Godzilla Is Here: Zimbabwe’s Super El Niño, the Supercharged Makombwe, and Keeping Your Family Safe
Pull up a chair. Yesterday Masvingo woke to hail the size of mazhanje — roofs torn off, solar panels shattered, cars dented, families in a council hall by nightfall. We have said it on these pages for over a year: the 2026/27 season is a super El Niño, a “Godzilla,” and in a super season every element Mwari made comes supercharged. This is not a prophecy. It is the Olympics of the Makombwe — earth science and living heritage saying the same thing. So let’s talk, calmly, about what’s coming and how to stay safe.
Let us start where it got real. On Monday 5 October 2026, a violent hailstorm tore through Masvingo City — hailstones that neighbours swear were the size of mazhanje, roofs peeled off homes, windows and sliding gates smashed, solar panels and cars battered, trees uprooted. By evening, some sixty households were counting their losses, and families were being sheltered at Mucheke and Rujeko halls. Mercifully, no one was killed. And a mile from where I sit, I will be honest with you: a small, nerdy part of me sat up. Not because anyone’s roof flying off is good news — it is not — but because this is exactly what we have been telling you was coming, over and over, for more than a year.
So consider this a Couch Conversation of the “we-did-tell-you” kind — said with warmth, and with a chair pulled out for every new reader this storm has brought our way. Welcome. The Tete Getty Research Institute (TGRI) has been writing about this super El Niño since before it had teeth. Now it has teeth. Masvingo was not a freak event — it was the opening ceremony. And the whole point of saying so early was never to frighten anyone. It was so that, when the big weather arrived, we would be ready for it instead of surprised by it.
What a “Godzilla” El Niño Actually Means
Let us get the science right, because getting it right is what keeps people safe. El Niño is a periodic warming of the Pacific Ocean that reorganises weather across the whole planet. When it is very strong, the world nicknames it a “Godzilla” — the last great one, in 2015–16, earned that name. For Zimbabwe, the official forecast for 2026/27 is a very strong El Niño, pointing to a season that is, on balance, drier, hotter and more erratic than normal.
Every time the sky does something dramatic, someone in a shiny suit rushes to claim they “released” it or “saw it in a vision.” Sit down. This is not your playbook. A warming Pacific Ocean does not consult anybody’s WhatsApp broadcast. What is happening above Zimbabwe is earth science — measurable, forecastable, and written down by meteorologists months in advance. You do not need a prophet to tell you a super El Niño is coming. You need a roof that is tied down and a weather app that is switched on.
The Olympics of the Makombwe
Now let me speak in our own frame, because our people understood the power of weather long before satellites. In the spirituality of the Zimbabwe Plateau, above all is Mwari — Musiki, Musikavanhu, Nyadenga — the genderless Creator of everything. Beneath Mwari stand the great guardian spirits, and among the most senior are the Makombwe (singular, Gombwe): the spirits our tradition associates with the mighty forces of nature — the rains, the winds, the storms, the elements themselves.
So when I call this season the Olympics of the Makombwe, I am not being mystical for drama. I am saying, in the language of our grandparents, exactly what the scientist says in his: every elemental force is turned up to maximum this year. The wind, supercharged. The hail, supercharged. The lightning, the fog, the floods, the heat — each one, bigger and fiercer than a normal year. Our ancestors would have recognised this instantly as a season when the Makombwe are fully awake.
The Opening Ceremony — and What It Nearly Cost
Masvingo — the province of old Great Zimbabwe, the heart of the Plateau — taking the first big hit feels almost symbolic. But I want you to sit with the near-miss inside it, because this is where weather becomes economics. The flash flooding that came with that storm was serious. Now imagine that same system, a few weeks on, parked over Mutare instead.
