Zambezi: A journey along southern Africa’s mystical river
HAD a visitor in 1958 stood on the crest of Bumi Hills and peered out through a pair of binoculars, they might have been distracted by the sight of a bare-chested man in a floppy hat attempting to strap an elephant to a wooden raft.
Rupert Fothergill was chief game ranger of what was then Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, and charged with relocating wildlife stranded by the rising waters of the newly-created Lake Kariba.
Grainy footage of the time shows him contending with a number of irregular predicaments: shoulder-deep in water and clutching a wriggling, rabbit-like hyrax in his arms, casually attempting to shoo away a rhino with a wave or two of his hat, and hoisting a bedraggled baboon into a boat by its shoulders. By the time “Operation Noah” was wound down in 1964, Fothergill and his team had saved over 6 000 animals.
Today, from the vantage point of Bumi, Kariba looks more sea than lake. On the shore, small herds of elephant, buffalo and hippo graze on the jewel-bright grass. Straight ahead, the crumpled, grey hills of Zambia are just visible, but there’s nothing but water to the horizon left and right.
The weekly car ferry that traces a steady line through the waves east to west will take 24 hours to complete its journey.
Over 50 years since it was created, Kariba remains the world’s largest man-made lake. And yet it is seen by some as a temporary blip, one likely to disappear before too long.
In the mythology of the region’s Tonga people, the Zambezi is home to the river god Nyami Nyami. A giant dragon, with the body of a serpent and the head of a fish, Nyami Nyami provides for the Tonga when times are hard.
In 1957 and 1958, Zimbabwe suffered the worst floods it had seen in recorded history, twice sweeping away the wall being built to create Lake Kariba.
Nyami Nyami is angry, said the Tonga, he does not want the dam. Sightings of a 200-metre-long beast weaving through the lake are still reported, and the region’s earthquakes are attributed to the monster crashing against the dam, attempting to reach his wife stranded on the other side.
Local guide Student Muroyiwa grew up with these stories. In clothes with which Fothergill would be well familiar (crisply ironed safari shorts and shirt), he steers his boat among the treetops.
Their blackened branches poking out of the water like macabre fingers, the trees are all that remain of a mopane forest that once carpeted the Kariba gorge, lost when the Zambezi was dammed.
Muroyiwa points to an island named after the last human to leave the valley as the waters rose around him.
“Mola believed in Nyami Nyami and he knew he didn’t want the dam and said the water would not get to his doorstep. But it started coming and came right into his house,” he explained. In the end, he just got into his canoe and paddled away.”
Muroyiwa’s mother, Unarie, was another who left when the lake was formed, walking about 20 kilometres inland to the resettlement village that was to be the Tongas’ new home.
She sits in the shade of her mudbrick house, its roof thatched with bluegrass, tin pots drying in the sun outside. Tomatoes, sweet potatoes, okra and maize grow in the small plots tended by her family.
At the edge of their cluster of huts, a look-out tower stands empty; as soon as night falls, one of her grandchildren will climb up and keep watch for marauding lions, hyenas and elephants.
“I am too old to go to the lake now,” Unarie says, “but my life in the old village was perfect. I never saw Nyami Nyami, but I would be more than happy if he wanted to break the wall.”
Until that day comes, all must adapt to the damming of the Zambezi. Hundreds of kilometres downsteam from Kariba, the river continues its journey to the Indian Ocean in a thick languid swirl.
From the floodplain spring groves of broad, oak-like Faidherbia albida trees, giving the region a puzzlingly familiar look: were it not for the zebra snuffling beneath the branches, one might imagine oneself to be in Richmond Park on a golden summer’s day.
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