The Monkey That Bled a Man: An Encounter in the Kwall Forest

In the 1960s, my great-uncle, Ichie Onyeweaku, was a man who existed in an ideological limbo. Like many men whose lives had carried them across the boundaries of empire, his convictions frayed at the seams concerning matters of the divine and the supernatural. On one hand, he was exposed to the sensibilities of colonial Anglicanism. On the other hand, his father and siblings practiced omenala. His plurality of mind did not stop there; stationed in Burma and later India during his military service, his introduction to “foreigners who worshipped idols like his village folks” deepened this profound uncertainty.

Perhaps to anchor himself, he embraced a learned rigidity. He was a Public Servant at one of Nigeria’s foremost scientific institutions. He had recently purchased a Vauxhall Viva for exactly £500. He was a documented marksman, having served in the 8th (WA) Field Park Company, where only a Sergeant Major could outscore his bullseyes. He understood ballistics. He understood trajectories. He was gallant and clear-eyed by every natural standard.

On a Saturday evening in January 1965, he drove his nine-year-old son to the Kwall forest near Miango, Jos, Nigeria. Parking his Vauxhall Viva at the village chief’s house, he stepped into the heavy, undisturbed brush of the Kurmi seeking game.

They had barely penetrated the tree line when he spotted two monkeys sitting unusually close to the ground. A seasoned hunter knows that wild monkeys do not linger in the lower branches when armed men enter a forest. But a marksman does not question his luck. He raised his Zabala double-barrelled shotgun, took aim at the larger primate, and fired.

The creature did not fall. It did not scatter. Instead, the heavy silence of the Plateau forest was shattered by the unmistakable, terrified wailing of a human being.

"Haw, aw, aw, awh!" the creature screamed from the branches. "Ho! ho! oh, ohw! Haa, haa, haa, haah! Oo! Oo, ooh!"

My great-uncle lowered his gun. The sound echoing through the canopy was not the screech of a dying animal; it was the agonizing cry of a man in profound physical pain. Stripped of his hunter’s confidence, he called out into the leaves in Hausa: "Kai mutum ne?" (Are you a human being?)

"I am a human being," the voice in the tree replied.

"Za ka ia sauka?" (Can you come down?) my great-uncle asked.

"Ii, zan ia," (Yes) the figure answered.

Ichie Onyeweaku writes in his memoir: “In no time, the fellow came down, and he was a short young man of between twenty-five to thirty years old. He was wearing a green short knicker, a white shirt and green short-sleeved sweater. Blood was flowing from his head to his body – soaking his dresses.”

This monkey was not a monkey after all. It was not a primate and most definitely was not a wild animal. It was a complete dismantling of reality as he knew it.

Driven by integrity despite being justifiably flustered, my great-uncle immediately offered to carry the bleeding man on his back to the village. The stranger refused, demanding to lead the way on foot. But the internal damage of the shotgun blast was catastrophic. Before they could walk ten paces, the young man stopped and vomited half a pint of blood onto the forest floor. Ten paces later, he vomited another half pint.

Fearing the onset of tetanus and knowing a rural dispensary could not handle this level of trauma, Ichie Onyeweaku loaded the bleeding stranger into his Vauxhall Viva and sped through an uncharted route to the Vom Christian Hospital. They arrived at 7:30 PM, where they were met by Dr. C.E. Hartley, a British surgeon who had previously removed his appendix.

“As soon as he was free, he came and asked me what was the trouble. I told him that I went hunting at Kwall, and as I shot at a monkey, he quickly turned human, and this was the fellow!” Ichie Onyeweaku recounts.

Dr. Hartley wheeled the blood-soaked man into the operating theatre. When the surgeon finally emerged, he delivered a diagnosis that defied the very foundation of medicine: “That there was no visible wound on any part of his head or body, no wound, no abrasion, no cut, no lesion whatsoever! He said I should take him away, but I refused.” Onyeweaku writes.

Ichie Onyeweaku, refusing to accept the impossible, forced the hospital to keep the man under observation.