Mutare is our gateway to the sea — the road through the Machipanda border to the port of Beira is a multi-million-dollar trade artery, the eastern lifeline that moves our fuel, our imports and our exports. A single washed-out bridge or a buried section of that corridor during a supercharged storm season does not just ruin a day; it can throttle a national trade route. This is why, when I kept raising the alarm about the coming rains — and about the Christmas Pass gold dig, where artisanal miners are burrowing into the hills of the very mountain pass that forms the gateway into Mutare, exactly as the flash floods and landslide risk of a super season arrive — I was not being dramatic. I was doing the arithmetic. In a super El Niño, weather risk and economic risk are the same risk — and digging out the hillside that holds the gateway road is asking the storm to take it.
Mheni: The Danger We Grew Up Without Warning For
Now to the one I care about most, for my own people of Manicaland and everyone who lives beneath our great ranges. For years I circulated homemade reminders on surviving electrical storms, because we never grew up with early-warning systems — you learned the hard way, or you learned from an elder, or you did not learn at all. But here is what we now understand clearly: our mountain ranges — Nyanga, Bvumba, Chimanimani, the whole Eastern Highlands — pull in electrical-storm activity, and following these storms over the years, the trend has been a steady climb. Put that rising trend inside a super El Niño, and lightning becomes a season-long hazard we must talk about out loud.
⚡ Surviving an Electrical Storm — Keep This
- Go indoors early. If you can hear thunder, you are already close enough to be struck. Get into a solid building and stay there.
- Do not shelter under a tree, on a hilltop, or in an open field — those are exactly where lightning strikes. A lone tree is a death trap.
- Stay away from water — rivers, dams, puddles, bathing, washing. And keep off metal: wire fences, tools, bicycles, tin roofs’ edges.
- Unplug appliances (TVs, fridges, decoders) before the storm peaks, and avoid corded phones and taps during it. A surge can travel the wires.
- Caught in the open with no shelter? Crouch low on the balls of your feet, feet together, head down — small and low. Do not lie flat.
- A car with a metal roof is safer than open ground — wind up the windows and don’t touch metal inside.
Protecting Home, Farm, Children and Journey
Here is the practical heart of our conversation — simple, doable things that turn a frightening season into a managed one. None of this requires money you don’t have. Most of it just requires the habit.
Make checking the weather a daily family habit — the Meteorological Services Department, a trusted weather app, the radio warnings. We never grew up with early-warning systems, but we have them now, and they are free. A two-minute glance at tomorrow’s forecast is the cheapest insurance in Zimbabwe. Build it into the morning like brushing your teeth, and half the danger of a super season simply disappears into “we saw it coming.”
Respect the Sky, Ready the Home
I’ll be honest with you, the way you can only be on a couch among friends: when Masvingo’s hail came down exactly as we’d been warning, a nerdy little part of me felt that quiet electricity of a prediction coming true. I’m not proud of the thrill — a hard thing happened to real families, and my heart is with them. But I am glad of this: maybe now, when this platform says “prepare,” more of us will listen. We were not guessing. We read the science, we read the sky, and we told you early so that readiness could outrun fear.
And I want to leave you with the thing our heritage gets so right. Our elders stood under the same supercharged skies, with none of our satellites, and they did two things at once: they respected the Makombwe — read the elements, prepared, took shelter — and they thanked Musiki, even in the storm, because the whole roaring world is Mwari’s creation. That is not superstition. That is the healthiest posture a human being can hold before a force far larger than themselves: humility, gratitude, and good sense. Not the theatrics of a prophet claiming to command the clouds — just a people who know their place under heaven and tie their roofs down anyway.
So this is my word for the season, friends: this Godzilla is real, and it is here, and Masvingo was only the first act. Do not panic, and do not be talked into fear by anyone selling prophecy. Instead, do the calm, ancestral, sensible things — check the sky, ready the home, teach the children, protect the farm, mind the journey. Respect the Makombwe, thank the Creator, and prepare like your grandmother would have. Mamvaririro ekudenga, tiri kuaona; ngatizvigadzirire — we can see what the heavens are preparing; let us prepare ourselves. Zvese zvakasikwa naMwari zvatosvika zvakasimba gore rino — everything the Creator made has arrived supercharged this year. Tendai Musiki, uye mugadzirire — thank the Creator, and get ready.
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