The first thing I remember about Kariba is not the lake, even though it is impossible to be there without being confronted by its enormous presence; it is the silence that seemed to hang over the community, a silence that felt different from the ordinary quiet of a rural town at the end of a long day.
This was the heavy, almost physical silence of people who have run out of words, the kind of silence that settles over a home after a coffin has been carried away, and the kind that comes when a family is still struggling to understand how a journey that began as an ordinary trip across the lake ended with someone they loved disappearing beneath the water.
I travelled to Kariba to report on the disaster. Still, somewhere between the shoreline, the homes where families were mourning, and the people who gathered to remember those they had lost, the story stopped being about a boat and became something much larger and much more painful. It became a story about people, about mothers who will never hear their children call them again, husbands who returned home alone, children who will grow up with photographs instead of memories, and entire families suddenly forced to count the empty chairs around their tables.
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By Tuesday, August 18, the official death toll had reached 93, with 83 victims positively identified by their relatives, according to police figures, as divers and rescue teams continued searching the vast waters of Lake Kariba and more bodies were recovered and brought to shore.
But 93 is a number that cannot possibly explain what happened here, because it cannot tell you what it means to lose a wife and a child in the same afternoon, what it means for five members of one family to disappear together, what it feels like for an entire neighbourhood to discover that almost every household has been touched by the same tragedy, or what it means to live with the unbearable uncertainty of knowing that someone you love may still be somewhere beneath the waters of Lake Kariba.
I met a man who lost his wife and child
In Kariba, grief does not have to be explained because you can see it before anyone speaks; it is in the faces of people sitting outside their homes, in the clusters of relatives gathered under trees, in the way conversations suddenly become whispers when the name of a missing person is mentioned, and in the photographs being passed between phones as families search for familiar faces among lists of the dead.
I met a man who had lost both his wife and his child, and there was no dramatic speech from him and no performance of grief for the journalist standing in front of him; there was simply the unbearable reality of a man trying to process the fact that the two people he expected to return home with him would not return, and that the ordinary life he had known had been divided forever by a journey across the lake.
Standing there, I found myself struggling to ask the questions journalists are trained to ask: what happened, when did you last see them, have you identified their bodies, what happens now, because although those are necessary questions, in that moment they also felt painfully inadequate in the face of what I was witnessing.
What does a journalist ask a man whose family has been torn apart by water, and what words can possibly make sense when a wife and child are suddenly reduced to photographs, memories and names on a list?
I left that conversation carrying the weight of his grief with me. Then I realised that his was not an isolated story because everywhere I went there were other families carrying versions of the same pain, each with their own names, photographs, memories and unanswered questions.
Next door, an entire family was mourning five people
In the house next door, another family was mourning the loss of five relatives, and the number stayed with me because five people from one family means five lives interrupted, five voices suddenly absent, five relationships that will never again exist in the way they did before the tragedy.
Five people who had boarded the boat together or whose lives were bound together closely enough that their absence would change the family forever had been taken by the same disaster, leaving those who survived to confront a scale of grief that is almost impossible to comprehend.
There were no words capable of explaining what that does to a household, because a family can sometimes find strength in one another after losing one person, but what happens when grief removes several people from the same family at once?
Who comforts whom, who becomes the strong one, who looks after the children, who fills the spaces left behind, who answers the telephone when relatives call, who tells the family that another body has been recovered, and who has the strength to attend five funerals?
These are questions that will not appear in the final death toll, yet they are the questions that families in Kariba must live with long after the last body is recovered and the last official statement about the disaster has been issued.
A neighbourhood counting its dead
In another part of the community, I met people who were mourning together because, in many ways, they had lost together, with the tragedy having moved through the neighbourhood like a storm that left almost every household carrying some form of loss.
One family had lost relatives, another had lost relatives, another was still waiting, and by the time the losses were counted, the neighbourhood had lost around nine people, leaving homes that had once been connected by ordinary routines suddenly connected by funerals, grief and memories of those who would never return.
It was difficult to stand there and think of the disaster as something that happened somewhere on the lake because the lake was right there, the wreckage was right there, and the grief was everywhere, sitting in homes, gathering in yards and following people through conversations that repeatedly returned to the same terrible subject.
