A row has erupted in South Africa over the identity of one of the bodies of dozens of South Africans who were killed in the collapse of a Nigerian church building last year.
One family suspects they were given the wrong body and has commissioned private DNA tests and warned they would want the “right” corpse exhumed if their suspicions were correct.
Her body was among the last batch of 11 repatriated to South Africa on February 5 after months of delays attributed partly to waiting for DNA tests.
“I told the other families not to go ahead with their burials because none of us were sure we had the right bodies,” her brother Lwandle Mkhulisi told AFP Monday.
The Mkhulisi family ignored a warning not to open the body bag they were given because the corpse could be in a deteriorated state.
Lwandle Mkhulisi said the body inside did not have a gap in the teeth like his sister did and had no skin from which they could identify birth marks or scars.
“They (the government) told us that the bodies may be infected with Ebola because Nigeria is close to Sierre Leone,” Mkhulisi said.
“Sierre Leone is very far from Nigeria…. They are lying to us.”
Dr Munro Marx, who handled the DNA verification process on behalf of the Nigerian authorities, said he was “100 percent satisfied” that the DNA profiles of Mkhulisi’s two children matched the numbered sample belonging to her.
Marx, head of Stellenbosch University’s Unistel Medical Laboratories in South Africa, said the lab had nothing to do with handling the body bags but it was “highly unlikely” that any bodies were swapped.
The Mkhulusi family’s private DNA test results are due in two weeks.
An inquest into the building collapse is under way in Lagos.
Officials who have testified blamed the collapse on structural failure and said building plans for the guesthouse were never approved.
At night I go out almost as pretty as I may appear in pictures and as I watch people drinking, flirting, exchanging numbers and agreeing to meet up soon, I feel a strange loss of corporeality when my self-possessed smiles and quick rejoinders are met with nervous laughter and clumsy goodbyes as men begin to look through and beyond me.
At something simpler, intrinsically sexier and over my shoulder.
For me this is nothing new.
I’m a 29-year-old black woman and I’ve never been asked out on a date or for my number in any way that would suggest the slightest view towards twin tombstones.
My black and white male friends tell me it’s because I’m too intimidating when reduced to a bullet point list.
I’m passably pretty. I have a great job. I’m affable, educated and articulate. I live in a swank apartment, my sexual reputation is squeaky clean and I’ve recently taken a shine to flying across the world to eat, explore and be mute in monasteries.
Even more repulsive is the fact that I speak a little too well, white, meaningfully and much. Couple this with the ability to afford my own hair, home and gambols across the globe and the reality is that while I’m obviously “a catch,” I’m also the least desirable fish in the sea.
To many white men who date black women, women like me are a little too white.
We’re great for pulling up with at parties and talking to until the wee hours but as a fleeting fancy once told me: White men want their black women ‘black’.
They want them with ‘political hair’, ostensibly insatiable pussies and with just enough Africa in their accent to remind the rabble that they’re profoundly progressive.
Then, of course, there’s the sex. And the hypersexualisation that precedes it.
Reduced to forbidden fruit, blowjob lips, bouncy buttocks and thick thighs in film, literature and life, many black women are approached by white men with largely erotic expectation who will generally skip what appears to be an open mind above closed legs.
After all, what’s the point of dating a black woman if you can’t talk about her stereotype-supporting abandon in bed? If you can’t salaciously suggest that she’s a lady in the streets but a freak in the sheets to all your high-fiving friends who know her kinky hair mirroring kinky ways will never meet your mother?
To plenty of black men, black women like me are whole other bag of bad news.
Many have grown up in households were men rule the roost and women work at cooking, cleaning or killing time at a job that pays just enough for them to remain compliant.
So black women like me – black women with our own money, our mouths and our minds – we’re erudite abominations. We’re traitors of tradition and pariahs of our place which is no further than somewhere far below a man by the simple virtue of him being one.
Lucky for them, there are black women in abundance.
Women who like being kept in clothing and under the thumb and these women will do until they don’t. Until they demand one too many weaves and shopping sprees, the feeling of being used becomes mutual and jaded black men dismiss assorted black women as being gold-diggers by nature, if not harpies and whores.
The irony is that while they complain, cuss and call us all names, most black men would never date black women like me.
Not when we’re unperturbed by the threat of unpaid bills and unkempt weaves so we’ll be swift to leave liars, beaters or cheats.
When we don’t sleep around and they can’t call us sluts because the pot is only as free as the kettle.
When we maintain ourselves just as highly as we please and speak up and out about double standards, patriarchy and the misogyny inherent in ‘our place’.
When they insist that we deserve better, swear they’re unworthy and they can never see their way to stepping up to the challenge.
When we’re not angry, slutty or anything else allegedly innate in being female and black and walk a strange and steadfast line as neither Sapphire nor Jezebel.
Though they’re quick to lament black women’s so-called superficiality and lack of intellect, most black men would never date black women like me.
Not when we can hold our own in all kinds of conversation as we jump through educational and professional hoops to get beyond our caricatures and our kin.
Not when we aren’t impressed by a string of baby mamas waiting in the wings with children who will only half know their grudging fathers balanced precariously on their infuriated hips.
Not when everything we’ve worked hard at is seen as a minus on some lazy list because most middle-class black men would rather be a part of something limping and loose than take a chance at dating an equal who is willing and able to share their bills, their lives, their torments and their triumphs.
Not when most black men would rather ignore successful black women entirely than be bothered to take an interest in a black damsel who is not in distress.
When, much like them, we want to chase our dreams and pursue our talents as far and as wide as they may take us because we’ve been given an opportunity denied to an African many.
