Oh yes, for a change!
Four years might have passed since a Mchinji man, who was accused of having sex with a goat, stunned the Magistrate’s Court when he, in mitigation, asked the presiding judge to exercise leniency on the grounds that he did it with the goat’s ‘consent’ and that he wore a condom.
The story hogged the limelight both on the domestic scene and far beyond the borders that it was even splashed in the Express International tabloid of England as a top bizarre story.
And late last year, faced with a charge of defiling a 12-year-old girl, a 47-year-old man Wilson Nyirenda, left a judge a little out of his breath, when he claimed that he had a sexually-transmitted disease (STD)— gonorrhoea (chinzonono) and in what was his last roll of the dice, asked the court to subject the poor girl to medical check-up, arguing that if she would be diagonised with the STD, then it would indeed prove the prosecution’s case.
That was not all. He further stunned the court by arguing that if he had truly defiled her, she would have been pregnant because he had gone a long time without having sex. Boy, oh boy. Unfortunately, my mother Malawi mostly hogs the limelight because of such negative stories.
However, be as that may, Malawi has fireside tales under the baobab and it was refreshing that for a change, my country basked in the global limelight for good reasons for the past few days after our netball icon Mwawi Kumwenda was voted 2015 International World Games Association (IWGA) Athlete of the Year—the stuff that dreams are made of! It’s not all doom and gloom after all, not so? Eitaa Mwawi! Glory be to God. Uloliwe…uloliwe wayidudula hah!, neng’esiza [The train is pushing].
