Howick Falls

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At the top of the drop the river gives no warning. The uMngeni comes down through the KwaZulu-Natal midlands broad and unhurried, over grass banks and dolerite shelves, and then the land simply ends: a hard black lip of rock, and beyond it nothing but air and the far wall of a gorge. The water goes over in a single fall of roughly ninety-five meters and turns to spray before it reaches the bottom, so that from the town’s edge the fall is heard as much as seen. A railed viewing area stands at the lip, with curio and craft stalls set back from it, and a signboard giving the height in feet. This is the postcard: one of the principal sights of the province, the reason a town grew here at all. It is also the place, in the country’s older reckoning, where a doorway opens — and by the law of that reckoning the person at the railing is standing exactly where a visitor should stop.

The drift and the drop

Before it was a name it was a fact of the land. The falls sit on the uMngeni — the Umgeni River — where it crosses the high midlands north of Pietermaritzburg, and the surveyed point is about 29 degrees 29 minutes south, 30 degrees 14 minutes east, a little under 1,100 meters above the sea. The river runs off the interior plateau toward the Indian Ocean, and at Howick it meets a band of resistant dolerite that has held up while the softer rock below wore away, leaving the sheer step over which the whole river now falls at once. The Wikipedia account of Howick Falls gives the height as approximately ninety-five meters, about 310 feet, in the article text, while the infobox carries a larger figure of 111 meters; the widely reported and repeated height is the lower one, and it is the one used here. Either way the drop is a long one — high enough that the pool at its foot cannot be seen properly from the lip, only guessed at, dark and turning under the mist.

Below the fall the river does not slow. It runs on through a deep, wooded gorge, dropping again in lesser falls and rapids toward the valley of a thousand hills and, eventually, the sea at Durban; the whole midlands stretch of the uMngeni is a working river, dammed upstream at Midmar and drawn on for the water supply of a good part of the province. But it is the one great step at Howick that holds the eye and the name, because it is there that the river disappears all at once, and there that the pool gathers at the bottom out of sight. A cataract that can be watched from above but whose foot cannot be reached with the eye is exactly the kind of place a tradition marks: visible in its power, hidden in its depth.

The amaZulu name for it is kwaNogqaza, “the place of the tall one.” The name is attested across the tourism, municipal, and reference record, and it is older than the colonial settlement that grew beside the water; it names the fall for its own height, the tall one being the standing column of the cataract itself. To speak of the falls in isiZulu is thus already to name a presence and not merely a measurement — a thing with stature, addressed as such.

The English name is a later layer, laid over the top of the older one, and its history is well documented. The river here was crossed at a drift — a ford — just above the falls, on the wagon road that ran up from the coast into the interior, and the crossing carried its own plain danger, since the current that took a wagon off the drift would take it over the drop. In 1849 the Wesleyan missionary James Archbell bought three farms above the northern bank of the uMngeni. In November 1850 a proclamation appeared in the Natal Government Gazette offering thirty-six village allotments on the “uMngeni Waterfall Drift” for sale, and a settlement took shape around the crossing. For its name the colonial officials reached back to London: their Secretary of State for the Colonies was Earl Grey, who had lately taken the courtesy title Viscount Howick, and the town was named from his ancestral seat, Howick Hall in Northumberland, England. So the map now carries two names at once — a Northumberland great house and the tall one of the water — laid over the same lip of dolerite.

The tradition-internal identity of the place reaches the written record by a different route than its colonial history does, and the difference is worth marking. The falls’ municipal founding is a matter of gazettes and title deeds, dated and filed. The pool below as the dwelling of the inkanyamba, the great serpent of the deep water, comes down chiefly through the living oral tradition of the province and through the popular retellings that gathered it for a general readership, rather than through any single canonical missionary page devoted to this fall. It belongs to a broad and well-attested pattern — the Nguni complex of great water-snakes that inhabit deep pools and rivers, which the classic record documents across the region, from Henry Callaway’s The Religious System of the Amazulu (1868–70), read as the missionary-era encounter it was, to the later scholarship of Eileen Krige and Axel-Ivar Berglund. What is said of Howick’s pool here is therefore marked as tradition-internal knowledge, carried by the community and its diviners, and not as the report of a named colonial informant. The being has its own account; what stands at this place is the house it is held to keep.

The waterfall with a doorkeeper

Approached from within the tradition, the falls are a threshold rather than a spectacle, and the pool at the foot of the drop is the reason. It is held to be the home of the inkanyamba, the great serpent of the deep water, the storm-power of the summer midlands associated with wind, hail, and rain — a being of the pools and the funnels that join them, distinct from the sky-powers above and from the ancestral shades of the household. Because a power dwells in the basin, the place carries protocol. It is not that the water is dangerous in the ordinary way of a high fall, though it is that too; it is that the water is inhabited, and an inhabited place is entered on terms set by what lives there.

The terms are plain, and the record states them plainly. Only the izangoma — the diviner-healers called and taught by the amadlozi, the ancestral shades — may safely approach the pool, and then, in the words of the reference account, only “to offer prayers and other acts of worship.” The offerings are made to the inkanyamba resident in the water, to the ancestors, and to uNkulunkulu, rendered in the popular telling as the Great God or supreme creator at the head of all things. How far the pre-Christian uNkulunkulu was a worshiped creator, as against a remote first-ancestor from whom the nation descends, is a contested question, and the nineteenth-century missionary reframing of the name — its recasting as the Christian creator-God in Bible translation and preaching — is part of why the popular “supreme creator” gloss sits uneasily on it. That phrasing is attributed here, not asserted; the fuller argument belongs to the entry on the name itself.