When we’re a little occupied and exhausted because every day is a clash; a fight fraught with defying stereotypes and making the world more accepting of ambitious black women through sheer necessity and precedent. Though, the reward is as pyrrhic as: you’re too good, you’re too talented, walk alone.
Not when they assume our Western-style accomplishments dictate that we don’t date black men but the reality is no man has ever actually asked.
At least not me.
Except one.
Aptly, a man named Courage. A local comedian who grins at me from the stage at a Valentine’s Day-themed comedy show at Jojo’s Music and Arts Café and doesn’t invite me out but asks:
“Martha, why are you still single?”
It’s a good question and just facetious enough to make everybody laugh.
They do.
And I don’t blame them.
On paper, I’m “a catch“.
But my love life’s a joke.
Martha Mukaiwa is a freelance arts, entertainment and travel writer as well as a weekly columnist living in Windhoek, Namibia in-between short, spirited sojourns in South East Asia. She is an avid coffee drinker, spring cleaner and cinephile with a love for all things hobo and happening. Follow her on Twitter: @marth__vader
President Robert Mugabe cuts his birthday cake with his wife Grace Mugabe and his children during a 21st February Movement celebrations rally held in honour of his 89th birthday at Chipadze stadium in Bindura on March 2 2013. (Pic: AFP)
Zimbabwe’s main opposition party on Wednesday denounced as “obscene” a planned bash to celebrate President Robert Mugabe’s 91st birthday at a time the economy is on a downturn.
Mugabe turns 91 on Saturday and each year his Zanu-PF party lays on a lavish party using funds raised through public donations.
This year a belated feast is set for February 28 at a hotel in the prime resort town of Victoria Falls where guests will be served with game meat donated by a local farmer.
But the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), the country’s main opposition, wants the funds raised for the party to be used instead to fix infrastructure such as hospitals.
“All the money that has been collected to bankroll this obscene jamboree should be immediately channeled towards rehabilitating the collapsed public hospitals, clinics and rural schools in Matabeleland North province,” Obert Gutu, spokesperson for the MDC party said in a statement.
Victoria Falls is in Matabeleland North province where public facilities such as clinics and roads are in a state of disrepair for lack of funds – as elsewhere in rural Zimbabwe.
The town is home to one of the world’s largest waterfalls, the Victoria Falls.
Gutu also suggested that food donated for the birthday be “handed over” to charities for the disabled and to orphanages.
A businessman in Victoria Falls last week reportedly offered two elephants, two buffalos, two sable antelopes and five impala to be slaughtered for Mugabe’s birthday party.
The businessman was reported by the state-owned Chronicle daily newspaper as saying the donation was “our way of supporting the function and to ensure a celebratory mood in our community as well.”
An all-night music concert in Harare this Friday will preface the celebrations which in the past have included a fashion show and a football match.
Africa’s oldest ruler Mugabe has been in power since 1980.
Kazungu Kassim (R), head of a Burundi albino association, listens to proceedings inside a courtroom in Ruyigi, eastern Burundi on May 28 2009. Prosecutors in Burundi asked for life sentences for three people on trial for allegedly murdering albinos to sell their body parts for use in witchcraft. (Pic: Reuters)
The mutilated body of an albino toddler has been found in Tanzania with his limbs hacked off, the latest such killing for body parts for witchcraft, the police said on Wednesday.
The United Nations condemned the attack, warning that with general elections looming – when people may turn to witchcraft to boost political campaigns – albinos in Tanzania were facing a “dangerous year.”
The one-year old boy, Yohana Bahati, was seized by men with machetes from his home in northern Tanzania’s Chato district overnight on Saturday, with police finding the body on Tuesday afternoon in a forest area close to his home.
“His arms and legs were hacked off,” regional police chief Joseph Konyo said.
The baby’s mother Ester Jonas, aged 30, is in a serious state in hospital with machete cuts to her face and arms after she tried to protect her baby.
The killing follows the kidnapping in December of a four-year-old albino girl also in northern Tanzania. Multiple arrests were made but the child has not been found.
UN country chief Alvaro Rodriguez said he was “deeply concerned by the abductions of these two young children,” saying that at least 74 albinos have been murdered in the east African country since 2000.
The UN repeated its fears that attacks against albinos could be linked to looming general and presidential elections in October 2015, leading political campaigners to turn to influential sorcerers for help.
“These attacks are accompanied by a high degree of impunity, and while Tanzania has made efforts to combat the problem, much more must be done to put an end to these heinous crimes and to protect this vulnerable segment of the population,” he added.
“This is the year of elections in Tanzania and, as some analysts have suggested, it could be a dangerous year for people living with albinism.”
Albino body parts sell for around $600 in Tanzania, with an entire corpse fetching $75 000, according to the UN.
Albinism is a hereditary genetic condition which causes a total absence of pigmentation in the skin, hair and eyes. It affects one Tanzanian in 1 400, often as a result of inbreeding, experts say. In the West, it affects just one person in 20 000.
The child’s father, who was nearby during the attack, is being questioned by police.
You either love sci-fi movies or you hate them – but a sci-fi love story based in Ethiopia? That’s sure to pique everyone’s curiosity.
Directed by Miguel Llansó, Crumbs is a a Spanish-Ethiopian co-production that premiered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam in January.
From Indie Wire: “Crumbs tells the story of diminutive superhero Gagano (played by Daniel Tadesse), a junk collector, who embarks on a ‘surreal epic journey’ that’s set against ‘post-apocalyptic Ethiopian landscapes’. He’s had enough of collecting ‘valuable crumbs of a decayed civilisation’, when a spaceship that has been hovering high in the sky for years, starts showing signs of activity, and Gagano has to overcome his fears – which includes a witch, Santa Claus and second-generation Nazis – to find out that the world isn’t quite what he thought it was.”
