Give back Zimbabwe’s bird!

01 April 2016 at 07:47am

By: Shannon Ebrahim

Zimbabwe needs all the help it can get, so if it believes a mythical sculpture can bring fortune, we should return it, writes Shannon Ebrahim.

Julius Malema, I have a new slogan for you: Give Back the Bird! Many Zimbabweans believe that their country will never experience good fortune or return to its former glory until its eight mythical soapstone birds are reunited.

There has never been a time when Zimbabwe was in greater need of good fortune.

The country was just listed as the poorest country in Africa with a per capita income of $200 (R2 965), compared to that of Mauritius, which is $21 700, according to the Africa 2016 Wealth Report released this week. This is the country of the Great Zimbabwe ruins - a testament to Zimbabwe’s ancient African civilisation and culture. This is also the country that once was the bread basket of the southern African region.

Zimbabwe is in possession of only seven of its eight birds, which were found in the ancient ruins of its lost city that dates back to the 11th century. The eighth bird sits in Cecil Rhodes’s bedroom in Groote Schuur, which is now a museum on the presidential estate in Cape Town. Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe had called Rhodes’s possession of the bird “ruthless cultural plunder”.

Mugabe hailed the return of a fragment of the seventh bird in 2003 from a German museum, and promised to speak to then-president Thabo Mbeki about returning the eighth bird so that all Zimbabwe’s precious birds could be reunited.

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Woman Dies of Trauma from ‘Bird Debt Collector’

A Robert Sinyoka woman who was experiencing sleepless nights after a grey bird was sent from Tamandayi to demand payment of a debt she failed to pay as per stipulated time has died.

Theresa Mguni 38, who was a cross border trader and operator of five flea market bays in and around Bulawayo, died at her rural home after a struggle with trauma from a bird that kept her on her toes day and night.

Pastor Solomon Ncube of Christ for All Ministries told ZimEye.com that they tried to assist Theresa but she did not commit herself to God opting to go to fake prophets who told her confusing and conflicting advice that haunted and caused her death.

Mguni met her fate after she travelled to South Africa last year to buy stock for her business, and this led to the beginning of the troubles that have been triggering shivers in her spine countless times.

According to her elder Sister Thembekile, the Cross-border trader died last week and was buried in the same village. “We are still worried if this war is over, as we do not know what to do if the saga continues,” she told ZimEye.com off the camera.

Theresa was from SA to buy goods, when she stole bags which were packed with material for sale from across the border and sold the order before a dream came to her ordering her to return what “she stole”.

The late Mguni told ZimEye.com before her death that, the dream kept coming until she sought divine intervention from prophets who warned her to look for the owner of the goods she had embezzled previously.

“I went back to Beit- Bridge and tried to look for the owners but that was to take me to another journey into the deep jungle in search of the owners of the goods I took. I am regretting the day I picked up what did not belong to me,” said Mguni in our previous interview.

She also told ZimEye.com that she went to a village where she was directed by prophets and came across an old man in his 70s. She was told by the old man that he was waiting for her arrival weeks ago to return the stolen goods.

She was ordered to enter into a mutual agreement of paying the said amount which was calculated to $800 and she agreed.

According to Mguni before her death, sekuru gave her a small root that she said ‘I must take to SA and do another order and that the orders will double the charge he demanded’. The goods that Mguni took were also valued at $400 and she was to repay her debts money and also another $400 to sekuru.

Mguni went to SA and did what she was told to do and the deal went well, that she managed to acquire $1600, which she squandered and delayed to return to sekuru with the payment for both her victims and the old man.

A few days after she squandered the cash, in the morning when she was taking a bath, a bird arrived from nowhere and greeted her in the bathroom and it introduced itself as sekuru Nyandima.

Asked to shed more light about the bird, she told ZimEye.com that the bird was still coming every time she is at her lodgings, a situation that fueled her death, before settling the debt.

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Return of the bird king —Mehboob Qadir

Musharraf seems to have missed the basic lesson that humility and benevolence are the first steps in public service and not boastfulness and spite

Somewhere in the childhood books one had read the story of the infamous bird king who had brought about untold misery to his subjects just because he could not see beyond his own beak and because he had grown fond of his own plumage. More than that, he was not prepared to listen to sane advice or straight talk as he became too full of himself, and like his plumage, he was overstuffed with the mistaken notion of self-importance, and thus of his self-assigned indispensability for his kingdom of feathers and twigs. What he also failed to realise was that the kingdom he had acquired was not genuinely his and that he became the bird king by chance and collusion, not through due process.

As the story goes, there was a bird kingdom without a king who had been shot out of the skies by a reckless poacher some time ago. Quite disrespectfully, the town taxidermist still had its preserved body placed in his shop window. The bird assembly had been looking for a suitable candidate when one fine morning they spotted a big grey bird with an impressive gaze and regal plumage perched on a branch of a pine tree in the city’s central park. It looked majestic in appearance surveying the panorama in a dignified silence. The bird assembly went into session and elected the great grey bird as their king. 

Read on:

http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2013%5C04%5C24%5Cstory_24-4-2013_pg3_5