In an African river there lurks a super predator.
A creature with the combined strength, speed and ferocity
of all the river monsters I have ever encountered...
creating the most horrific yet perfect killing machine in all of the world's rivers.
Something bit this fish right in half.
My name is Jeremy Wade, biologist and extreme fisherman.
I'm on the trail of this terrifying monster.
And it's going to take all my skills as a fisherman to capture one.
Ripped By mstoll
This is a story from the heart of Africa...
of a cursed beast that preys on the unsuspecting.
Its powers are legendary,
its ferocity the stuff of nightmares.
On the banks of an African river, a young girl is playing.
She enters the water as she has done hundreds of times before.
Around her waist is a belt made from shiny bottle caps.
What she doesn't know is that today, in this spot, there lurks a monster.
A creature of terrifying appearance, like a relic from prehistoric times.
Armed with bone-crunching jaws as powerful as a hyena's,
it is as secretive as a crocodile and as deadly as a great white shark.
This super predator is only found in the most inaccessible part
of the most inaccessible river on Earth.
Very few outsiders have ever heard of it.
Even many of the locals have never seen it.
I'm heading to Central Africa, to the Congo River,
to track down and catch one of these elusive killers
to see if this creature really does deserve its reputation
as a supreme underwater predator.
The first thing a fisherman does when he goes to a new place is to check out the river.
But nowhere else in the world would you expect to be greeted by a sight anything at all like this.
This massive river is second only in flow and area to the Amazon,
draining a huge swathe of Africa half the size of the US.
That's the Congo River.
To reach this point it has run nearly 3,000 miles, crossed the Equator twice,
and narrowed from ten miles at its widest to around a mile here,
where it splits the two war-ravaged capital cities of Kinshasa and Brazzaville.
From here it plummets nearly 1,000ft in a series of rapids
to the Atlantic Ocean almost 300 miles away.
And wherever there is a river there are humans hard-wired to seek out its fish.
I meet up with Wedda, one of only a handful of fishermen that choose to fish these waters.
Lovely little miniature fish here.
Because this is a very delicate...
Yes, yes, yes, I've got two! I've got two!
Whoa! Look at this.
Because this is a very, very whippy bit of bamboo here,
you can actually feel these things going ding, ding, ding!
I got two.
Two fish. Look at that. My first fish in the Congo. Fantastic.
Kaki. These are the Kaki fish again.
That's exciting. It's always significant, your first fish.
It's hard to believe but many species of fish can survive fast-flowing rapids like these.
Wedda is one of only a handful of fishermen who choose to fish these waters.
I'm seeing what the local guys use here.
I'm slightly embarrassed using such gear, which is very expensive in comparison.
I actually think this will stand a chance of getting out large fish from here
which the bamboo and lighter line doesn't do, perhaps.
The creature I'm pursuing is a voracious predator...
There's the hook.
that not only attacks the small fish these fishermen are after...
but will also take a chunk out of a crocodile.
It's the Goliath tigerfish.
Not just one of the top predators here,
but among the most ferocious freshwater predators in all the world's rivers.
Goliath tigerfish are said to grow six feet long
and weigh well in excess of 100lbs.
They have jaws packed with razor-sharp interlocking teeth.
And with their streamlined body and huge tail,
they are capable of incredible bursts of speed when striking prey.
Their ferocity when hunting is legendary.
The fishermen tell me there's someone I should meet
who has a unique way of fishing these waters.
This is Philippe Tenta.
He fishes these rapids... with a net.
That is the scale of a goliath tigerfish which he caught the day before yesterday.
- Combien de kilo? - Trente kilo.
- Trente kilo? Ici? - Oui.
Whoo.
70lbs. Here. That's a big old tigerfish.
Teeth on it probably like that, you know, so...
Just the thought of that kind of fish in this kind of water.
You don't get much more extreme.
He's about to check his nets.
So you've got cable where it's going over the rocks.
Here we go. Here's the net coming in.
