Zimpapers Logo

The man who was sentenced to eight months in prison for bestiality

Tichaona Zindoga and Petros Zivengwa
If hell has no fury like a woman scorned, according to that hackneyed statement, it should be worse for the Epworth woman whose lover recently decided to have sex with a dog while she waited for him.
ONLY the woman, known as Mai Jenny, who refused to provide her name, is too stupefied to be mad.
Days after 50-year-old Neville Mpofu was caught pants down with a dog, for which he was convicted and sentenced to eight months imprisonment by a Harare Magistrate on Thursday, Mai Jenny is still stupefied.

The magistrate ruled that the manner in which the crime was committed showed that it was premeditated and that Mpofu could have abused the dog before.

What is worse for Mai Jenny is that the story of her lover’s bestiality has become the talk of her neighbourhood in Overspill, Epworth, while she hangs her head in shame.

She is a mother of three and well-known in the area for vending herbal remedies.
Her name is spoken in hushed tones and people point furtively in her direction. The newspapers that reported the case have become collectors’ items.

“This is very embarrassing,” she told The Herald at her modest home in the Overspill section of Epworth.
“l have lost my dignity and people in this neighbourhood run around with newspapers with the story. It now appears as if I am the one who did it,” she said.

Mai Jenny did not follow Mpofu to the police station after he was arrested, neither did she attend the court session. She does not care.
“I don’t want to see him again. It is better for me to stay alone as I did for 10 years after my divorce with my first husband,” she said.

On the day, she had just finished preparing supper when police officers came to her house.
“They asked me whether I was the owner of the dog that they had found being abused and called me to see the perpetrator. It was then that I saw this man and his soiled clothes,” she said. “I was shocked, I didn’t even eat. How could I?”

The seemingly unlucky-in-love Mai Jenny, who divorced her abusive husband 10 years ago, thought she had finally found a husband in Mpofu – a motor mechanic who she said also ran a spare parts shop in Mbare.

They met in a commuter omnibus last year and three months later they were co-habiting at the woman’s place.
Mai Jenny revealed that she would lavish love – and all that goes with it – on the man who would come home sometime in the middle of the night and demand conjugal rights. The night before the incident, said the woman, they were intimate.

“He loves sex too much,” she said. Mpofu’s uncle, Samson Mungweru, who lives in Mbare, is equally disgusted.
“It is painful, I did not expect such a thing and I cannot explain what really transpired on the day for him to do such an embarrassing thing” he said

Mai Jenny now fears she could have been infected with some STIs from the dog, although she was  still to seek medical attention.
She now ponders what to do with the dog, named Spider, a one-and-a-half-year old brown mongrel of indeterminate breed. Mai Jenny pities it more than she is bitter with it for having turned “rival” for Mpofu’s affections.

“Maybe I should kill it,” she suggested, before quickly brushing away the thought.
Bestiality, apart from being illegal in Zimbabwe and just about anywhere else in the world, can be dangerous.

Experts warn that those that practice bestiality risk contracting infections of the generic term zoonosis, which is a reference to transmission of diseases between animals and people.

It is said some zoonoses may be transferred through casual contact, but others are much more readily transferred by activities that expose humans to the semen, vaginal fluids, urine, saliva, faeces and blood of animals.