Sperm Hunters

Zimbabwe 'sperm hunters' picking up male travellers

Gangs of women in Zimbabwe have been picking up male travellers to have sexual intercourse and harvest their sperm, according to reports.

TELEGRAPH

Sisters Sophie Nhokwara (26), Netsai Nho...Sisters Sophie Nhokwara (26), Netsai Nhokwara (24) and Rosemary Chakwizira (28) leave Harare Magistrates court on November 29, 2011 after a pre-trial hearing for attacking male hitchhikers to collect semen for rituals. The women allegedly used different cars to pick up 14 other men and forced themselves on them. They were arrested early in October when they were involved in a car accident, and police found 31 used condoms in the boot of their car. Photo: GETTY

11:37AM GMT 22 Mar 2012

Susan Dhliwayo claims she pulled her car over recently to pick up a group of male hitchhikers and they refused to get in, because they feared they were going to be raped.

"Now, men fear women. They said: 'we can't go with you because we don't trust you'," 19-year-old Miss Dhliwayo recounted.

Local media have reported victims of the highway prowlers being drugged, subdued at gun or knife point – even with a live snake in one case – given a sexual stimulant and forced into repeated sex before being dumped on the roadside.

The sperm hunters first surfaced in the local press in 2009 but police have only arrested three women, found with a plastic bag of 31 used condoms in October. The attacks have continued since they were nabbed for allegedly violating 17 men.

"We do not have the exact number of confirmed cases," said national police spokesman Wayne Bvudzijena.

"These cases occurred mostly when the victims were hitchhiking and boarded private vehicles. We encourage people to use public transport."

The sperm's exact use is not clear but is thought to be intended for "juju" or traditional rituals to bring luck – anything from enhancing good fortune, boosting business or preventing a criminal from being detected.

It is also not known why the semen is taken forcibly from strangers.

"It's really an issue which is mind boggling," said University of Zimbabwe sociologist Watch Ruparanganda, who believes it is a lucrative business. "It's quite a big mystery. Obviously we know (it is) being used for rituals."

Ruparanganda said he was astonished to discover seven years ago that semen appeared to have become a tradable commodity, while doing research for his doctoral thesis among Harare street youth who told him that businessmen would take them to hotels, give them new clothes and ply them with booze.

They were then told to pick a prostitute and to hand over the used condom after sex.

"It just shows there's some big racket somewhere, some big guys driving everything, but they are in the background and using these ladies," said Ruparanganda.

The Zimbabwe National Traditional Healers Association criticised the practice.

"We believe that this is a form of witchcraft. So we are totally against the idea," said spokesman George Kandiyero.

"It has really frightened people," he said. "It has really brought in a bit of shock because normally it was the other way round, normally we know of men raping women, not women raping men."

A Zimbabwean women's rights group has criticised the spotlight shifting to male rape victims, and paid for a newspaper advert to deplore that violence against women in the country is not met with the same degree of shock.

The three women linked to the case, meanwhile, have stirred much attention and public anger. Audiences pack into the dreary courtrooms each time they appear in the dock, and one of their lawyers said they have received death threats.

No law in Zimbabwe criminalises rape by women so the trio, arrested with one man, face 17 counts of aggravated indecent assault, though no trial date has as yet been set.

Dumisani Mthombeni, a lawyer for two of the women and the man, complained that five months after their arrest, prosecutors have yet to produce DNA test results, a charge sheet or witness statements but nonetheless have "paraded (the women) on national television as female rapists".

"We have not been given anything – nothing," Mthombeni said. "We believe they don't want us to go to trial because they arrested the wrong people."

The case has triggered a mix of shock, intrigue and humour – such as one newspaper cartoon showing a nude hitchhiker hoping to be picked up by a female driver – but also fear among some men.

"Of course we are scared," said a 26-year-old hitchhiker on a highway south of Harare, adding he would not get into a car driven by a woman.

"Even if she's old, we can't."

Source: AFP

Too Bad for Zimbabwe that Robert Mugabe is not White.

If he were, he would be long gone. In America and much of the world there are two intellectual and behavioral standards, those acceptable and demanded of whites and the No-Go areas reserved for blacks.