That is what the statistics fail to capture, because a death toll of 93 sounds like a national tragedy, but in Kariba, 93 becomes something much more intimate: it becomes a neighbour, a cousin, a mother, a baby, a fisherman, a friend, a person whose shoes may still be sitting outside their house, a person whose phone may still contain unanswered messages and, above all, a person whose name once meant something deeply personal to someone else.
The children make the tragedy harder to comprehend
Among those identified are babies and very young children, and the latest police identification lists include children as young as seven months and one month old, bringing into painful focus the number of young lives that were lost when the Mbuya Nehanda ferry overturned.
There is something uniquely devastating about a disaster that takes children because children do not understand the risks of a journey; they trust the adults carrying them, they trust that when they board a boat with their parents they will arrive at the other side, and they have no way of knowing that an ordinary journey could become the last moment of their lives.
And when a child dies, the grief does not end with the funeral because it follows the parents, follows the siblings, follows the grandparents and follows the community, finding its way into the photograph on the wall, the empty place in a classroom, the birthday that will never be celebrated in quite the same way again and the family gathering where somebody will inevitably remember the child who should have been there.
This is why the psychological response to Kariba cannot be limited to the immediate aftermath, because there are people who have survived the physical disaster but are now beginning another, quieter battle, one fought not against the water but against memory, loss, guilt, fear and the question of how to continue living after witnessing something so devastating.
The wreckage
I also went to see the wreckage, and there is something profoundly unsettling about standing near the remains of a vessel that has become the centre of so much suffering because from a distance it is easy to see a boat, but when you are close enough to understand what happened, you begin to imagine the people who were inside it.
You imagine the movement, the noise, the confusion and the moment the water began coming in; you imagine the screams and panic, the desperate search for something to hold on to, the people looking for loved ones and the passengers trying to survive as the vessel became increasingly overwhelmed by the water around it.
Then you look at the lake again, and it appears almost indifferent, continuing to stretch across the horizon as though nothing has happened, and perhaps that is one of the cruellest things about tragedy: nature does not stop to mourn with us, the wind continues, the water continues moving, the sun rises, and boats still cross the lake.
But for those who lost someone on August 11, Lake Kariba has changed forever because it is no longer simply the water that connects communities; for many families, it is now the place where someone they loved disappeared.
The search continues
The recovery operation has become a race against time, distance and the enormous scale of Lake Kariba, with police divers, military personnel, local authorities and other emergency responders involved in the painstaking search for those who remain unaccounted for.
Bodies have been recovered from different parts of the lake, while authorities have continued efforts to identify those brought ashore, and the official figures have continued to rise as recovery teams reach areas where victims had been carried by the water.
For families, however, there is no such thing as an ordinary recovery operation because every search matters, every boat returning to shore matters and every body recovered matters, since somewhere a family is waiting to know whether the person being brought home is the person they have been searching for.
Waiting is its own form of suffering because a family whose loved one has not been found cannot fully mourn and cannot completely accept the death; instead, they remain suspended between hope and despair, watching the lists of recovered bodies, waiting for telephone calls and listening for news from the lake.
And that is why the search must continue until authorities have done everything reasonably possible to account for those who remain missing, because for the families, recovery is not simply an operation being conducted by government agencies -- it is the difference between uncertainty and closure.
The government arrives -- but the questions remain
Government officials have been coming to Kariba as the scale of the tragedy has become clearer, and Transport and Infrastructural Development Minister Felix Mhona travelled to the area to assess the situation, inspect the damage and engage with communities and operators as government began looking beyond the immediate recovery operation towards the longer-term question of how communities around Lake Kariba should move.
Mhona has also spoken about the need to find alternative routes for communities that depend heavily on the lake, including the rehabilitation of the 105-kilometre Chalala-Kanyati, commonly known as Gachegache Road, as a land-based alternative linking Kariba's urban and rural communities. The government says the route is being prioritised because it could provide another connection for communities that have historically relied on the lake.
Standing on the road, Mhona spoke about the urgency of making the route usable, saying: "We are seeing this road, which is about 105 kilometres, and the idea is to see how we can move with speed to promote accessibility and ensure that the road is trafficable."
The significance of that road is difficult to overstate because for years residents have depended on the lake precisely because the existing road journey is dramatically longer, making the water route an essential part of daily life for communities scattered around Kariba.
Mhona also acknowledged that reality, saying: "Above all, we also think of how we can substitute the boat that was shortening the distance by over 200 kilometres," before adding, "This is very important to make sure that no one and no place is left behind."