As would be expected, fishing with nets in such turbulent water is not without its problems.
The net's actually... It's stuck.
I have no idea what he plans to do about it.
But I wasn't expecting that.
Jumping into these waters is nothing short of suicidal.
But I realise now that this is something he must do on a daily basis.
If people call me an extreme fisherman, what does that make him?
I know he knows what he's doing
but to me it looks the most insanely dangerous way to make a living.
Swimming in this super-sized washing machine-type water,
with a net which is designed to catch things.
All this effort and there's actually nothing in this net.
We're just gonna redeploy a fresh net.
And it is just... just mind-boggling. You just wouldn't get me doing that.
That kind of fishing seems very reckless to me
but this is a country where people are forced to go to extreme lengths simply to survive.
Philippe tells me about a man whose father was attacked by a goliath tigerfish.
So I head to a suburb of Brazzaville, the capital of the Republic of Congo,
to meet Jean-Pierre Montbeli, a fisherman with a story to tell.
He shows me a macabre souvenir,
a scale that he took from the massive goliath tigerfish that attacked his father.
It sounds like he was a specialist fisherman for tigerfish.
He was fishing on his own.
He didn't come back one day and...
They are known to jump out of the water. They're very fast.
They have just these wickedly sharp teeth.
Some time later, they found the boat, but with nobody in.
But there was a fish in the boat with a hook in its mouth.
When they looked, some distance away, his body was there as well.
The thing that's horrifying is it sounds like...
there were marks on his father's throat.
It sounded like he was standing up in the boat.
A freak accident. It sounded like the fish jumped out of the water and bit him on the throat.
Montbeli's story raises a few questions.
But this is the second account of a goliath tigerfish attacking and killing a person.
I've come down to the market, which is something I always try and do.
The reason I do this is it's just such a great clearing-house for information
about boats, fishermen, and also about fish.
There's actually a fish in Africa called the African bony tonguebonytongue,
which is a relative of the Arapaima, which lives in the Amazon.
It's a bit like the way the piranhas are relatives of the goliath tigerfish here.
All this seems very strange, the fact you've got relatives living thousands of miles apart.
But it's all evidence of the fact that Africa and South America used to be joined.
It's a bit of an arms race down there.
In order to survive, the fish have had to get tooled up.
Sharp teeth, poisonous spines, and a bolt of electricity
are all mechanisms that have evolved.
- Makunga. - Makunga.
I'm starting to see some of the weird and wonderful fish from this river. Makunga, this one.
Argh!
Oooh!
Very toothy. Argh!
This is an electric catfish.
This is an electric catfish. It's still alive.
He got his finger in its mouth.
Ah, the tail. And that's OK?
OK. Ah!
But here... Zzzz!
OK, OK.
But to stand any chance of catching a goliath,
I need to head upstream to a less-densely populated part of the river.
I want to see for myself if this fish deserves its reputation as an indiscriminate killer.
Success in fishing is largely about preparation
and I use the journey north to begin the groundwork.
Catching the fish is about getting local intelligence.
There's no way you can get that without talking to people.
Where I'm going, they're not gonna speak English.
Having left the capital, not many will speak French.
So I'm brushing up on my Lingala, which is the language they speak on the Congo River.
It's the trade language that everybody speaks as well as the other little local languages.
The goliath tigerfish is the ultimate freshwater predator,
combining characteristics from all the other river monsters I've ever battled.
It has the bloodthirsty reputation of the piranha,
dentition more fearsome than the payara,
the cunning of the Wels catfish,
and the strength of the piraiba.
Add to that, the athleticism of the arapaima and a bony head to rival that of the alligator,
and it's clear I'm going to have to draw on all of my past experiences to catch one.
Basically, I've got some pretty serious treble hooks.
I'll be using this kind of wire.
If I used ordinary fishing line down to the hooks the goliath tigerfish will chomp through it
so I'm using this kind of stuff.
It's a breaking strain of 135lbs.
