In landlocked Zimbabwe, folklore has it that mermaids not only exist, but they have supernatural powers. The mythical creatures have a bad reputation, with some believing they are responsible for kidnapping, torture and even murder.
Illustration of a mermaid.
Beliefs and Superstitions
Belief in Zimbabwe is big business and churches of all persuasions are keen to build their flocks - including the Apostolic Faith Mission. Pastor Togare Mapingure believes in mermaids, which he classifies as a demonic force. "Of course people use demonic forces for various purposes to benefit. But the devil's kingdom, they use the mermaids for witchcraft. So I say it is evil all the same," he said.
According to Voice of America, belief in mermaids persists among some Zimbabweans, though many are skeptical of such claims. Mermaids are supposedly mythological water creatures with a female body and the tail of a fish. One version says mermaids carry humans underwater and if there is a public outcry their relatives might never see them again.
“As a custodian of the traditional I have no doubt," chief Chihota said. “They are said to exist in water particularly in big dams like Kariba. “I do not believe that they need to be used to hinder development. The traditional leader said: “I think let’s go back to the late 70s when the struggle was being waged and I understand a number of people were thrown in those dams and nothing was done and a continuation has been happening.
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Encounters and Tales
Around these hills, Mr. Justice Manyonga is known as the man who not only survived being seized by mermaids but as someone who had spent two years being tutored by them. Under their tutelage at mermaid school he became a traditional healer. As far-fetched as this may sound, there is no denying Mr. Manyonga's belief in his past, or that many Zimbabweans believe that mermaids exist in the dams and creeks across the country today.
A recent Christian convert, he claims to know the other side, having spent time there. "A mermaid is very mysterious creature. You can't really say what complexion it is, what colour it is. It can be like a white person, or an Arab, but one distinguishing factor is that they have long hair; very, very long hair - it is metres long," he said.
He described his experience with mermaids: "Once they take you there, you live like them. You wear something that does not show your feet. You eat what they eat. You eat fish, rice and chicken only. On the first day you are taken into the water, you are given millet or sorghum meal and two silver fish. The fish will be rotten but you are told to eat them. If you show any sign of disgust, the mermaids won't be happy with your ancestors and you could be killed."
“When someone is taken by a mermaid it tallies very well with what is held with the African traditional religion and we can't really say it's just a way of trying to explain things that people fail to comprehend. I think it's real because it's not always all people who are taken by mermaids who are killed. Some, if the relatives abide by the rules of the mermaid games, you find someone resurfacing. If they don't abide by the same rules you find someone resurfacing, but dead."
Mermaids and Development
Late last year, attempts to install pumps for irrigation at a dam near the eastern highlands city of Mutare came to an abrupt halt after reports of mermaid sightings. A traditional healer was called in to cast the mermaids out.
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JOHANNESBURG, South Africa - A mermaid-plagued dam in Zimbabwe is up and working after traditional healers brewed beer to appease the mischievous water spirits. The "mermaids" had harassed workers installing water pumps at a dam near the small town of Gokwe, in northern Zimbabwe, according to local media reports.
Water resources minister Samuel Sipepa Nkomo told a Senate committee last week that work on the pumps at Gokwe dam had stopped after terrified workers complained of machines breaking down under mysterious circumstances, and blamed mermaids, the state-run Herald newspaper reported. Nkomo said the same problem had been reported at Osborne Dam, near Mutare in the country's east.
At Osborne dam, divers had been sent down to investigate the cause of blockages in the pumps, but returned to the water's surface vowing to never go back down, the South African Press Association reported. "We even hired whites thinking that our boys did not want to work but they also returned saying they would not return to work there again," Nkomo told the Senate committee.
The problem at Gokwe was reportedly solved late last week when the water ministry hired traditional healers to conduct rituals. The traditional leaders held a ceremony in which they slaughtered cattle and brewed beer to appease the water spirits. "I do not believe in mermaids, but the community that lives in the area does," Nkomo said, according to SAPA.
For Pastor Mapingure, he is not worried about visiting congregations in mermaid country. He knows what keeps him safe - his religion.
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Mashambanzou Dam Incident
One morning in June 2000, villagers in Mhondoro woke up to the news that two men had drowned in a local dam, mashambanzou, in the early morning when elephants drink and wash themselves. The word “mhondoro” has a dual usage: when you put the stress on the syllable “ndo”, it refers to one of the most important myths of Shona metaphysics, that of a supra national spirit whose symbol is a maneless lion. When you apply the stress on the “ro” when pronouncing the word, it refers to the area where my father and grandfather were born.
