Mythology Episode 1 - The legend of Nyami Nyami - and some weird stories

The Nyami Nyami.

Strictly speaking, not really a South African story, but definitely a very, very Southern Africa story.

And Nyami Nyami is the river god of the Zambezi.

And I love the story of A Yummy Yummy and it adds so much character to your visit to the Victoria Falls area or even to the Lake Kariba and the village of Kariba that lies right at the border there between Zimbabwe and Zambia and where the Kariba Dam wall is situated.

Now, the Cariba Dam wall has been in the news for a little while because the overflow of the wall created a huge undercurrent of the catchment basin at the bottom of the wall it was actually undermining it they've then they've just completed a huge engineering project to stabilize the wall of the of the kariba dam now of course i mean if the kariba dam failed i don't know how many gazillion kiloliters of water got streaming down the zambesi causing death and destruction so it was a one heck of an important project.

The story of Nyami Nyami is inextricably linked up with the construction of the Kariba Dam.

And I've always wondered why people call it Lake Kariba, because it's actually a dam.

So it should actually be called the Kariba Dam.

But it is a huge, huge body of water on the Zambezi River that lies between Zambia and Zimbabwe.

Now the Kariba Dam was conceptualized in the 1950s as a hydroelectric project and in 1956 construction on the Kariba Dam actually started.

Now the Zambezi River Valley was obviously inhabited, the Tonga people had lived in the valley for I don't know how many hundreds of thousands of years.

And with the construction of the dam, thousands of the Tonga people got displaced.

As well, there were huge construction projects of housing for the workers, hundreds of, if not thousands of little houses got put up.

All the infrastructure needed, the shops and the roads, and you name it, for several thousand construction people was necessary.

So it was complete mayhem and uproar.

in that valley and they're just an interesting aside there that the biggest wildlife relocation project ever attempted was actually called project nola was rescuing all the wildlife out of the zambesi valley when the dam was completed and the water started filling up and all the animals got isolated little islands and the the game park organization had to go in and rescue thousands of animals from these little islands and take them off to safety.

So

that was one of the weird consequences of the building of Lake Gariba.

But the Tonga people obviously lived on both sides of the river, both in Zambia and in what is now Zimbabwe.

The dam gets built in 1956.

And the Tonga had a belief in a river God.