The Inkanyamba of Howick Falls
At the foot of Howick Falls in KwaZulu-Natal, where the Mgeni River drops more than ninety metres into a deep plunge pool, sightings of a large serpentine creature with a horse-like head have been reported for at least six decades.
Howick Falls is one of South Africa’s most celebrated waterfalls, a single drop of ninety-five metres on the Mgeni River in the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands. It is also the reported home of the Inkanyamba, a serpentine creature of considerable size and supernatural reputation, whose presence in the deep plunge pool below the falls has been continuously reported by Zulu communities for more than a century and by witnesses of all backgrounds since at least the early 1960s.
Historical Context
In Zulu cosmology Inkanyamba is more than a single animal. The word denotes a class of great serpents, often associated with violent storms, who inhabit deep pools and waterfalls and whose movements were traditionally said to draw the tornadoes of the southern African summer. The tradition is widely distributed across the Nguni-speaking peoples of southern Africa and is documented in colonial-era ethnographies, notably those of Henry Callaway in the 1860s and A. T. Bryant in the early twentieth century. The specific association with Howick Falls predates the photographic record but is well established by the 1930s.
The pool below Howick Falls is unusually deep — recent sonar work has placed its lowest soundings at more than thirty-five metres — and is fed not only by the visible cataract but by a complex of underwater channels and undercut cliffs. It is, in other words, a body of water capable of concealing an animal of substantial size, and divers have repeatedly described the visibility at depth as poor enough to limit any systematic survey.
Witness Account
The modern record begins in earnest in 1962, when a local farmer named Buthelezi Mhlongo reported to the Howick municipality that he had observed, from the cliff path on the eastern side of the falls, a large dark animal surfacing in the centre of the plunge pool at first light. Mhlongo described the visible portion of the animal as roughly fifteen feet long, with a thick neck and a head he likened to that of a horse. The animal, he said, lifted its head out of the water for perhaps ten seconds, turned slowly, and submerged.
A series of further reports followed in the 1970s and 1980s. In 1981 a Howick municipal worker named Jacob Mtolo claimed to have photographed the creature from a vantage point near the cable-car terminal, but the resulting image, published in the local Natal Witness, showed only a long dark shape that critics dismissed as a partly submerged log. A more substantial cluster of sightings in 1995 and 1996 was investigated by the cryptozoological writer Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer, the same naturalist who had earlier identified the first known living coelacanth in 1938. Courtenay-Latimer interviewed seventeen witnesses and concluded, in characteristic restraint, that “something uncommon is in that pool.”
The most widely circulated single image came in 1996, when a tourist named Bob Teeney photographed what he described as a long-necked creature surfacing near the falls’ base. The Teeney photograph has been the subject of inconclusive analysis ever since.
Investigation
The conventional zoological candidates for the Inkanyamba include the African rock python, Python sebae, the Nile monitor, Varanus niloticus, and various large eels of the genus Anguilla, all of which inhabit the Mgeni system. None of these species reaches the size or possesses the morphology consistently described by witnesses. A 2002 paper in the South African Journal of Zoology by the herpetologist William Branch reviewed the available reports and concluded that the case for any known regional species was poor, but that the case for an undescribed large vertebrate was equally unsupported by physical evidence.
Sonar surveys of the plunge pool have been conducted intermittently since the late 1990s, including a 2008 effort by a team from the University of KwaZulu-Natal, but the pool’s complex geometry has frustrated definitive results. Several large unidentified contacts have been recorded but not characterised. The municipal authorities of Howick maintain that no formal effort to drain or dive the pool to its lowest depths is feasible.
Cultural Impact
For the Zulu communities of the Midlands the Inkanyamba is approached with the same composite of respect, caution and routine acceptance that characterises engagement with the Tokoloshe and other supernatural presences. Local sangomas occasionally perform protective rites at the falls, and traditional advice continues to discourage approaching the pool too closely during the summer storm season, when the creature is said to be most active.
The case shares a regional context with other southern African water-creature traditions, notably the Mamlambo of the Eastern Cape and the Grootslang of the Richtersveld. Whether the Inkanyamba represents a surviving relict population, a misidentified large eel or python, or a genuinely paranormal presence anchored to one of southern Africa’s most dramatic waterscapes, the reports continue, year after year, from witnesses who have nothing to gain from making them.
Sources
- Callaway, Henry. The Religious System of the Amazulu. Trübner & Co., 1870.
- Courtenay-Latimer, Marjorie. Notes on the Howick Falls reports, 1996, East London Museum archives.
- Branch, William. “Cryptozoological reports from the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands.” South African Journal of Zoology 37 (2002).
- Natal Witness, archive coverage 1962–2010.