Americans are scared pale of any critical analysis of anything Afro-American.

The double standards are staggering and anyone who dares to call attention to their racial piousness is branded (of course) a "racist". The examples are legion. Picture media reaction to a White Congressional Caucus or John McCain if he attended a militant Caucasian-centric church for twenty years.

The recent video posts of black students trashing an Asian owned convenience store is a daily reminder of the hypocrisy of the press and and the timid denial of Americans to a deep enduring social problem. Had those students been white and the owners black, Al Sharpton would be pitchin a bitch and the MSM would be homin in.

Hate is hate and racism is racism. Zimbabwe is a victim of the racist murderer Robert Mugabe. The whites are dead or gone but Mugabe's old habits developed against them exist.

__________________

African leaders stay silent on Mugabe
By Anne Penketh, Diplomatic Editor Independent
Tuesday, 1 July 2008

Africa's leaders have failed publicly to condemn Robert Mugabe for stealing Zimbabwe's presidential election by proceeding with a run-off vote in which he was sole candidate at the height of an officially orchestrated intimidation campaign.

At a summit of the 53 member states of the African Union – in which stable democracies remain a minority – Mr Mugabe was praised as a "hero" by the veteran President of Gabon, Omar Bongo.

Although he was not addressed as "Mr President" by fellow summiteers gathered in the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, the embattled Zimbabwean leader was comforted by speeches in which few spoke out about the political violence in his country. His most vocal opponent, President Levy Patrick Mwanawasa of Zambia, suffered a stroke and was rushed to hospital on the eve of the summit.

The summit host, President Hosni Mubarak, did not mention the Zimbabwe crisis directly in his opening speech. Raila Odinga, the Prime Minister of Kenya, was a lone voice sniping from the sidelines in Nairobi where he called for Zimbabwe to be suspended from the AU until "free and fair" elections can be held.

Conference sources said that while African leaders were more outspoken in private meetings, they declined to criticise Mr Mugabe in public. President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda was said to have been "particularly unhelpful".

The summit is expected to wind up today with a call for dialogue between Mr Mugabe and the opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai, who has urged the AU to deny the Zimbabwean President the legitimacy he craves. The dialogue is intended to produce a government of national unity or a transition to fresh elections.

The US and the EU have branded the election a "sham". Britain fears that Mr Mugabe will control the transitional arrangements unless they are conducted under the supervision of Mr Tsvangirai, who came ahead of the 84-year-old President in the first round of voting on 29 March. Lord Malloch Brown, the Foreign Office minister for Africa, came away disappointed with his talks in Sharm el-Sheikh, after the UN deputy secretary general, Asha-Rose Migiro, warned the AU that it faced a "moment of truth".

Wishing you were here. American forces needed in Africa.

The Left simply went orgasmic when western sanctions toppled Ian Smith and the white settlers that ran Rhodesia. For over thirty years they have been making excuses for African incompetence, blaming the residual white legacy, but slowly and inexorably the all new wonderful Zimbabwe rotted into just another African cesspool. Whites were killed and property expropriated by the use of a new and pure and excusable black thuggery.

Now, even the most ardent liberals are having doubts, and they should. It will not be too long before South Africa will follow the trek to the sewer.

If you thought the call for American intervention has past the scene, well you were wrong.

Will America deliver the final shove that topples Mugabe?

By Con Coughlin The Telegraph
Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 23/03/2007

When Steve Biko, the charismatic South African Black Consciousness leader, died naked and manacled in a fetid prison cell in Pretoria in 1977, his brutal demise ultimately sounded the knell for apartheid.

Those countries, such as Britain and America, that had continued to maintain relations with the South African regime realised that the Vorster government had gone too far; David Owen, the then Labour foreign secretary, led the chorus of international protests, attending a memorial service held in Biko's honour in London, and making Britain's distaste for Biko's death at the hands of the security forces publicly known.

The resulting international isolation of South Africa as a consequence of that single incident led to the collapse of apartheid a decade later and the takeover of the country by Nelson Mandela's ANC.