The following morning, he reported the incident at the Vom police station. The Sergeant in charge was, almost serendipitously, a native of Kwall. Ichie Onyeweaku writes in his memoir, “He said that in their place, young men turn to monkeys and foxes to engage in various exercises.” The Sergeant simply noted that, had my great-uncle known, he shouldn't have bothered with the hospital, because gunshots have no permanent effect on them.

The man was discharged on Monday evening without a single scratch. Reading his memoir now, the confusion is as palpable to me as it was to him and his neighbours those many years ago. In fact, his colleagues refused to believe the story. Ichie Onyeweaku writes, “The talk was that I had shot a man in the forest and claimed that it was a monkey I shot.” Consequently, he was compelled to drive the stranger to his quarters, pull out a dining chair, and seat the man in the middle of his compound for the entire neighbourhood to inspect. The crowd was completely nonplussed. The proof was sitting right in front of them: a man who, apparently was once a monkey, had caught a shotgun blast and survived without a scar.

The stranger eventually found work as a Sanitary Labourer, and the two men became unlikely friends. Onyeweaku visited his home to greet his parents and his wife, and he too visited my great-uncle from time to time.

Ichie Onyeweaku writes in his memoir, “This ‘monkey’ chap later told me that if I wanted, he could give me a stone which will enable me cause rain to fall at my will. I told him that I was not interested.”

Ichie recounted the events of that Saturday in 1965 for the rest of his life. He told the story of the Kwall forest over and over again for many years, ultimately cementing the encounter in his written memoir; Moments In the Life of Ichie Nweke Udeozo. The vividness of his account never faded with time. He remembered the exact shade of the young man’s green sweater, the precise volume of blood vomited onto the forest floor, and the chaos and sterility of the Vom Christian Hospital. His meticulous testimony, together with the testimony of others who encountered the young man afterward, makes the story difficult to dismiss as a fleeting hallucination. But it does not tell us what, precisely, happened in the Kwall forest.

This encounter invites us to look closely at shapeshifting, a concept we rarely examine beyond its surface thrill in mythology. As a psychological and literary archetype, the shapeshifter suggests that physical form is merely a temporary garment. It transcends physical mutation to represent shifting loyalties, the volatility of the human unconscious, and the dismantling of rigid boundaries. When a man becomes a beast, he strips away the social contracts of humanity and gains access to the wild, unregulated freedoms of the natural world.

My great-uncle’s immediate return to Anglicanism after the incident reveals a fascinating tension, especially since the Holy Bible itself carries a deep tradition of mutable forms.

“With what I saw in the Kwall forest, I went to Jos, bought a complete set of Anglican Religious books, and started attending church thereafter.” He writes.

The Holy Bible frequently blurs the line between human and otherworldly bodies. In the Book of Daniel, King Nebuchadnezzar loses his human reason and mutates into a beast of the field, growing hair like eagle feathers and nails like bird claws as a form of divine humbling. Genesis also contains scenes in which divine visitors appear in recognisably human form, most famously in Abraham’s encounter with three visitors at Mamre. The Christian tradition my granduncle sought refuge in already possessed a framework for fluid realities, where spiritual entities adopt flesh to interact directly with the mortal plane.

In mythology, the Greek and Norse pantheon feature gods who turned into animals or objects. An example is Loki who transformed into various animals, monsters, and humanoids to deceive friends and foes alike. Shapeshifters can also be found in early texts like the Epic of Gilgamesh.

Coming home, the traditions become closer to the world Onyeweaku himself inherited. Across many African traditions, human and non-human forms do not always occupy rigidly separate categories. But these traditions are neither interchangeable nor reducible to a single African belief in shapeshifting. Their differences are precisely where the story becomes interesting.
The most striking parallel comes from the Hausa material surrounding the region in which the encounter occurred. Early twentieth-century ethnographic records collected by Arthur Tremearne describe a supernatural landscape in which human and non-human forms could be crossed, assumed or inhabited, including accounts of beings taking human form and people acquiring animal forms. Tremearne’s account must, however, be read as a colonial-era ethnography rather than a transparent window into Hausa belief. His terminology, categories and methods belong to the period in which he wrote. What the record establishes is not that Hausa people believed precisely what my great-uncle encountered, but that forms of transformation between human and animal were already present in the repertoire of supernatural explanations available in the region. That makes the response of the Kwall police sergeant difficult to ignore. When Ichie Onyeweaku reported what had happened, the sergeant did not treat the story as an impossibility but provided context.  

