Country file · Africa
Cryptids of Zimbabwe
What cryptids are in Zimbabwe? The best-known is Nyaminyami.
Zimbabwe shares the Zambezi with Zambia, and the great river is the home of Nyaminyami, the serpent-bodied river god of the Tonga people. According to Tonga tradition he lived in a rock in the Kariba gorge, and when the Kariba Dam was built across the gorge in the 1950s the floods that damaged the works were taken as his anger at being separated from his wife. Tonga elders called for a sacrifice, and a tale is told of a calf set adrift on the river and of workers’ bodies found afterwards.
- 1 cryptid
Cryptids reported in Zimbabwe
The legends of Zimbabwe
The story is not a monster legend but part of the identity of a people who were moved from their homes to make way for Lake Kariba. Carved figures of Nyaminyami are sold across Zimbabwe, and visitors can see the dam, the lake and a statue of the god. Zimbabwe’s other great natural wonder, Victoria Falls, is known to its Lozi and Tonga neighbours as Mosi-oa-Tunya, ‘the smoke that thunders’.
Hotspots
- Kariba Dam and Lake Kariba
The concrete dam wall and the huge lake behind it, setting of the Nyaminyami story.
- Victoria Falls
The Zambezi’s great waterfall, in the same river system that Nyaminyami is said to guard.