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Taiwan

Popular Taiwanese Cactus Toy Raps In Polish About Cocaine

Popular Taiwanese Cactus Toy Raps In Polish About Cocaine
Genevieve Mansfield

If not for a Polish shopper, it might have remained lost in translation for all the Taiwanese parents who've bought their kids the popular toy cactus that raps in some exotic language.

But a Polish mother living in the city of Taichung was doing some grocery shopping with her baby at the local Carrefour when she heard something that made her ears perk up: a foul-mouthed Polish rap song referencing cocaine and suicide. It turned out that the source of the obscene music was the singing cactus.

It was just "cocaine and suicide attempt, repeated over and over again. It is really shocking," the Polish woman recounted. She contacted another Polish friend of hers in Taiwan, Ela Sobczak who took the matter of the rude cactus very seriously and notified Taiwan News.

"The song itself is definitely inappropriate to play in front of children," said Sobczak.

The 32-centimeter-high cactus, which moves and grooves along to the tune, is programmed to sing a number by the Polish rapper, Cypis. The video of the cactus doing its thing, along with a cat that apparently has heard it all before, is quite something ...

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Society

Zambia Questions Its Harrowing Puberty Rites Of Passage For Girls

Zambia’s traditional counselors are rethinking the country’s puberty rites, which some argue are detrimental to girls’ well-being.

Photograph of young girls in Zambia standing behind a vegetable stand.

October 5, 2018, Lusaka, Zambia: Children standing behind a vegatable stand.

Lou Jones/ZUMA
Prudence Phiri

LUSAKA — On a sunny afternoon in Chipungu, a clean-swept hamlet in Rufunsa, a rural district east of Lusaka, three girls who have recently reached puberty sit on the floor of a thatched roof hut in the center of the village. The girls, wearing only their underpants, are seated on a reed mat, their legs stretched out and heads bowed. Around them, women take turns performing sexually suggestive dances, aimed at teaching the teenagers how to engage in sexual acts.

This is an essential part of the traditional female initiation ceremony into adulthood, known as Chinamwali in Zambia’s Eastern province and Chisungu in the country’s Northern province. Here, for the next few weeks, the girls will learn how to serve and sexually please their future husbands.

Margaret Banda, a 54-year-old woman who serves as the community’s apungu — a local term that refers to the ritual’s mistress of ceremony — raises the girls’ heads, forcing them to watch the women and demonstrate what they’ve learned. It is then the teenagers’ turn to repeat the dances.

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