The Forbidden Pit

6/10/2025

by M.P. Pellicer | Stranger Than Fiction Stories
Like Tarzan's hidden home in the Mutia Escarpment with its tales of the elephants' graveyard, in the 1920s explorers found a mysterious place in Africa that became known as the Forbidden Pit.

Traversing the Mutia Escarpment at great risk from the 1932 film "Tarzan the Ape Man"

In the 1920s, Africa was a continent mostly unexplored by Westerners. Mysteries abounded as to what could be found there. One these stories was the mystery of the Elephant's Graveyard.

In the early Tarzan movies (1932, 1934), there is a sacred place known as the Mutia Escarpment, which was where elephants went to die. This legendary place was rich with ivory, and to access it was fraught with danger. This is where Tarzan lived, and kept intruders out. This area was first introduced in the Trader Horn book (1931) which predated the movies.

Ethelreda Lewis wrote a 3-volume series as a memoir based on the life of Alfred Aloysius "Trader" Smith (1861-1931) who was an ivory trader in central Africa. She changed his surname from Smith to Horn to protect his identity when she published the books.

Trader Horn was a true explorer who left Liverpool, England at the age of 18, and spent the rest of his life in Africa, having many adventures throughout his lifetime.

Alfred Aloysius "Trader" Smith (1861-1931) The pseudonym was Horn was used by Ethelreda Lewis

Part of the legend of the Elephants' Graveyard, was that those who set out to find it never returned, and if they did, would never be able to locate it again. Tales were told of searchers who tracked sick or old elephants who broke off from the herd in hopes it would lead them to the cemetery. Eventually they would realize the animal would just travel in a circle, which led nowhere.

The Elephants' boneyard was even mentioned by David Livingstone, a famous explorer, who from 1854–56 made the first successful transcontinental journey across Africa from Luanda on the Atlantic, to Quelimane on the Indian ocean.

An elephant graveyard was also known as an elephant mine, since finding one would make the discoverer wealthy.

Another source for the belief in the elephant graveyard is that when native chiefs were selling ivory, they produced huge stocks of tusks that showed signs of having been exposed to the weather for many years.

There was another story told of elephant hunters making their fortunes in one trip, and always with old ivory.

One theory is that older elephants will congregate in areas where food and water are easier to obtain as they age, and eventually pass away close to each other.

The earliest reference to the elephant's graveyard is found in the One Thousand and One Nights. Sinbad is on his seventh voyage when he is captured and sold as a slave to a merchant who forces him to kill elephants for their tusks. One day he is surrounded by angry elephants who take him off to a secret place known as the elephants' graveyard. With this discovery he has no need to kill other elephants. Returning with so much ivory the merchant sets him free, however Sinbad is now wary of traveling on the seas, and on reaching the nearest port he joins a caravan that take him to Baghdad, and he never sails again.

Tribesmen from Northern Rhodesia c.1920s

There was one report which described a place located in North Rhodesia that the native Mashona and Matabele tribes shunned. It was fifty miles west of Broken Hill at Kapopo. They called it the Forbidden Pit. The sides of the pit were so sheer that it would be impossible for any animal to get out, or other animals to reach any that were trapped. Unlike the Elephants' Graveyard, proof was found about this myth.

The tribes thought of it as the center of a lost world. The reason for the natives' fear were based on stories of strange, reptile-like animals that roamed the area, eating anything it could catch, including humans. Growls could also be heard coming from the pit. In an attempt to appease whatever lurked in the depths of the hole, another tribe, the Ila, tied a group of their own people and flung them into the pit as a sacrifice.

In another version of this story, members of a whole community tied themselves together and committed suicide over the side of the pit, cursing the villagers to haunt the pit of water.

Elliot Smith, professor of anatomy at the University of London said, "It is highly probably that there are animals still alive in the wild, broken hill country that are known to us only in a fossilized state. This country is bound to produce a great many things of extraordinary interest in the future. It may be the last refuge of the animals thought by us to be extinct."

Could the creature described by the natives be a Plesiosaurus?

In September 1925, a news story ran of a bottomless hole discovered by scientist in Rhodesia. It was described as a huge, water-filled limestone pit. There was a 40 foot, sheer drop from the bank to the water, and even a sounding of 200 feet had not found the bottom.

