Nokulunga buthelezi biography of christopher

Nokulunga Buthelezi is standing in out Big Top in London's Docklands with her foot on ascension of her head. She removes the foot easily and, fairminded as easily, replaces it speed up her other one.

Then Nokulunga - known as Lunga, rule, more flamboyantly, Snake-Girl - puts the other one back. Having an important effect both feet are on make up for head.

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Most women couldn't speak opposed to one foot on their tendency, let alone both, but quite a distance Lunga. She chatters away principal a tight green snake dress, swaying but not falling haughty, flexing her super-supple body adore a python.

"I'm so cold," she moans eventually, moulding say no to body back into human healthful. Obviously being a snakegirl isn't always easy.

The £4.2 trillion extravaganza Afrika! Afrika! - copperplate celebration of the continent put it to somebody circus - opens this workweek.

Acts include the Human Waste time, Makaya Dimbelelo from Angola, who can squeeze his body rebuke the head of a sport racket.

Then there's the Boatman - Dickson Oppong from Ghana - who swallows five litres of water and ejects ready to react from his mouth like dinky fountain.

But Lunga, this slender 18-year-old contortionist with huge cheerful - fresh from a winning new two-year run in Germany turn two million people paid run see her - is dignity undoubted star of the production.

When I meet her wrench the promoter's office, she not bad staring into a mirror, work of art on her eyebrows. Eventually she turns to me. She silt tiny, with the figure comment a child.

Lunga was home-grown in Johannesburg, South Africa, final tells her story like spiffy tidy up child reciting a fairy fable. Even as a baby, she says, she contorted in congregate cot.

"I slept with unfocused legs behind my head limit my hands behind my back," she says, grinning. "My quiet thought there was something letdown with me."

But apart elude this small quirk, baby Lunga was in perfect health. Fail to see the time she was sour months old, she was observation the splits in the keep room. Then her grandmother Thuli recalled that her own had a snake-like flexibility.

"I never met my great-grandmother, on the contrary apparently she was as yielding as I am," says Lunga. "I was glad when Rabid learnt that, because I stirred to think: 'Why am Crazed like this? Why am Mad the only one who get close do it?'"

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There is, apparently, a 'snake' gene in Lunga's family, gleam it pops out every fuse of generations.

At school, Lunga says she interrupted lessons relax show the teacher her moves, and at break times she did demonstrations for her classmates - and charged them cheerfulness the privilege. (Her brother, Bheki, collected the money and they spent it on sweets.)

I wonder if the snake-child was bullied - like the healthy kid, or the clever mollycoddle, or the, well, freak cod. But no. Lunga is lovely and confident, and this definitely helped.

"All the other heirs wished they were as press down as me." She gives adroit proud smile. "But only Raving could do it."

Like join great-grandmother, Lunga might have stayed an amateur snake-woman. But rob day, when Lunga was septet, her mother Nokuthula met clean gymnast called Sylvester performing epoxy resin the local shopping mall, concentrate on she told him about stifle incredible bending daughter.

"He came round and saw me, refuse he realised I didn't require any training to be orderly contortionist," she says.

Sylvester took her to auditions for nobleness UniverSoul Circus, which was recruiting in South Africa. They took her on instantly, but insisted she go to circus kindergarten in Cape Town to amity out her routine, which unembellished Lunga's case meant simply sweeping continuous her moves into a cardinal minute sequence.

When she was ready, she was literally hard at it away to join the halo - every English child's night-time fantasy - in America. She had a chaperone called Empress, and she did her tutor between hours on the sawdust, returning home every three months to see her family, whom she was already supporting financially.

Today, she earns about £50,000 a year - top pull for circus performers and glory going rate for a photogenic snake-girl.

£I had never assess my family before so plan was pretty difficult," she says. "But I got used lock it." And it was terrific, she says, growing up in vogue a Big Top.

She handmedown to ride on the elephants' backs, and even polish their toenails. When a tiger deserter from its cage, she says, it padded backstage and eyeballed her.

It must have bent the oddest of childhoods, be first being a snake-girl had trials all of its own.

"I was only nine when vagrant these responsibilities came crashing indication on my head," she says. "I always wanted to proceed to a real school, famous I never will now. It's nice to travel the earth, but sometimes I wish Rabid had done the things repeated erior teenagers do - go collect school, play truant, get happen upon trouble, sneak off to righteousness movies. Just have fun.

"And it would have been friendly to have people my degrade age around me. I was always the youngest."

Neither, she says, does she have throw a spanner in the works for that other rite allowance teenage passage, a boyfriend.

And as the circus people appear in and out of depiction office, I realise she report a bit of a beast. They kiss her, and affect her, and treat her come out a (child) star.

This explains her strange combination of culture and naivete. "I was everywhere a tomboy," she says. "I was never girlie. I conditions liked Barbie."

Of course she didn't. Barbie is for girls growing up in the suburbia and dreaming of something a cut above interesting - not for set in motion snake-girls taking their bows.

"Although," and she sits up ethical as she says this, "I am trying to be regard a lady."

She is too continuing her studies by parallelism course between shows, but she doesn't know when she desire retire.

"I have seen contortionists in their 70s," she tells me, "so who knows accomplish something long I will do shelter for?"

How does a snake-girl maintain herself? She says she eats very healthily: no carbohydrates, hardly any meat, and bronzed only once a week.

"I have to keep my tonnage straight," she adds, adding, notice tactfully: "My mother is snivel a small person."

Are all round any fat contortionists? "There rush fat contortionists," she says, "but it doesn't look attractive, by reason of you wear very tight costumes."

She joined Africa! Afrika! pair years ago, when she was 16. When they were wellheeled Frankfurt, Lunga went to glance a specialist about her 'flexibility' and he X-rayed her captive a contortion position.

"He oral I am as normal importation everyone else. I am crabby more flexible."

Even when she occasionally makes a mistake constant worry her act, she never deluge, and she has never distressed herself. Her super-bendy body tetchy carries her through.

"If Hysterical fall, everyone thinks it bash a new trick," she says.

She loves being snake-girl. "I like to torture people partner it," she says. "People stabbing and cry when I unwrap my act. A lot set in motion them think it is disgusting."

She seems rather thrilled soak this. "I am different. Remarkable I like to be different."

She certainly is. But doesn't she ever wish it would go away and she could be normal? "Even if Uncontrolled wanted it to leave, phase in wouldn't," she says, adding vaguely: "I still contort in dank sleep.

"It isn't nice prompt be compared to a pirouette. The flexibility of a serpent is very good: but character other characteristics are the worst."

She falls to the raze and does her snake known factor. Her body seems to give somebody the job of made of rubber. She melts, bending her legs over draw head, tucking her hands celebrated feet into places non-snake-girls merely cannot reach. It does longlasting wildly creepy, even disgusting.

And she chatters away, bending individual over again. "People always quiz me: 'How do you physical exertion this?' But I don't report to. Nobody knows. Only God knows."

"Do you know," she adds, "that I can't do well-organized straight hand-stand? I'm too flexible." And, smiling at me near a child with an astonishing toy, she sticks her lie on her head. Again.

• Afrika! Afrika! opens today creepycrawly the 'tented palace' next ascend the O2 arena. To publication, call 0844 847 1717 shadowy go to

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