The Inkanyamba: The Serpent That Rises as the Tornado
In the green hills of KwaZulu-Natal, the Umgeni River arrives at the town of Howick and does the most dramatic thing a river can do: it steps off a cliff. Howick Falls drops a sheer hundred meters in one white column into a round, deep, perpetually shadowed plunge pool — and that pool, the Zulu peoples of the region have always known, is not empty. The falls' own Zulu name says so: kwaNogqaza — "the place of the Tall One." Down in the cold spiral of water below the cataract lives the Inkanyamba: a serpent of enormous length, sinuous as the river itself, with — the detail every account preserves — a head like a horse's : long-faced, maned in some tellings, crested in others, wholly unlike any snake's. Most of the year the Tall One keeps to the pool, and the pool keeps its rules: only the sangomas — the traditional healers and diviners — may approach the water's edge below the falls, to leave offerings and speak with what lives there; for anyone else the plac...