Status: Scam
This leaves me at a complete loss for words. It's amazing:
HARARE, Zimbabwe - A bogus traditional healer who persuaded a businesswoman to hire "mermaids" and accommodate them in a Harare hotel to help find a stolen car was convicted of theft by false pretenses, court officials said Tuesday...
In Zimbabwe, where tribal superstition is deeply entrenched, prosecutors said Chizema persuaded Margaret Mapfumo to pay 200 million Zimbabwe dollars (about $30,000) to hire mermaids, feed and accommodate them in a Harare hotel, buy power generators for a floodlit lakeside ceremony and invoke ancestral spirits to find the missing car. Some of the money was to be used to buy a bull whose genitals — described in court as the animal's "strong part" — would point out the car thief, prosecutors said.
All that was needed was the addition of a
penis-melting Zionist robot comb, and it would have been a perfect trifecta of weirdness. (Thanks to Big Gary for the link.)
Comments
Regards, Bryan.
On the third page there's a link to the new one.
Africans I've known do, however, tend to have a different sense of reality than most westerners, so that a claim that mermaids could be persuaded to reveal the location of a stolen car wouldn't be more strange to them than a claim that Jesus or God or St. Anthony could help find something lost would be to many Americans and Europeans, or a belief that an individual has a reasonable chance of getting rich by playing the lottery.
A cult involving a belief in supernatural mermaids is widespread, and growing in popularity, in West Africa, so it's not unlikely that some people in Zimbabwe have also heard of it or even follow it. For you ethnology buffs, this iconography is related both to the old Yoruba sea goddess and to the more modern figure of "Mami Wata," who is just as often associated with rivers and lakes as with the sea.
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.. ok, I guess that just sounded funny because it's one in the morning..
Hmm.. 'Strong Parts'.. sounds like an X-rated version of a popular webtoon character...
"Dear Strong Parts, Where the heck is my car? I've looked everywhere, and still can't find it. Yours with much crap, Bob."
Robin Bobcat, you owe me a new keyboard.
What's more, Zimbabwe is completely landlocked, so I doubt whether mermaids are part of traditional beliefs.
Even if a country is landlocked, it still has water. Zimbabwe has many rivers, including the very large Zambezi river on its northwest border. Plenty of room for mermaids to frolick about.