  The MHONGOOSE (MeerKAT HI Observations of Nearby Galactic Objects: Observing
Southern Emitters) survey maps the distribution and kinematics of the neutral
atomic hydrogen (HI) gas in and around 30 nearby star-forming spiral and dwarf
galaxies to extremely low HI column densities. The HI column density
sensitivity (3 sigma over 16 km/s) ranges from ~ 5 x 10^{17} cm^{-2} at 90''
resolution to ~4 x 10^{19} cm^{-2} at the highest resolution of 7''. The HI
mass sensitivity (3 sigma over 50 km/s) is ~5.5 X 10^5 M_sun at a distance of
10 Mpc (the median distance of the sample galaxies). The velocity resolution of
the data is 1.4 km/s. One of the main science goals of the survey is the
detection of cold, accreting gas in the outskirts of the sample galaxies. The
sample was selected to cover a range in HI masses, from 10^7 M_sun to almost
10^{11} M_sun, to optimally sample possible accretion scenarios and
environments. The distance to the sample galaxies ranges from 3 to 23 Mpc. In
this paper, we present the sample selection, survey design, and observation and
reduction procedures. We compare the integrated HI fluxes based on the MeerKAT
data with those derived from single-dish measurement and find good agreement,
indicating that our MeerKAT observations are recovering all flux. We present HI
moment maps of the entire sample based on the first ten percent of the survey
data, and find that a comparison of the zeroth- and second-moment values shows
a clear separation between the physical properties of the HI in areas with star
formation and areas without, related to the formation of a cold neutral medium.
Finally, we give an overview of the HI-detected companion and satellite
galaxies in the 30 fields, five of which have not previously been catalogued.
We find a clear relation between the number of companion galaxies and the mass
of the main target galaxy.