Just 100 miles upstream from Brazzaville we arrive in the section of river
where the young girl was attacked and killed by a goliath tigerfish.
But that was on the opposite bank in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
And I don't have papers for the DRC.
With the country still experiencing unrest, I can't risk going there.
I stop and chat to some fishermen.
They show me a tiny goliath tigerfish that they have just caught.
It looks like a piranha but this is just a baby goliath tigerfish.
These things grow to the size of a person.
This confirms that it could be a good place to start fishing.
So we've got a lump of rock here, a cliff. Some boulders at the bottom.
The current comes down, gets deflected out into the middle.
And we've got this nice eddy here.
So I'm actually fishing off the back of the boat, letting the back current take it.
But it's classic ambush predator country.
I've got the bait about 50 yards down from the boat.
I'm feeling hopeful. Something could take that.
- (Whizz of line unreeling) - Fish on! Fish on!
Argh!
The bait went round the corner.
I lost sight of the float, I lost sight of the float.
And I just pulled on the line. I was retrieving it. Suddenly, there's a wrench on the rod.
Ah, look at that.
That's tigerfish.
There we go - chung, chung, chung.
It would have had a really good mouthful of that...
of the hook as well.
But...
failed to get a good hook-up.
That fish was on for two or three seconds.
That's sort of par for the course with these fish.
But I'm just looking up the wire here.
You can see, as it was running away,
the slime off the fish, some of it, left itself on the wire trace there.
So those are the tantalising clues...
about the fish that was on the end of this line, which I never saw.
But it's left a little bit of itself on the wire there.
A little further upriver is the village of Maipili where I set up camp.
Just pulling into a little village here.
One of these very large "baleiniers" they call them. Big whale boat.
On its way down river buying up firewood and charcoal, by the look of it.
Plus people jumping on for a lift.
As night draws in, I'm left to ponder my near miss.
I had the right spot, but I had underestimated the animal.
It just spat out my treble hook with contempt.
I've been talking to some of the people here. They say, "Just use loads of those.
Maybe ten on the line. Something will hold."
But it's not just a case of the more the merrier.
I think that might hook something fairly well, possibly.
But that amount of metalwear might actually put something off
from actually coming along and taking the bait in the first place.
The other thing is, if something grabs hold of that,
the pressure that I'm exerting is divided over nine points.
On the other hand, something like that...
It's a bit of compromise. I've got a big treble hook on the end.
Then I've got a single hook further up.
If just that single hook gets a hold,
I've got a lot of pressure that can actually work that into the bone of the fish's mouth.
The goliath's reputation as a fierce predator has immortalised it in local culture.
Known by the Congolese as mbenga,
it crops up again and again in tales of mutilation, human death and sorcery.
The next day, I head out with a more substantial rig.
I've got some artificial lures with me
but everybody here tells me this predator is most likely to hit a bait that is alive.
(Speaks French) OK.
Goliath tigerfish are active hunters.
As well as having good eyesight, they can detect vibrations in the water
which can lead them to prey.
But does the mbenga intentionally target people?
Or is there another reason to explain the attacks that I've heard about?
I've just got this on the clicker, on the ratchet.
If it's actually in the full current that's just pulling it away,
but the fact that that is just holding nicely...
is good.
It's in a little quiet pocket of water, relatively quiet, out in the current.
That's what I'm looking for. It's where a predator would wait
without expending much energy, where there's not too much current.
Just for future reference, just getting a fix on where we are.
Cos this is...
This just feels like a good spot.
Right.
It might be off. Damn, it's off!
Ahh!
No question about me putting pressure on that or not.
The float just shot under. That fish was tearing away.
Argh!
Wow.
Look at that. Look at that.
Phew!
That's the kind of thing you'd expect to see if you're shark fishing.
This is freshwater. Something down there just bit this fish in half.
One thing that's going through my mind, I've heard stories of people getting attacked.