The dam is part of the agricultural infrastructure built by former president Robert Mugabe’s government in the optimistic mid-1990s. It was built in a shrub-filled, undulating vlei in the early part of the course of the Nyamakondo, a river that begins on a wetland a few kilometres upstream. Nyamakondo pours into the Mupfure River, which itself feeds into the Sanyati River, a tributary of the Zambezi.
The choice of the setting of the dam at the boulder-strewn edges of the river was unusual, not least because of long-held beliefs, indeed dread, that the koppies and their environs are the abode of spirits, ancestors and mythical creatures. Of all the places in the vicinity, it makes sense that a python would seek shelter here at Chengevana, a place through which the river runs that is marked by striking geological formations, ancient granite domes and rocks sitting gracefully on top of and rubbing against each other, at times precariously.
“Paiyera. Paive nechivanhu (The place was sacred),” the headman of the area, who is in his 70s, told me. So spooky does he find the area that even during the day, he avoids walking near the dam. Some of the flat, lichen-eaten rock surfaces are inscribed with images by the San, the former inhabitants of the area.
According to the headman’s wife, the mermaid wasn’t always an inhabitant of the dam. One day after the construction of the dam, as she walked on the earthen wall that holds the water, she saw a whirlwind in the distance. The whirlwind was narrow and towering, seeming to reach into the lower stratosphere, but always moving towards the lake. She stopped to look at the approaching whirlwind, at first with interest and, increasingly, trepidation. When the column of air reached the middle of the pool, she heard the sound of splashing water, as if a huge boulder had been deposited into the dam, creating a ripple of waves. The pool had become like other rivers that don’t quite set the mind at ease; alive, the crocodile-made lakes, rivers and pools are a danger to the human and his or her livestock; dead, the crocodile’s bile is the source of one of the most potent poisons known in nature. Now the mermaid, the fantastical half-woman half-fish thought to cause people to disappear, drive some into madness and make healers of others, had become a denizen of the pool. (Sangomas with water or riverain guardian spirits are thought to be powerful.
Strange happenings started to occur at the lake. In another instance, one day as dusk approached, the headman’s son came home and found his mother preparing sadza, pap. When he asked what they would eat with the pap, his mother told him it would be muriwo, vegetables. Baulking at what he considered unappetising fare, he collected his fishing rod and trotted off to the dam, his dog in pursuit. He sat on a rock that jutted into the pool and started to fish. His dog was sitting near him, perhaps watching his master. Then he heard his dog suddenly shriek, convulse and disappear into the water. That was the last time he saw him. He stood up in fright and fled, leaving the fish he had caught on the rock, never to go near the dam again. “It was a warning,” intoned his father.
Around this time, members of a sect of the Mapostori church started to use the site as a place of prayer. The Mapostori is a Zimbabwean Christian movement that broadly falls into the Zionist Christian Church (ZCC) tradition, mixing traditional African religious tropes and practices with Christianity. The founder of the movement was John Masowe, a man born into the Anglican church in Makoni, in the east of Southern Rhodesia in 1914, as Shoniwa Masedza Tandi Moyo. Sometime in the 1930s, he fell ill and had a dream in which he died. While in this trance, he heard a voice telling him to pray, that his new name would be John. Members of the Africanist church movement Masowe founded eschewed formal employment and lived in self-sufficient collectives. Pointing to the “staleness” of the white man’s Bible, they advocated a spirit-filled Babelian ecstasy. When he started relaying this message, the colonial authorities, realising the anti-colonial import of his homily, were naturally rattled and his movement was persecuted. On his death in 1973, by which time the church had grown and spread as far east as Kenya, it broke into many sects and franchises. Each sect has its own head, a prophet, known in Shona as madzibaba.
Soon after the Mapostori’s occupation of the shrine, a local spirit medium sent word: tell those people who pray at the shrine to stop because the ancestors are not happy about their presence. The head of the sect is said to have explored the underground caves and on one of these encounters is said to have met the mermaid. As a kind of a compromise for their continued use of the shrine, the prophet was told that he could use the shrine if he stuck to one side of the pool. It is said, however, that the prophet couldn’t keep to the code and was reputed to be a philanderer. In what was interpreted by villagers as the revenge of the spirits, disaster struck one day as he was in the middle of a sermon to his congregants. His flock were surprised as, while holding forth, he suddenly took off his flowing white garment and underpants and wandered off naked. He walked to a tavern at a nearby commercial farm, where he bought some beer and meat for a braai. Perplexed patrons looked on, surprised to see the prophet drinking, and even more surprised to see him in the nude. From that day, his mind was spoilt and never recovered. A few years later, he died. It was this cleric, a fully fledged prophet, who led his congregants on the wild mermaid chase early one morning that resulted in the deaths of two people.
