Life Them Money Lizards
posted by on July 9 at 13:32 PM
One more from Zimbabwe. Enjoy!
By Staff ReporterA HARARE woman kept two lizards in her handbag thinking they would bring her financial bliss.
The unidentified woman from Harare’s Kambuzuma suburb told friends her husband sent the lizards from South Africa “to spin money” in Zimbabwe, the official Herald newspaper reported.
The woman’s lizards are said to have drawn a large crowd at the Kambuzuma 5 Shopping Centre, before a self-styled prophet from the eastern border town of Mutare sprinkled the lizards with a concoction following which they died.
The prophet, according to the paper, accosted the woman and insisted that she open her bag. After much resistance, the tearful woman finally obliged as the crowd swelled.
“The prophet said the creatures in the woman’s bag could cause an accident if she travelled with them on the bus,” the paper said.
“A crowd then gathered thinking the two were involved in a domestic dispute. But on discovering what the two were arguing about, they pressed the woman to open the bag.
She took out a smaller bag, which was inside her handbag, and — to the utter shock and amazement of the gathering — two monitor lizards crawled out.
“We were shocked, to say the least,” said a Mrs Yeshiva, who was at a nearby market said.
A local businessman then bought four litres of paraffin and diesel with which he attempted to burn the creatures, but they crawled out of the fire — to the further disbelief of the crowd.
About 30 minutes later, the prophet, who comes from Mutare but was visiting his brother, asked for some water and salt and began praying.
He later sprinkled the water onto the lizards following which they died.
The woman, who was visibly shaken by the event, said the lizards were young and small when they were brought from South Africa.
“My husband said we would be rich if we kept feeding them with mealie-meal,” she said.
But the lizards, she said, were becoming a nuisance as they grew bigger.
“I could not leave them alone at home because they would always try to crawl out of the house. So I carry them around in my bag,” she said.
The woman said they lived a relatively good life with the money sent to her from South Africa by her husband, but said she personally did not believe the lizards were bringing in any riches.”
I'd be lying if I said I even read a word of it. Awesome post!
So it wasn't being burned in the fire that killed them, but a little powder? Uh-huh. Charles, I'm glad you're in the US and not there.
since this was in harare - which is an actual city, how does it further your thesis that "rural idiots" are the cause of the planet's problems?
Screw payday loans. If I'm ever in a financial jam, I'm gettin' me a money lizard. Preferably one that is fireproof like the money lizards in this story.
Money lizards make a lot more sense than those democracy lizards that Bush is hawking. But I can't wait for Tony Snow's press conference announcing that the answer to the fiction of climate change are those global warming lizards.
Ethnic people are so zany!
Man Zimbabwe needs help
It used to be an okay place to visit, maybe a little boring (although we were in the middle of a pulling match in Harare over who's bus we'd ride on).
The people are really nice and honest there. Actually, Zambians were really the best (far more honest than I could hope to be in their sitautions), but we met lots of nice people in Zimbabwe. The corruption of their governments and ours really is unfair. They deserve help in ridding themselves of Mugabe. It probably would be better coming from the ANC, but how many years is this going to be left to linger?
Charles,
I have to ask, how is portraying Zimbaweans in this unflatering light, by cherry picking the most inane stories in the Herald, helping to further a specific point - and further more, what point is it that you are furthering? You know that the Herald publishes these stories as space filler in craptastically crapy newspaper and that the only people who read that stuff are literate versions of your "rural idiots". So I ask again, why post this without context? I can only infer that you mean for the average slog reader to marvel at the idocy of your countrymen i.e. you mean for the average slog reader to believe that these silly ideas are held by wide swaths of Zimabweans and by extension that wide swaths of Zimbaweans are silly and stupid. For someone who only recently emerged from the simplicity of Kwekwe you completley embody the essence of a munoz or musalad and thats just sad....
Yes the posts are sad. A brilliant and original writer serves up his countrymen to be ridiculed by the white readers of his newspaper. Is this what happens when we leave?
We mock and then silly readers offer cheap commentary.
Yes Mugabe is horrible. Once he leaves, little will change for the rural dwellers of Zimbabwe. Empire has no interest in their future, to beleive other wise is the true idiocy.
Desperate poverty creates incredible situations where people are stripped of all their dignity and at times all they have is their horrendous myths, legends and superstitions.
America is a country of incredible wealth and yet you will find these same situations not only in the rural but in the city town folk as well. But this great writer and African man of letters, feels the need to feed the apetite of the colonializers to mock the savage developing world dweller as if this country is rich simply because people here work harder. As if examples of idiocy are not plentiful in our adopted country as well. As if Empire had nothing to do with the inequality which breeds such rural idiocy. Charles is a subject of empire just like the rural idiots he mocks, but he just happens to be educated.
Seriously, what's with all the Zimbabwe around here alla the sudden?
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