Just looking at the state of this fish,
it really does make you realise what a mess that would make of a person,
if it went for your arm or your leg or anywhere else.
So far, the numbers just aren't in my favour.
Not many people have really fished for these on rod and line.
But they say it's... three or four out of ten that you hook, you'll get in.
Some people say it's even less than that.
So, for me, it's nought out of two so far.
Sometimes, they will actually jump in the early stages.
This one didn't jump. It was just going deep.
The fish has left a slime trail up the trace.
There you go.
This line here is 200lb breaking strain. No stretch.
I was just hanging on for all I was worth.
I mean, it's just...
such a fearsome creature in so many ways.
Not just the force of the teeth, but also the strength of the body, which I've now felt.
Like the girl I heard about who had a fish grab her torso...
The morning after I'm called to meet the village elders.
They have stories to tell me about attacks by mbenga on people from the village.
The story that is emerging is that if you live here and you go to the water every day
then there are certain... things that you should try not to do.
Anything that goes in the water that moves, creates a disturbance...
- If you put a baby in the water... - (Speaks French)
It seems that the sound of splashing in the water attracts them.
But it wasn't just the sound that attracted it to the little girl who was killed across the river.
They're being bitten on the hands and arms.
Anything that shines, a shiny watch or bracelet or something, there is a risk.
On that day she was wearing a belt around her waist made from shiny bottle caps.
Her waist is exactly where she was attacked.
It is only now, when I find out why she was wearing the belt,
that the tragedy of this story becomes clear.
There is a type of traditional protection - it sounds like a wristlet or an amulet...
- (Speaks French) and it will protect you
against carnivorous fish, also hippopotamus, crocodiles.
It's sort of like a good-luck charm.
So, I guess these are people who actually go to the water a lot.
They go there to fish, to wash their clothes, their pots and pans.
You never know what's within a few feet of you.
So, in that kind of situation, you need all the protection you can get.
The tragic irony of the girl's death
is that the belt was given to her by her parents to ward off evil spirits.
But it ended up attracting the predator that killed her.
Fred has been my boatman for the past two weeks now.
He has helped me understand the spirituality that swirls around this region,
like the currents in the river.
Together, we fish every hour...
along huge stretches of the river.
But the fish seem to have vanished.
It's as though they were never here.
I change location and I change rigs and bait.
But nothing.
I continue asking the locals and they direct me further north.
Very few things are put down to accident or chance.
If you're bitten by a goliath tigerfish, it's because the spirit of a sorcerer was in that fish
and it made the fish do that for some reason.
Maybe someone's put a curse on you for whatever reason.
When you're actually fishing for one, and not catching one,
you actually do start to think that...
maybe this isn't a real fish at all.
Maybe it is purely...
a mythological beast, a figment of the collective imagination.
Because, at the moment, there doesn't seem to be anything down there.
But I know it is more than a myth.
Because everyone I speak to has a different story
about somebody who has been attacked.
I've just asked if they know of anybody having any accidents with goliath tigerfish.
They were gesturing like this on the arm and on the leg.
And it sounds like further upriver...
It seems to be a common occurrence -
there are people around who have been bitten by them.
After weeks of no results, it's difficult to keep my focus.
But I have to because just one lapse in concentration
and I could miss the chance when it comes.
This fish is basically a scaled-up piranha.
And once it gets to a case of being close quarters,
I'm going to have to be very careful.
I'm going to have to really watch my step and just take extreme care.
That is where this fishing just has a totally other dimension.
Part of me's hoping that float's gonna disappear and the line's gonna go screaming out.
But part of me's thinking, "Well..."
It might jump, might jump.
Watch that line on the rocks.
It's a smaller one.
Hey!
That's what they do, that's what they do.
That's three takes and no fish.
Three takes, no fish.
That's so close, so close, so close, so close.
This was a really lively bait.
Ah, yeah.
That's another fish...
I'm thinking, with hindsight, if I'd had more ironmongery in there, that might have...
