snatched by baboons

Saturday's state funeral had tongues wagging in Zimbabwe. In the middle of a power-sharing crisis, Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai chose not to attend. It was hardly surprising: President Robert Mugabe used his graveside oration to blast Tsvangirai as he used to at almost all state funerals before the unity government was formed. State reporters were sent Tsvangirai-sniffing and found him playing golf at Ruwa Country Club. "PM plays golf as nation mourns," read the headline on the official Sunday Mail.

The man being buried was a little-known senator, Misheck Chando. He was a member of ZANU-PF, of course: one of the MDC's gripes is that the national burial ground is now nothing more than a graveyard for ZANY-PF. He was killed -- wouldn't you know it -- in a car crash. It turns out Chando very nearly didn't make it to national hero status and not for the normal reasons (wrong party): in 1944, at the age of three, he was abducted by baboons. His parents were working in their fields in Murehwa. The toddler was set on the ground. A troop of baboons dashed out from the bush and snatched the child. The parents were too far away to save him, although they tried. Villagers mounted search parties in the nearby mountains. They searched for four days. At one point, they found a child's footsteps next to the tracks of adult baboons. Eventually, they conceded defeat and arranged a funeral at the family homestead. It wasn't until the fifth day since the boy had gone missing that a villagers out looking for firewood came upon the child, calmly seated in the middle of a circle of baboons. The man managed to scare the animals away and rescue the child. Village elders had to "erase" the funeral by throwing sorghum into a fire and celebrations were held instead.

To this day, no-one really knows what the boy Chando ate for five days or how he survived.