Journalist's dog finds headless corpse.

This morning a rival newspaper completely outdid the daily paper I work for with a cracker of a lead!

I have never seen anything like it. Seriously.

Last week I thought we were running with a bizarre story when my Durban colleagues gave us the story about the former Blue Bulls rugby player who went running around with an axe and killed three people, actually decapitating one of them.

It all quietened down after the guy was arrested and the courts sent him for mental observation.

But now this morning another paper came up with a brilliant new development in the story. The Citizen's investigative reporter, who is apparently based in Durban, decided to take his dog Earl for a walk in the area where the Blue Bulls guy was staying during the time he alegedly took to running around with an axe.

And get this - the dog found a fourth body lying in the bushes. Minus a head.

The headline: "Earl solves a murder mystery". I swear

Talk about pro-active journalism.

Eeeew!

Safe like chickens on any Given day.

Back at work after a public holiday, smack bang into the first deadline for the afternoon paper and decisions, decisions...

What do we lead with? The latest on Libya? Japan? The hit on dodgy underworld boss Cyril Beeka?

Hmmmm.....

So Libya it was.

And just when that edition is done and dusted, time to think of what to go with for the evening edition. And of course there was lots to choose from. A train derailed in Germiston. A guy walked into the Eldorado police station and shot a cop in his office. And some armed gang robbed an Engen garage in the south just as the cash-in-transit van arrived to fill up the ATM after the long weekend, sparking a shootout.

Decision time:

 

Meanwhile back in the strange province of Limpopo, a man named Given Baloyi who earns his living by keeping chickens safe for R90 a month caught a python trying to prey on his feathered friends. So he killed it. And is now making a ... erm ... killing selling it off in bits.

“So far the intestines have already been booked for R300. I will charge anyone R150 for the skin and R20 per centimetre for the meat,” he told the rural news wire service in the area.

Plus he upped his chicken security fee with a bit of danger pay and now charges R100 a month. All the vendors who use him were so happy they gave him a R7 bonus.

 

Happy days!

The snail, the magical penis and six donkeys.

So while racism accusations, Joburg's billing crisis, the petrol price and tollgates have pretty much been the focus of news reports of late, weirdness has still been happening all the time in Mpumalanga province.

At the Tonga Magistrate's court a group of 12 people - nine men and three women - were released on bail. They apparently killed their pastor.

So why does a mob kill a man of the cloth? It seems the late Albert Malwane, pastor of the Izwi Zion Christian Church was accused of using a magical penis to sleep with women. The details of this incredible situation are not clear - and trust me, I tried to find out. All I know is that he was also something of a Dr Doolittle, because he was said to have been able to talk to the animals. Anyway his actions so enraged his local community that a bunch of people dragged him out of his house to a hill where they burnt him to death. And then they went back and burnt his house down.

Then the angry mob went after Pastor Malwane's wife. She had apparently been terrorising the community by - get this, I'm not making it up - turning herself into a snail. No, she did not transform herself into a puff adder, a scorpion or a man-eating lion. A snail! It must have been one freaky scary snail because they wanted to kill her too. As people do to you in Mpumalanga when you do such stuff. Apparently.

So the whole crowd has been sent home on bail of R1000 each and will go on trial next month. I wonder what the minimum sentence is for burning your pastor to death in that province.

And then this morning a bus crashed. Into six donkeys. The pictures we were sent are disgusting - donkey bits all over the road and some large dents in the bus. I am sure they will make page one of the Daily Sun tomorrow.

It's a tokolosh thing!

 

Big news in today is that some members of the Pietermaritzburg community handed in a public petition to the local court claiming that an accused in a murder case uses tokoloshes to steal court documents, and they believe justice won't be done in his case as a result.

Yes, indeed this is true.

The accused is a wealthy traditional healer or witch doctor who apparently told a local guy to behead some other guy and then keep his head in the freezer if he wanted to become rich.

So the co-accused in this case allegedly went off and beheaded an 18-year-old and stored the head, with a snake wrapped around it, in his girlfriend's freezer.

