Snakes alive for Vilakazi Street visitors

WHEN Lwandle Duma was seven years old, she confidently walked into a python pit and sat down right in the middle of a ring of snakes.

"They've got something that fascinates me," she says.

Now, 19-year-old Lwandle and her mother, Lindiwe Mngomezulu, run an educational "snake show" from their home in Vilakazi Street, Orlando West, Soweto.

The street has become a tourist hub, and when Mngomezulu gives you directions to her house over the phone, she directs you past "Tutu's house" and the "Nelson Mandela Museum".

The mother and daughter team has become so well known for their peculiar show that they have been featured in some of the biggest newspapers and magazines in the country.

The cuttings of these are neatly stuck onto the wall of their living room, where the glass-front cages of their snakes - a corn snake, two albino Burmese pythons, a boa constrictor and an anaconda - are kept.

Lwandle has never been scared of snakes . "They squeeze you when they want to be put down, and hiss at you when they tell you they are down and don't want to be bothered."

When she was seven years old, Mngomezulu was manning an arts and crafts stall at the Soweto Festival, and the little girl came and badgered her mother for money to go and see the snakes.

"She wanted to go into the python pit, but Clive [the snake handler] looked at me [asking if it was okay].

"She asked three times before I said it was okay."

Lwandle walked right in and sat right in the centre of the three-metre-long snakes.

Since that day, she has spent every single spare cent she has to buy snakes for her daughter and to feed them.