You know, days and days go by, nothing happens, nothing happens,
and then one is there.
It just comes out of nowhere and it's gone in a matter of seconds.
Damn! If I put this fish on, just rigged up,
normally I could have had it, I could have bloody had it.
If I'd had...
I think I need to get another bait out there pretty soon.
I don't know if we've got any good baits. That was the good bait.
It is an odd thing about this fish. It definitely does exist.
But you can almost reach a situation,
both myself and the local people, where you sort of forget about it.
You think it doesn't exist because you don't see it.
You hear about it, but you don't see it.
Then suddenly, it's right in front of you and it's tearing into flesh.
If I had one fish at least under my belt now I could accept this a bit philosophically.
But I've just been here now for so many days. I've had three chances.
I've just caught nothing the whole time I've been here.
It really does feel like a...
It really does feel like a test of character and I feel that I'm failing at the moment.
It looks like I'm going to go home empty-handed, having come all this way.
And that is just so demoralising.
It's like the fish is taunting me, almost.
The fish is... There's just enough of a sign of the fish...
to get the hopes up, and then just dashed.
I head back to the village, knowing that I need more help
if I'm not to go home empty-handed.
The elders tell me about an old man
who not only protects them from danger but also brings them luck.
Right, this is the house of the feticheur, the local... the witch doctor.
His assistants appear first.
While we wait in silence for him to emerge,
I wonder if the man held in such reverence by the villagers
will have the power to change my fortunes.
The people of Central Africa hold feticheurs like this man in very high regard.
His knowledge has been passed down over generations
and his powers lie in his ability to call on the spirits.
He uses substances from the forest to create the potions.
Ah. OK.
I have no idea what this will involve.
But for a small payment, I'm hoping he can change my fortunes.
What he's asking for is success in the fishing, but also protection from the fish.
This is a dangerous fish.
I'll try and get one of these fish and put it back alive,
but that does carry something of a risk.
It's sort of a lucky charm.
I'm thinking I'm gonna need all the help I get in the next few days.
The ceremony finishes with the villagers thanking the spirits.
I'm still not too sure what to think about the ceremony with the witch doctor.
But, if nothing else, Fred seems a lot happier.
It's as though he knows something that I don't.
We head out with a renewed sense of purpose.
Fred explains to me in more detail exactly what the witch doctor said.
He has consulted a spirit of a dead fisherman.
And he has said that the place to catch the fish
is to come all the way up here from the village and then work down.
I'm actually quite superstitious at times.
You do something which actually, technically has no bearing on your fishing.
But you have a good result.
And here, I suppose it's the equivalent of praying, in a way, talking to the ancestors.
If you do that and you have a good result or you return safely,
then you'll keep doing that
and you will believe that is the reason you return safely from your fishing trip.
The people of this village have spoken to the spirits on our behalf.
They say this is the place to come.
I've been here for three weeks now and I've had three hits,
but still nothing tangible to show for all my efforts.
Fish on!
Fred, the net.
OK, I've got to just get a...
keep pressure from above cos there's rocks and I've got...
It's gonna jump, it's gonna jump.
That's the float. We're gonna see the fish very soon, gonna see it very soon.
There it is. That's a good fish. Look at that.
The net, the net, the net.
Careful, Fred, careful, careful, careful.
Right, we want to be very careful now.
Ready with the net? We want to get the head in.
La tete, la tete.
Ooh. Securez la poisson.
Bon.
I've got her.
OK.
What we've gotta worry about now is it biting its way out.
We got the fish, we got the fish.
Right, now, just a moment.
Is there anything in this or not?
I put it in this morning. Like the feticheur said it was under my pillow.
Today... I took it with me fishing.
I want to do something that fishermen never do when they catch these -
have a look at it then release it alive, back into the river.
The mouth is going, the fish is breathing. Good.
And the gills are going. That's good.
This water is nicely aerated. That's a good thing as well.
Now, those teeth.
