At least 44 dead after overcrowded ferry capsizes on Lake Kariba in Zimbabwe

At least 44 people have died after an overcrowded ferry capsized on Lake Kariba in Zimbabwe, police said.

The boat had a capacity of 90 people, but was carrying 114 adult passengers, five crew members and an unknown number of children, Zimbabwe’s civil protection unit (CPU) said earlier on Wednesday, citing ticket sales.

A crew member told the national broadcaster ZBC that there were 153 people onboard when the ferry overturned on Tuesday after it hit large waves. A passenger told ZBC that the boat began taking on water about 30 minutes after it left the lakeshore town of Kariba, heading for islands and fishing camps.

A specialised underwater team was flown to the area, the CPU said, as search and rescue continued on Wednesday. At the time, the CPU said the death toll was 15, with 27 known to be missing.

Zimbabwe’s police updated the death toll on Wednesday afternoon in posts on X twice in the space of 32 minutes. In the first post, it said the death toll was 38, adding: “The bodies have been retrieved from the lake.” Then it said that 44 people were now known to have died.

A video shared by ZBC on Tuesday showed several people appearing to be sitting on the upturned ferry, while at least four speedboats came to their aid and a helicopter circled overhead.

Maxwell Kanhema Page, who describes himself as a media practitioner and originally posted the video shared by ZBC, reshared a video on his Facebook page filmed from the shore, in which he had noted that the lake was “angry”.

He said: “A few moments later I get over 200 calls about [the ferry] sinking. A sad day indeed.”

Lake Kariba is the world’s largest human-made lake by volume, stretching about 150 miles along Zimbabwe’s northern border with Zambia. It was created in the 1950s during British colonial rule, when the Zambezi River was dammed, displacing about 57,000 people. The Kariba dam supplies at least a third of both countries’ electricity.

It is not uncommon for boats to overturn on the lake. In 2014, 26 people, 24 of them children, drowned in Zambia’s part of the lake, when the boat meant to transport them to independence day celebrations capsized.

On the Zimbabwean side, five drowned in a 2021 incident and three were feared dead in an October 2023 capsizing. The month before, a police boat overturned although no one died.