It's not clear whether he became rich by doing this, but he did indeed get himself arrested along with the sangoma.

And now the local community is really uptight about it and set the girlfriend's house on fire and expressed their concern about tokoloshe's being used to steal the docket.

All true.

I swear.

 

Prayers for Christchurch

Some days I find it really hard to do my job and remained completely removed from the news events and stories I have to work with. Especially now that I am based on the news desk full time and don't get to run around on crime scenes and things like that.

But this morning when I arrived at work at 6am I was hit by what has been described as New Zealand's darkest day - the quake in Christchurch. It was four hours after it hit.

I recently reconnected with an old friend from primary school days who is now living in New Zealand. I remembered him telling me all about the shocks and after shocks of the quake that hit in September. So I quickly logged on to check his details again and felt sick when I saw his hometown was listed as Christchurch. I mailed him immediately and have heard nothing back.

Then the pictures started coming in.

And the stories. News updates. And then the personal accounts.

They were hard not to read. I went through one of a woman who described how she had said cuddled her little girl the night before and taken her to play school that morning. Then quake had hit at 1pm their time. She survived the wobbling of the building in which she worked. She listened to the news and almost passed out when she heard that the building in which her daughter's day care was based was among those that had fallen.

Hours later she still knew nothing.

I cannot imagine her agony...

May God be with them!

Gone in 60 seconds. For real. Apparently.

So it seems that Mpumalanga is once again proving my theory that it is a very strange province that seems to be the chosen spot for all manner of weirdo events that would make for a Tarantino-type movie or a Stephen King book.

Like today - a story from a little news agency down that end of the world was dubbed "Gone in 60 seconds". So in Joburg one could assume it was a non-creative heading for stylish car theft racket - you know, like the movie about a master car thief (Nicolas Cage, that creepy looking guy who looks like he'd be at home in Mpumalanga). But no - not in this case.

The thing that disappeared was a brick house. Apparently. Swallowed up by the ground. Seriously. They even sent a picture:

So this was a house built by a guy called Joseph, and which disappeared into the ground four months later. In the Mbongozi section of a place called Driekoppies.

Obviously not deterred by this incident, he and his wife simply went across the yard and built themselves another one-roomed house. As one does in Mpumalanga when the ground swallows up one's first home without so much as a burp or a "thank you very much, that was delicious" .

And now look what's happening to Joseph's second house. I submit:

 

Joseph's neighbour Dumisa is now afraid that his house will be next.

“I wake up during the night to check if my house is not moving downwards yet. What happened to our neighbour is a nightmare that thankfully happened without anyone getting hurt," he is quoted as having said.

His observation was that the soil in the area was turning upside down every five hours, with the top layer swallowed into the ground. Sticks and stones thrown onto it just disappear. Chomped up by the hungry ground.

The geology expert from the University of Pretoria who was consulted concluded that the area was "unsuitable for residential occupation".

You think??

Jeez!

Ama false teeth going cheap cheap!

Manic day.

Not only did I man the newsdesk this morning, but I also wrote a story.

Emma - the plucky 15-year-old left paralysed after hitting her head while diving into her pool at home - died this morning.

It was a story I covered when the accident happened, and now sadly - a day short of five months later - at the end of Emma's life.

Her tearful mom told me how Emma hadn't wanted to go to sleep last night and kept calling her mom and sister into her room for chats. She became increasingly distressed about pain in her shoulder, eventually stopped speaking at 1am and then 30 minutes later passed away in her mom's arms.

Sooooo sad.

Then just before I was ready to leave for home we received a tip-off.

Apparently some entrepreneurs in downtown Jozi have taken to ...erm ... recycling disused dentures. The teeth are collected from funeral undertakers al around and flogged off at R20 a pair.

I can just imagine buyers picking up a pair, trying them on, spitting them out and trying another before they find a near-perfect fit. Eeeew!

We were given an exact address where the vendor is punting the second hand munchers. But it turned out not to be so.

But somebody is definitely doing it somewhere.

Check out the picture of ama False Teeth: