African fish fall

I was quite surprised to find that the Bassa, a Bantu nation in Cameroon, reported the fall of marine creatures from the sky quite matter-of-factly. Georg Schürle (1870-1909), a German missionary, took down this statement from them: “Above the vault of heaven is a great sea, from which the rain comes. Above the sea live the tailed bod ba ngi. If one of them behaves impudently, it is thrown into the celestial sea, from which on occasion one has already fallen down to us, just as crabs and fish fall down to us more often from the celestial sea.” (Source: G Schürle, Die Sprache der Basa in Kamerun; Grammatik und Wörterbuch, Hamburg, 1912, p.43) The Bassa live along the country’s Atlantic coast. What might the tailed creatures be? Perusal of the dictionary enclosed in the book suggests that the designation simply means ‘sky people’, though a Bantuist may like to confirm this. Could this be a cryptozoological variation on the fortean staple of fish falls?

Marinus van der Sluijs Vancouver, Canada