The Nandi Bear

http://www.newanimal.org/nandibear.htm

They say that the Nandi bear is a bear from Africa that people from the Nandi tribe have seen and described. European settlers have also reported seeing the bear, and the descriptions sound exactly like a bear, right down to its posture and mannerisms.
The author of this site said that the descriptions had to be the truth or "outright lies or hallucinations". So I guess it's the latter.

The Nandi bear is small, no more than five feet tall when standing on its hind legs. They climb trees and are very good at it, which is how they escape from people. They look almost exactly similar to the European brown bear.

The article makes a comment about how the Nandi bear can be a surviving remnant of the Atlas bear, but then it lists all the things that they don't have in common and why they wouldn't be. So I guess that whole section wouldn't help the side that there is a Nandi bear.

The Nandi could have come from the Middle East and traveled to Eastern Africa when they found the hospitable forests. Then the ew settlers could have destroyed the link that connected the Nandi bears to the brown bears. Since the Nandi bears are now in a new climate and cut off from the other species, they would have picked up all the new traits that the brown bear doesnt have.

Other explanations of the Nandi bear are that it is an undiscovered species of giant baboons. But this is mainly because the Nandi tribes have not had any experience with bears and would have to compare this animal with something that they know, which would be a monkey. Crytptozoologists have compared it to a hyena family. That would explain why it was in the area that it is, and it would look a lot like a bear.