COUNTRY FILE · AFRICA

Cryptids of South Africa

What cryptids are in South Africa? The best-known are Inkanyamba and Grootslang.

South Africa’s most powerful monster is a living belief. In Zulu and Xhosa tradition the inkanyamba is a vast serpent of deep pools and storms, whose body becomes the funnel of a tornado when it rises into the sky. Its best-known home is the plunge pool below Howick Falls – KwaNogqaza, “the place of the tall one” – on the uMngeni River in KwaZulu-Natal, where traditional healers still make offerings and where visitors have reported a great head breaking the surface. When tornadoes struck the Hogsback–Alice area of the Eastern Cape in the late 1990s, many people saw the inkanyamba’s hand in the destruction.

2 cryptids5 recorded sightings

Cryptids reported in South Africa

LAKE & SEA MONSTER · Pre-colonial

Inkanyamba

Pool below Howick Falls (KwaNogqaza), uMngeni River, KwaZulu-Natal

The great storm-serpent of Zulu and Xhosa belief, said to live in the pool beneath KwaZulu-Natal’s Howick Falls and to ride the summer tornadoes.

REGIONAL LEGEND REPTILIAN · Early 20th century

Grootslang

The “Wonder Hole” cave, Richtersveld, Northern Cape

A colossal serpent said to guard a diamond-filled cave in South Africa’s Richtersveld – a prospectors’ legend of greed, peril and treasure.

FOLKLORE

The legends of South Africa

At the opposite corner of the country, in the stark mountain desert of the Richtersveld near the Orange River, prospectors’ lore tells of the Grootslang – Afrikaans for “great snake” – a colossal serpent said to guard a diamond-filled cave known as the Wonder Hole. The writer Lawrence G. Green recorded the story in 1948, and it has since become one of the internet’s favourite African monsters. Behind it lie real perils: a hot, waterless land, a diamond rush and southern African rock pythons that can exceed five metres.

South Africa also gave the world its most famous “living fossil”. In December 1938 a trawler landed a strange steel-blue fish near East London, and museum curator Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer recognised it as something extraordinary: a coelacanth, a fish thought to have died out with the dinosaurs. That specimen is still on display at the East London Museum – a favourite stop for anyone who believes the natural world has surprises left – while Howick Falls, Augrabies Falls and the |Ai-|Ais/Richtersveld Transfrontier Park draw visitors to the settings of the country’s serpent legends.

Hotspots

Howick Falls (KwaNogqaza), KwaZulu-Natal

A 95-metre waterfall on the uMngeni River whose deep pool is said to be the inkanyamba’s lair.

|Ai-|Ais/Richtersveld Transfrontier Park

Rugged desert mountains along the Orange River, the setting of the Grootslang and its Wonder Hole.

Augrabies Falls National Park

Dramatic Orange River gorge whose deep pool features in related tales of the great snake’s treasure.

East London Museum, Eastern Cape

Home of the 1938 coelacanth, the “living fossil” that showed science can still be surprised.

Hogsback and the Amathole Mountains, Eastern Cape

Misty mountain country near the area struck by the late-1990s tornadoes linked to the inkanyamba.

Sightings timeline

1917
The disappearance of Peter Grayson Grootslang
According to a story widely retold in the twentieth century, English treasure-hunter Peter Grayson vanished in the Richtersveld after his companions were killed, injured or left to fetch help. The legend blames the Grootslang; there is no official record of his fate.
1948
Lawrence G. Green records the Wonder Hole Grootslang
In Where Men Still Dream, Green described the legendary pit, noted that the prospector-author Fred Cornell had written about the Great Snake and that “scores” of people living near the Orange River had written to newspapers claiming to have seen it, and gave witnesses’ estimates of 40 feet. He concluded that exceptionally large pythons had probably been seen and their size exaggerated.
1970s and 1981
The caretaker’s sightings Inkanyamba
Johannes Hlongwane, who looked after a caravan park beside the falls from 1969 to 1985, reported seeing the creature twice (sources give 1971 or 1974 for the first sighting), describing a head and long neck rising high out of the pool and a crest along its back.
September 1995
A head in the plunge pool Inkanyamba
A local restaurant owner said he saw a snake-like head and neck emerge from the water below the falls. Without a camera, he offered a reward for a photograph; the images later published in response were dismissed as hoaxes.
1998
Tornadoes and the snake in the sky Inkanyamba
Local accounts linked destructive tornadoes in the area to the inkanyamba. Researcher Felicity Wood later documented clay figures and narratives made by local artists in response to the storms.