Kara Ben Nemsi is a fictional main character from the works of Karl May, best-selling 19th century German author.

He travels across North Africa, Sudan, and the Ottoman Empire including various parts of the Middle East and the Balkans with his friend and servant Hadschi Halef Omar.

Nemsi shares his two famous rifles with Old Shatterhand, another fictional alter ego of May, the Bärentöter (Bear Killer) and the Henrystutzen (Henry Carbine).

This becomes obvious in the novel Im Reiche des silbernen Löwen I (In the Realm of the Silver Lion, Volume I) where the narrator going by Old Shatterhand is located in the US and meets an acquaintance of his from the Orient to whom he reveals himself as "Kara Ben Nemsi".

The name Kara Ben Nemsi first occurs in „Reise-Erinnerungen aus dem Türkenreiche von Karl May“ Giölgeda padiśhanün ("Travel-Memoirs from the Empire of Turks by Karl May" in the Shadow of the Padishah) later called Durch die Wüste (Through the desert) published in 1880/81 where it is spontaneously made up by servant Hadschi Halef Omar during an introduction:"This steadfast fellow had once asked my name and had truly remembered the word Karl, but being unable to pronounce it, he has quickly converted it to Kara and added Ben Nemsi, ‘offspring of the Germans’."

– EINE BEFREIUNG (A Liberation), 1894In the story An der Tigerbrücke (within Am Stillen Ocean, 1894) the first-person narrator mentions, that he is identical to Kara Ben Nemsi and Old Shatterhand.