There is an important parallel to be drawn between the impact Biko's death had on South Africa, and the implications of the brutal treatment recently meted out to Zimbabwe's opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai. Just as Biko's death led to the collapse of apartheid, the latest abuse of power by Zimbabwe's equally malevolent security forces may prove to be a similar tipping point in the removal of Robert Mugabe's dictatorship.

Tsvangirai, the leader of the Movement for Democratic Change, appears to have survived the violent assault he suffered at Harare's central police station following his detention for participating in an anti-government protest. Like Biko, Tsvangira suffered severe head injuries - a fractured skull. Unlike Biko, who was left naked and chained to a grille on the prison cell floor, the prompt intervention of Tsvangirai's lawyers meant he received emergency hospital treatment.

Even so, the damage inflicted on Chairman Bob's Marxist dictatorship by this single act of state brutality may well prove decisive. For the 27 years that he has presided over the slow ruination of his country, Mugabe has managed to cling to office despite being responsible for some of the worst outrages seen in the recent history of that benighted continent. He escaped any meaningful censure when he launched his genocidal campaign against Joshua Nkomo's Ndebele tribe in the late 1980s, when his North Korean-trained troops massacred upwards of 20,000 innocent civilians in Matabeleland.

Not even the racist campaign that Mugabe launched to evict thousands of white farmers from land that their families had owned and farmed for generations succeeded in mobilising international opinion. Zimbabwe was finally expelled from the Commonwealth in 2003, but only after years of wrangling in which the majority of the member states argued that Mugabe's misdemeanours did not merit punitive action. It is only now that people are seriously questioning Mugabe's ability to cling on to office.

The most trenchant criticism of his latest excess has come from America, which in itself is surprising, given that Africa's unpleasant little local difficulties have been low down the pecking order of Washington's priorities. But now the Bush Administration seems determined to apply as much pressure as possible against Mugabe, in the hope that it can succeed in achieving its ultimate goal of effecting regime change in Harare.

This would explain the strength of the comments on the current crisis made this week by Christopher Dell, Washington's ambassador to Zimbabwe, who has been a thorn in the side of the government with his criticism of Mugabe's almost wilful destruction of what was once one of Africa's most thriving economies, and the ageing dictator's total disregard for the rule of law.

Zimbabweans were "losing their fear", said Mr Dell, and there were signs of mounting discontent within the ruling Zanu-PF party at the country's increasingly parlous economic plight - inflation is expected to hit 4,000 per cent by the end of this year. "What I think we have seen in the past week is that people have turned a corner," he said. "They're not afraid any more."

So why is American influence rising in Africa? Partly it is the result of the woeful lack of leadership the British Government has provided in curbing Mugabe's wilder excesses. As the former colonial power and the architect of the 1979 Lancaster House Agreement that gave Zimbabwe independence, Britain is well-placed to take the lead in reminding Mugabe of his obligations both to the people of Zimbabwe and to the outside world.

Even the South Africans, decidedly reticent about openly criticising a former comrade from the liberation struggle, had condemned Mugabe's latest excesses before Tony Blair and Margaret Beckett, his anonymous Foreign Secretary, were moved to do so. South Africa, it seems, has finally woken up to the fact that Mugabe's regime is in danger of spiralling out of control, with the disastrous implications for the wider region. But they, too, have been a great disappointment in dealing with the Zimbabwean crisis.

Pretoria nurtures pretensions of becoming the region's dominant power, but Thabo Mbeki, the South African president, has studiously avoided taking any position that could be deemed hostile to Harare. When the ANC did finally pluck up the courage to speak out, its muted criticism was hardly likely to have Mugabe quaking in his boots. Aziz Pahad, the deputy foreign minister and a veteran of the liberation struggle, simply called on Harare to respect the rule of law and the rights of all political parties. Ouch!

South Africa has badly let down the Bush Administration, which at one point believed Pretoria would be pro-active in resolving the Zimbabwean crisis. President George W. Bush said as much when he invited Mr Mbeki to the White House in 2005 and described him as his "point man" in southern Africa.

But the South Africans have failed to deliver, and with Mugabe threatening to run for another term of office, it falls - once again - on Washington to provide the muscular leadership that is necessary to deal with deranged dictators.