The headman’s wife told me that the prophet and his church had gathered at around 4am, that ambiguous time that is neither night nor morning, leading them in song and prayer. He allegedly told his flock, “We are going to chase the mermaids who are stopping us from praying. We want them to leave, so that it is only us occupying the area.” Some accounts suggest the prophet wanted to get the mermaid’s power to perform miracles, so he could get followers and wealth. (Today, people from throughout Zimbabwe and beyond, come on pilgrimages to the shrine. Together with his younger brother and another member of the church, the prophet led the threesome into the pool from the dam wall. In his hands, the prophet held shards of clay pots to which pieces of red cloth were tied (mermaids are said to hate the colour red). As they made their way into the lake, so it is said, they came face to face with the mermaid. At the time of the incident, the prophet is reported to have said, “I was standing face to face with the mermaid, but my legs were weak. It felt like I was getting electrical charges running through my legs.” The mythical creature is said to have pinched the prophet’s legs and, after he regained his composure, he told the two men trailing him, “Vakomana kuno kwaipa, dzokerai (Guys, there is danger here, go back).” But the people behind him either didn’t hear the warning or were perhaps immobilised.
Around noon, about eight hours after the men had gone into the water, the headman got out of a taxi from Harare. He started walking home. As he approached the dam, he met villagers who told him some men had gone into the pool early in the morning but had still not come out. “They must be dead by now,” he exclaimed.
When he got to the dam wall, he saw a funereal crowd of people. He chatted to them for a while, then proceeded home. Before long, a delegation knocked on his door. His clan are the guardians of the shrine and he is the clan’s chief representative. At this point, a woman known in the area as AmuNdevere, reputed to have a mermaid spirit, had been called to help with saving and retrieving the two men (AmuNdevere means Ndebele-speaking; the Shona have a quirky habit of calling a person by the area or tribe from which they come or a place where they once lived. AmuNdevere waded into the water. But when she was well into the pool, she suddenly returned, having found the task daunting.
One dived where he had been told the man had entered the pool and after a while came up to say, “Kunoku hakuna (There is no one here).” Try the other side, the man who was their leader said. He went in and came up holding a prostrate man. He swam to the banks with the lifeless man and laid him on a blanket spread out at the dam wall. After a short while, blood started oozing from his ears, eyes and mouth.
I told the headman and his wife, to whom I am related through marriage as my cousin is married to their son, that I found this mermaid story fascinating and asked if it would be possible to interview someone who was there when the drowning occurred. Of course, they said, their neighbor Mrs C was there and to this day remains a member of the church. Initially, she was cautious. For one, because she was speaking to a stranger, but also because the deaths were linked to her religion.
As the conversation continued, she told me the two had drowned because they transgressed the covenant the church had with the shrine’s guardian spirits about which part of the lake was for their use. “I said to them, ‘Don’t go where you are going. The holy spirit told us that we can’t go there. When I asked why they wanted to catch or chase the mermaids, she demurred and said they didn’t want to catch the water creatures, they just wanted to engage in prayer.
Returning to the “unclean” thesis, she confided that the real reason for the deaths was uncleanliness. What exactly was the nature of this “uncleanliness”, I asked. When they quizzed him on the sin, he was initially reluctant to say what it was, only offering up that it was a bad deed the holy spirit insisted he confess pajekerere, before the congregation. The church elders continued to press him about the nature of his sin until he opened up to them, but not to the congregation. “He had raped a woman. He told them, ‘I followed someone and raped her.’ This is what he was supposed to confess. According to Mrs C, he had even foretold his impending death months before. “Ngirozi yati ndikasazvitaura ndinofa muna March (An angel told me that if I don’t confess, I will die in March).” But he wasn’t the only one who died, I pointed out.
Once Mrs C was comfortable with me, I found her to be a fascinating interlocutor who spoke on and on with various digressive yarns. But it was dusk and getting late. Already birds were calling out, staking claims on the boughs of the trees nearby. To get back to my aunt’s home, I needed to pass by the dam and, to be honest, I was a bit afraid. I headed home as dusk became night.
A few weeks later, thinking about that day, I wondered about Doris Lessing’s short story in the collection This Was the Old Chief’s Country, in which she writes about the “bigness and silence of Africa”.
Another Mermaid Sighting In Zimbabwe
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