That will take lumps out of other fish, it will take lumps out of crocodiles
and there are stories, well documented, about taking lumps out of people.
Wow. There we go.
What a freshwater monster this thing is.
What I'm looking at here is the ultimate piranha.
Those teeth just like a piranha's. Triangular.
Sharps blades down the side and they interlock almost like scissors.
They will just cut a lump out. Two big differences, though.
One is, piranhas hunt in packs. This is a solitary hunter.
The other thing is the size.
People who think the piranhas are scary,
if they saw one of these things,
their nightmares might be populated by a slightly different animal.
One sort of diabolical anatomical detail on this fish
is that it hasn't just got one hinge on its jaw.
It's got a double hinge. It's got one hinge here.
It's got another hinge there, which enables it to open that jaw much wider.
So it can almost open like that and just come straight in
and take a really huge bite out of its prey.
It's just a murderous animal, this thing.
This fish may look inactive now,
but once it's revived a bit, there's a danger it could slice me at any moment.
I actually don't want to let it go too soon,
even though there's a risk to me if I stay in the water too long beside it.
What I don't want is for this fish to swim into the powerful water
and not be able to hold itself upright.
It will just roll belly-up and get battered on some of these rocks here.
So I want it to be completely recovered before it goes.
I want it to be able to swim off, keeping itself vertical unaided.
- (Speaks French) - Ah. Oh, yes.
- (Speaks French) - No, no, no.
We're having a discussion because Fred thought
that we'd take it back to the village for everyone to eat.
- That is quite a nice idea. - (Speaks French)
He tells me, "This fish has been given to us by God."
He said even for the feticheur who gave me the charm,
told me I'd have success in the fishing, send him a piece of the meat.
It's not just our village, the people over the river have helped.
It would be... It would make everybody happy.
But it wouldn't make me happy...
Well, it would, in one way. But it would make me more happy to put this back.
It's gonna upset him as well, if he sees this swim away.
I'm trying to explain the important thing for me is to see it, and not to kill it.
I think it's very important that...
animals that we find frightening in appearance, that we try and understand them.
We don't just hack them to pieces and kill them and look at the body.
I want to look at this thing alive and then see it swim off.
If the fish dies because it has really exhausted itself
fighting against me and in that very wild, rocky water,
if the fish dies, we'll take it back for everyone to eat.
If it recovers, if it can support itself, I'm going to let it go.
So we now just wait and see.
Looking now at some of the marks on its head
I think it bashed itself on the rocks while fighting with me.
It's possible that it might die.
But what I wanna do is give it the best chance possible.
To me the mbenga ranks as one of the most difficult fish I've ever caught.
But I don't think it deserves its reputation as an indiscriminate killer.
Each attack involves splashes or bright, shiny objects in the water,
which, to a goliath tigerfish, resembles its normal food - other fish -
and it responds in the only way that it knows.
After an hour, the decision is taken from me as I feel the life slipping away from this monster.
No, it's not going to make it.
So, I mean, the good thing is, although the fish has died, it won't be going to waste.
To the people of the Congo, the mbenga is much more than just a fish.
It is a spirit that pervades their folklore.
Yet many people here, I now realise, have never seen this monster in the flesh.
I begin to suspect that, for Fred, returning this fish
would have meant much more than just losing a meal.
Bringing this fish out of the shadows into the light of day has been a monumental task.
It's easy to tell myself now that my success was down to my persistence.
But I still wonder how much was down to factors outside my control or understanding.
No, no...
OK. Whoa!
It's never good when a fish dies, but, you know,
when it gets that kind of reaction when you bring it in, that's a big meal for lots of people.
There's over 200 people in this village and they'll all have a piece.
A lot of them won't have seen a fish like that or not a good-size one.
They've heard about it, it is a legend.
But they don't see them very often so, you know, if a fish has to die or a fish does die,
at least... a reaction like that is some sort of compensation.
It's not the ending that I wanted, but... it is fitting in a way.
Ripped By mstoll