What the tradition describes, and all that is described here, is the shape of the boundary: that the site is treated as sacred and dangerous, that the diviners hold the right of approach, and that offerings are made at the water. The manner of any rite — how a diviner prays there, what is offered, in what order — is not the encyclopedia’s to set down, and the tradition’s own reticence is respected in kind. The prohibition on ordinary people going down to the water is the tradition’s boundary-keeping, not a curiosity to be explained away and not an instruction to be followed. It is enough to say that the pool has a keeper, and that the keeper is not the visitor at the rail.

The keepers are worth naming correctly, because the record has often named them wrongly. The izangoma are diviner-healers of the ancestors, men and women called through affliction and dream and formed in a long training under a senior diviner; the singular is isangoma. “Witch-doctor” is the colonial outsiders’ word for them, a term of contempt that fused divination with malice and never belonged to the tradition it claimed to describe, and it is corrected here rather than repeated. The isangoma, the diviner who works by the ancestors’ insight, is also kept distinct from the inyanga, the herbalist who works by knowledge of plants and medicines — two offices the outsider’s vocabulary tended to blur into one. At Howick the doorkeepers are the diviners, the ancestors’ own people, and it is by their office and not by any general daring that the pool may be approached at all.

Two things, then, share the place without being the same thing. The being of the pool is the inkanyamba, with its own reality, its own domain over the storm, and its own account. The falls are its house — a specific power in a specific water, with a threshold and a protocol and a class of person authorized to cross it. The house is not the tenant, and the fall of white water that a tourist photographs is, in the older reckoning, the front of a dwelling whose door is kept.

Howick Falls, kwaNogqaza — ‘the place of the tall one’ — on the uMngeni River in the KwaZulu-Natal midlands, photographed after several days of heavy rain. Bjørn Christian Tørrissen, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

The postcard and the pool

From 1850 the falls became the anchor of a colonial town, and the town wrote its own record over the place. The drift above the drop was a lethal crossing before it was a scenic one, and the fall below it drew a long and grim tally: a recorded forty deaths are associated with Howick Falls, the first logged in 1851, most of them classed as suicides, with accidents and murders also among them. That is set down here as a single record-level fact, at the register of the coroner’s book and no other — a sober line in the town’s official memory, and not to be confused with the sacred meaning of the water or with anything the tradition holds or does.

In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries the falls became a principal tourist attraction of the KwaZulu-Natal midlands. The viewing area at the town’s edge, the curio and craft stalls, the walk down toward the gorge for a longer view: this is the falls as most visitors meet them, kwaNogqaza turned into a stop on the midlands route. The craft trade beside the fall is part of the modern life of the place — beadwork and carving sold to the coach traffic that comes up from the coast — and the falls anchor a wider heritage circuit through the midlands, of galleries and farm stalls and, a short way off, the memorial where Mandela was taken. None of that displaces the older use. The two economies of the place run side by side: the one that sells the view, and the one that keeps the water. The modern lore accumulated too. In 1999 the American BASE jumper Jeb Corliss survived a near-fatal jump at the falls when his parachute opened asymmetric — an episode of the falls’ present-day fame that has nothing to do with their older meaning, and belongs squarely to the postcard rather than to the pool. So, at a further remove, does the town’s most famous historical marker: it was on the road near Howick, on the R102 toward Lidgetton, that Nelson Mandela was arrested on 5 August 1962, a fact of the country’s political history that the town now commemorates and that stands entirely apart from the sacred site.

Alongside the postcard, the older meaning persists in the present tense, because the people who hold it are a living people. The amaZulu are not a closed chapter, and the izangoma are not figures of the past; they are practitioners of a living office, one that the South African state has moved to recognize in law. The Traditional Health Practitioners Act of 2007 — Act 22 of 2007 — establishes a statutory council and a register for traditional health practitioners, and the categories it names include the diviner, the isangoma, kept distinct in the law itself from the herbalist. The diviners who hold the right of approach at Howick’s pool are, in the present, recognized professionals of a recognized calling, and the falls remain a sacred natural site where the inkanyamba is spoken of not as an old story but as a power really resident in the water.

The scholarship that frames such traditions treats them at that dignity, and it is the right dignity from which to read this place. The water-serpent of the deep pool, the diviner’s authority over the sacred and dangerous site, the offerings made at the threshold — these are documented across the Zulu religious world as coherent knowledge, not as folklore-curiosity. Callaway’s nineteenth-century compendium gathered the water-snake tellings early, though it must be read critically, as the record of a missionary’s encounter in which his informants disagree among themselves. Krige’s The Social System of the Zulus (1936), Berglund’s Zulu Thought-Patterns and Symbolism (1976), and Harriet Ngubane’s Body and Mind in Zulu Medicine (1977) set the diviner and the powers of the waters within an ordered religious life, each office with its own domain. Read against that scholarship, Howick Falls is not a scenic overlook that happens to carry a legend. It is a working boundary in a living religion, kept by the people the ancestors call, above a pool that has a name and a tenant older than the town.

Stand at the rail long enough and the two readings of the place separate. There is the fall the surveyors measured and the settlers named, the drift that killed and the sight that draws, the drop with its signboard and its stalls. And there is the tall one going down into its own water, the dark basin below that the visitor is not the one to enter — a house whose door has always had a keeper, and whose keeper was never the person taking the photograph.

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