By Jane Fields
The World Cup may have pushed up sales of vuvuzelas, T-shirts and footballs in South Africa, but in neighbouring Zimbabwe there are fears the tournament has spawned a much more grisly market in human heads. Residents of Bulawayo say an increasing number of children have been abducted since the tournament started in early June.
Locals fear that syndicates operating in Matabeleland and across the border have upped their demand for human heads, which are used in some African rituals. State ZBC radio reported that a man had been arrested at the Plumtree border post carrying cooler boxes “stashed full of human heads”.
The suspect was not named and the report gave no further details. But it will fuel mounting hysteria in Zimbabwe over child disappearances. Angry residents of Bulawayo’s Magwegwe township on Friday surrounded a police station where a 21-year-old man who had been found hiding a child’s head in a bag was being held.
The head turned out to be that of the man’s one-year-old nephew: apparently the man had tried to kill his grandfather first, but the elderly man locked himself away. The residents “wanted to know which syndicate was paying him for the head”, said rights activist Magodonga Mahlangu in a telephone interview.
“People are really scared,” she added. Police had to fire shots in the air to disperse the crowds. One Bulawayo school has asked parents to accompany young pupils to and from school. There are various theories about what the heads are used for: some locals maintain that if a human head is thrown into the sea and eaten by a shark, the shark will regurgitate gold.
Others say businessmen want the heads to bait whales who then ‘cough up’ rare minerals. The Scotsman
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