Ninki Nanka

The Ninki Nanka is a dragon of Mandinka belief in The Gambia, said to live in the mangrove swamps and to kill anyone who sees it.

Wikipedia records the Mandinka belief in the ninki nanko, pictured as a huge serpent wearing a crown and living in the densest bush. Seeing its body was thought to bring serious illness, and seeing its eyes or crown to kill at once, so people kept well away from places where one was said to live.

In 2006 a small British team went looking for the Ninki Nanka in The Gambia. Helen Brown of The Independent wrote that local people described a giant reptile as long as 30 feet, living in the dark water of the mangrove swamps. Richard Freeman, who led the team, said to the BBC that the evidence was thin so far, because most people who saw it were said to die soon afterwards.

National Geographic reported in 2021 on a new Ninki Nanka Trail in The Gambia. Someone on the trip told the writer that seeing the creature is believed to be fatal, and the magazine wrote that the only trait all accounts share is its deadly gaze. The fishermen on the boat carried mirrors to turn that gaze aside, and the magazine compared it to Medusa.

The creature also reached music. Reviewing Touré Kunda's album Casamance Au Clair De Lune in Talking Drums in 1984, Kwabena Asamoah wrote that the track 'Ninki Nanka' opens on xylophone and percussion and sounds as though the dragon is being called up.