddamn jungle knows, or at least has a vague idea of what a dinosaur is and of some of the most famous ones.
I haven’t written all of this to criticize IHP’s article, it is a good piece of short fiction one that I do I enjoy a lot. But Remixcon was the perfect time to challenge some of the ideas it accidentally had.
