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SO what happens to us from tomorrow onwards? By “us” I mean everybody! The World Cup finals are over and they have been a thriller, so naturally a huge void has been left and we have nothing to fill it with.
If only they had postponed Wimbledon! It was stupid wasn’t it to stage it in the middle of the most popular sporting event in the world; it became just an event in parenthesis.
Our own Premier Soccer League resumes this week. If I say something about it in comparison with the just-ended jamboree, Zimbabweans will accuse me of self-hate! Out go Spain and the Netherlands, in come Lengthens and Kiglon!
But there will be plenty to talk about as the drama of the past month transforms into just memories. The juiciest story will obviously be about Paul the “psychic” octopus which people in more than one country will wish to stew, the Germans particularly.
The Argentines have already come up with a recipe for it. Only the Spaniards love it. Their SPCA is trying to have it brought to Madrid for safekeeping because “they fear the real possibility of it coming to some harm in Germany”.
But did you also hear about the Burmese rock python rescued in Cape Town? It was being used to influence match outcomes. Its owner must have made a killing from gullible gamblers. He is said to have been paid by soccer fans to chant a few spells for their team.
But there was something intriguing about how the stories of the two creatures were reported and treated! The python was described as the “spell-casting” snake while the octopus was dubbed as “psychic”.
If there is anything that has cast a spell on the world, then it’s Paul. The octopus has made world headlines; everyone is talking about it in pubs and anywhere else people gather. It must also have made a huge dent in the gambling world. More people now obviously trust its divination way ahead of the odds given by bookmakers. Bookmakers must hate it!
The handler of the python was said to be a sangoma defined in the Western media as “a practitioner of herbal medicine, divination and counselling based on ancestral spirits”.
On the other hand the handlers of the octopus are not referred to as sangomas; they are called keepers of the aquarium. No one has hazarded a guess as to where the octopus gets its psychic powers, the implication being that it’s definitely not from ancestral spirits!
No one, particularly in the West, wants to acknowledge that sangomas in Africa are psychics and psychics in the West are sangomas. Am I seeing stereotyping where it isn’t?
A psychic according to an online encyclopaedia is a person who professes an ability to perceive information hidden from the normal senses through extrasensory perception (ESP), or is said by others to have such abilities.
In the West a large industry exists whereby psychics provide advice and counsel to clients but critics attribute psychic powers to intentional trickery or self-delusion.
But that’s exactly what a sangoma is; only he calls his ESP ancestral spirits!
There is also a huge industry in Africa where sangomas provide advice and counsel.
Unfortunately the snake was found in a poor state in a shack in a township where people visited the traditional doctor for consultations. When the python, called 2010, was found, she had pneumonia, mouth-rot and was underweight and dehydrated. Poor thing! Now it has been put on a vegetarian diet. I wonder why!
Specialists say like all snakes, Burmese pythons are carnivorous. Their diet consists primarily of appropriately-sized birds and animals. They are often found near human habitation due to the presence of rats, mice and other vermin as a food source. However, their equal affinity for domesticated birds and mammals means that they are often treated as pests. In captivity their diet consists primarily of commercially-available, appropriately-sized rats, and graduates to larger items such as rabbits and poultry as they grow. Exceptionally large pythons may even require larger food items such as pigs or goats, and are known to have attacked alligators in Florida, USA, where they are an invasive species.
Besides large snakes and octopi people will have plenty to talk about post-World Cup. They will talk about the poor showing of the African teams and wish the “hand of the devil” had not denied Ghana entry to the next stage. That incident must have been the ugliest of the whole tournament. I am not saying this because of some xenophobic or patriotic inclination in me but anything that turns a villain into a hero, vice versa must be wrong.
The Uruguay player, Luis Suarez, deliberately used his hand to stop a clearly goal-bound ball but in the same stroke made himself a hero back in his country because his team won the subsequent penalty shootout. Then Asamoah Gyan the hero of the Ghana squad immediately became the greatest non-hero when he missed the penalty. That cannot be fair or funny!
There will be plenty of great goals to talk about! South Africa’s Simphiwe Tshabalala’s great goal in the opener against Mexico set the tone. Many South Africans, obviously out of patriotism, began to talk about it as the goal of the tournament. It proved too early!
Brazilian Maicon’s goal against South Korea however must take the cake. Hit when it was just about to cross the line it curved like a parabola into the back of the net. The South Korean goalkeeper never knew what hit him.
But the goal no one is talking about must be the one by Spain’s David Villa against Paraguay which will take a top physicist to explain. The striker unleashed a screamer that hit the right upright and flew directly along the goal line to hit the left upright before hitting the nets! Newton’s laws of motion cannot explain that.
Of course in the next World Cup referees will be assisted by technology. It’s high time, given the glaring mistakes the referees made.
BY NEVANJI MADANHIRE
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