 Furthermore, the possibility was not entirely foreign to my great-uncle’s own inheritance either. His father and siblings practised omenala, which he had partially distanced himself from. Contemporary Igbo accounts preserve traditions of Iyi Anụ, the transformation of human beings into animal forms, particularly the leopard. Such transformations are associated in some accounts with hunters, warriors, spiritual power, protection and the acquisition of abilities unavailable to ordinary human beings. These contemporary accounts should not be mistaken for a universal description of Igbo belief; Igbo religious traditions vary across communities and historical periods, and much of what survives today is mediated through oral memory and later cultural reconstruction. But they are significant because they demonstrate that the idea of a mutable human body is not an alien invention.

Yoruba traditions complicate the idea further. In discussions of Èṣù, the problem is not simply that a supernatural being can change its appearance, but that the being itself resists fixed categorisation. Èṣù occupies thresholds: between human and divine, order and disorder, intention and consequence, one road and another. In Yoruba literature, D.O. Fagunwa’s classic novel, The Forest of a Thousand Daemons, places the hunter Akara-ogun in a landscape where human and spirit forms constantly collapse into one another. Fagunwa’s supernatural forests offer a striking literary parallel to Kwall: in both, the forest is not simply a geographical space but a zone in which ordinary distinctions between human, animal and spirit become unstable.
This matters because shapeshifting may be less interesting as a supernatural special effect than as an assault on categories. The question is not merely, “Can a man become a monkey?” It is, “What happens when the categories by which we recognise a man and a monkey cease to behave as categories at all?”
There is, therefore, a difference between the shapeshifting gods and monsters of classical mythology and the traditions surrounding Ichie Onyeweaku’s encounter. Loki transforms because transformation is one of the tools of a god. Nebuchadnezzar becomes beastlike because God has imposed a punishment upon him. Fagunwa’s forest is populated by beings whose transformations belong to the logic of a literary supernatural world. The Kwall encounter is different. Onyeweaku did not enter the forest expecting a shapeshifter. He believed he was hunting a monkey. The transformation, if his account is accepted, happened without warning and without his consent.
Ichie Onyeweaku’s encounter is ultimately less interesting as a catalogue of supernatural possibilities than as a collision between competing systems for determining what is real. Having witnessed his game turn man, he formed his own interpretation: it was a paranormal event. The surgeon, C.E. Hartley, made a conclusion from his medical knowledge: there were no indications of a gunshot. The police sergeant offered his own advice based on what he describes his culture to be: it is normal.  Onyeweaku’s neighbours chose to engage in different ways: doubt, hysteria, fear, belief. The young man in question presented what he knew of himself: he was supernatural.

To dismissively call one account “myth” and another “reality” is not simply to describe two different kinds of stories; it is to assign authority to one way of knowing over another. This does not mean that every supernatural claim is true, nor that scientific or medical explanations are merely Western prejudices. It means that the question of what counts as evidence is itself a human and cultural question.
For a man who had spent his life learning to trust trajectories, measurements and observable consequences, the Kwall forest presented a peculiar kind of crisis. He had seen something. He had shot something. He had carried a bleeding body into a hospital. A medical examination had been performed. A police officer took his statement. None of these facts cancelled the others. They simply belonged to different systems of meaning. The Kwall forest therefore leaves us with a question more difficult than whether a man can become a monkey. It asks who gets to decide when something has happened, what kind of thing has happened, and which explanations are permitted to count as real. Ichie Onyeweaku insisted that he had seen something. We are free to doubt his perception and interpretation. We are less free to pretend that he did not.