At the beginning, the expedition had trouble finding a native guide willing to take them to the Forbidden Pit. The party did not encounter any strange sighting, but the guide as well as the natives from the area insisted the strange creatures existed. They feared it so much, that many refused to talk about it.

The October 1925 issue of the New Zealand Guardian, recounted a story told by Lewanki, the chief of the Barotse tribe thus: "An animal like a monstrous hippopotamus, but many times larger, which swirled away as he looked but left behind it the traces of its crawling limbs like ruts of wagon wheels."

The party of explorers were constantly warned by the natives to stay away from the "pit". The article reported on the description given by the tribesman as:

The story conjures up visions of some great reptile like the Plesiosaurus, which wallowed in the swamps of Africa millions of years before ancient man walked there. Fifty miles from the Forbidden Pit the skull of Africa’s earliest known man was found, a contemporary of the cave men of Europe. Could he have seen this monster or its ancestors?

Major Frederick George Jackson made a 6000 mile trip across Africa in 1927 and visited the Forbidden Pit In 1927,

In 1927, Major F. G. Jackson spent 12 months traversing Africa in a 6,000 mile trip from the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean. He was accompanied by Graham Eyres-Monsell, 2nd Viscount Monsell. The caravan had almost 100 native carriers throughout the trip. They stopped at the "forbidden pit".

Major Jackson said it was a deserted place that the natives stayed well away from, and was far from any European habitation. It sat surrounded by stunted trees and measured about half an acre. The banks into the pit were steep and slimy. The major along with his companion stripped and swam in the water, and during their stay they did not see or hear anything unusual.

The pit was compared to one which Sir Lawrence Wallace, chief surveyor for Northern Rhodesia visited with a friend and shot an unknown creature which he described as having a "thin snake-like head and neck above water, and body resembling that of a large duck below water." The body sank and due to the sheer sides they were unable to retrieve it.

Edwin Book in his book The Ila-Speaking Peoples described the site this way:

The lake mentioned is the Mwine-mbushi, near Kapopo, evidently an old crater, four hundred yards in diameter. This is the legend: Once upon a time the Banampongo (the Goats) had a dispute with another clan, the Batembozhi (the Hornets), over a question of chieftainship; the Banampongo, having got the worst of it and being ousted from their premier position, planned to destroy themselves in the lake. They set to work to twist a very long rope—men, women and children. Then they gathered on the lakeside and tied the rope in turn around their necks, and all plunged into the unfathomable depths. A man of another clan, the Banankalamo (the Lions), had married a woman of the Banampongo, and after failing to induce her to refrain from suicide, determined to die with her. They happened to be the last to be tied to the rope; they were pulled in and on the point of drowning when the man, repenting, cut the rope and so free himself and his wife. She struggled to escape from him screaming, 'Let me go! Let me go!' but he persevered and brought her to land. This is why to this day the Banakalamo say to the Banampongo, 'It is we who saved you from extinction.'

GROOVES IN ROCK IN BATOKA HILLS, 20 MILES SOUTH OF KAUNGA.

Close to the Pit is the Kafue River which feeds the Lukanga Swamp. The upper part of the river is dotted with limestone caves, underground rivers and sinkholes.

The Ba-ila people also had a curious story about their ancestors, which they called bakaseluka ("they descended"). They believed their forefathers came down out of the sky, accompanied by animals.

On the shore of a lagoon of the Kafue River at the government station of Namwala there is a bank of rock upon which they say the ancients descended, and in proof they point to many pits in the weather-worn sandstone. They considered these the footprints of the ancestors impressed on the rock at the first moment of their first contact with earth.

Article appearing in the Miami Herald about the Forbidden Pit (c. Sept. 1925)

After leaving the Forbidden Pit, the Jackson expedition stopped at the court of Ging M'singa, the only remaining warrior king in central Africa. They found that the power behind the throne was his mother who measured more than six feet in height. Her chief claim to fame was that she poisoned six of her relatives to ensure her son's ascension to the throne.

Jackson found a high death rate from tuberculosis, and that many times healthy persons were purposely infected in order to assure their death. This was done from taking the lungs from dead TB victims, and grinding them to a powder. This was then used to fill the tubes the natives drank their native beer from.

Whether the explorers thought they would encounter prehistoric reptiles or mammals, the most important question remains unanswered as to what the Forbidden Pit actually is. Is it a bottomless sinkhole, or the doorway to another world where creatures long thought extinct would occasionally exit to terrorize the natives?