There is also a recognition that the communities cannot simply be told to stop using the lake because their lives depend on it, their livelihoods depend on it, fishing depends on it, trade depends on it, and family connections depend on it.
The government has therefore also been engaging private operators and partners about bringing another vessel onto the route while longer-term road improvements are pursued, because the immediate needs of communities cannot simply wait for a road rehabilitation project to be completed.
But for a community grieving 93 deaths, a replacement boat cannot be the only answer, because the people of Kariba need to know why this happened, they need assurances that whatever replaces Mbuya Nehanda will be safe, they need proper enforcement of passenger limits, functioning safety equipment, trained crews and adequate emergency response capacity, and they need confidence that their lives will never again be treated as a calculation between convenience, distance and cost.
Minister Mhona has also assured the nation that the government will investigate the disaster in accordance with the Inland Waters Shipping Act, while urging the country to allow families to mourn and focus on bringing closure to those affected before conclusions are drawn from the investigation.
A road cannot replace everything
The proposed road is important, but speaking to people in Kariba makes one thing clear: a road alone cannot replace the lake because the communities are scattered across islands and fishing camps, many people depend on the water for their livelihoods, and some cannot simply abandon the lake because it is woven into the way they live.
Even when the road is complete, boats will remain part of life in Kariba, and that is why the lesson from this tragedy cannot simply be that people should travel by road; the lesson must be that when people travel by water, they deserve the same seriousness about safety as people travelling by road or air.
The government has promised an investigation under the Inland Waters Shipping Act, while President Emmerson Mnangagwa has also acknowledged deficiencies in maritime safety, raising broader questions about regulation, enforcement, vessel capacity and emergency preparedness that must be answered if another tragedy is to be prevented.
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Those investigations must be allowed to answer difficult questions, not merely for the sake of assigning blame but because the dead deserve an explanation and the living deserve protection.
Grief will remain after the cameras leave
There is another part of this story that worries me: the attention will eventually move elsewhere, the cameras will leave Kariba, the politicians will return to Harare, the divers will eventually complete their work, and the headlines will disappear from news websites, but grief does not work according to the news cycle.
For the families I met, this is not a seven-day story, and it is not even a one-year story; it is the rest of their lives, carried into birthdays without someone, Christmases without someone, weddings without someone and family photographs where there will forever be an empty space.
That is why counselling and psychosocial support must become a central part of the government's response, because the people who lost relatives need help processing trauma, survivors need somewhere to speak about what they saw, children need help understanding death, rescuers need support after spending days searching through bodies and wreckage, and families who lost several relatives need long-term assistance because the psychological and economic consequences of such losses will be enormous.
The World Health Organisation notes that emergencies can produce widespread psychological distress and that some affected people may go on to develop longer-term mental health conditions, including depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder, making sustained psychosocial support an important part of recovery after a disaster of this scale.
In Kariba, that warning is not theoretical because it has faces, and I saw them.
The number 93 is still too small to tell the story
The official death toll is now 93, but the number feels strangely inadequate because I met one man who lost his wife and child, stood outside a home where five family members were being mourned, walked through a neighbourhood where around nine people had been lost, and saw families who were still mourning as well as others who were still waiting for answers.
I saw a community trying to carry a grief that is simply too large for one place, and I stood beside the wreckage of the boat that carried them towards what should have been an ordinary destination, a journey that for many passengers was probably no different from the countless journeys they had made before.
That is what I will remember about Kariba: not simply the number of dead, not the arguments over how many people were aboard, not the political statements and not even the wreckage, but the families, because disasters are ultimately measured not by the number of bodies recovered but by the number of lives permanently changed.
The man who lost his wife and child will wake up tomorrow and they will still be gone; the family that lost five people will still have five empty places, the neighbourhood that lost nine people will still have homes where voices that once filled the air have fallen silent, and somewhere on the shores of Lake Kariba another family may still be waiting for the knock on the door that tells them their loved one has finally been found.
For them, the search is not over, the mourning is not over, the questions are not over, and the lake is not simply a lake anymore.
It is a place of memory, a place of loss and a place where at least 93 people went out on a journey and did not come home.
Kariba will eventually become calm again, but for those who stood on its shores waiting for their loved ones, it will never be the same.
