The Standard
[Kenya]
28 October 2013
By Leah
Gondi-Ogondi and Snopes.com
Kenya: Irene
Myangoh, a personal assistant working at a law firm in Nairobi went to an
upmarket hair salon along Kenyatta Avenue, and spent more than Sh3,000 on a
human hair weave.
Two weeks later
she started suffering from severe headache that would not go away. She would
wake up with severe headache at night.
She went to a
private doctor who gave her drugs for the relief of mild to moderate pain of
inflamatory origin with or without fever; they would only work for a few hours
and then the headache would be back worse than even before.
Desperate, she
went to see a specialist who did blood tests and even a brain scan. All the
tests were negative but the headache persisted, making her unable to
concentrate at work and sleeping very poorly.
She went back to
her doctor who decided to examine her scalp and under the beautiful weave he
found worms! The worms were burrowing into her skull and after sending the
samples to the lab they found that the hair had eggs from which the worms had
hatched.
The doctor told her that the hair was probably from a
corpse because those worms are usually found on dead bodies. […]
Independent
Reporters TV Media [Nigeria]
28 October 2013
by Efe Tega
Nairobi, Kenya:
Irene Myangoh, a personal assistant working at a law firm in Nairobi went to an
upmarket hair salon along Kenyatta Avenue, and spent more than N5,500 on a human
hair weave. […]
Nigerian Tribune
3 November 2013
Written by Victory Oyeleke
[…] This tale of
woe about a contaminated hair extension that infected its wearer with flesh
eating maggots has been around for more than 3 years. It began circulating the
Internet in September 2010 and so far, there are about four versions, with each
changing the city she works in, the location of the hair salon, and her name
but otherwise leaving the plot of the tale relatively untouched. […]
The Standard
[Kenya]
7 November 2013
PETER KIMANI seriously speaking
There is an
interesting tale doing the rounds around the world and it apparently originated
from this newspaper. It was partly appropriated from Snopes.com. It purports
that a certain manzi (lady) of Nairobi, keen about her looks and all, picked up
a hair weave from some unnamed shop in town. […]
The Huffington
Post concludes The Standard piece was a hoax. I disagree. It was an urban
legend, which is a respected genre in fiction. One of my teachers, Robert
Boswell, actually has an essay on how such stories function. The essay appears
in his book on the craft of fiction writing, The Half-Known World, which I
highly recommend to our creative reporter. The measure of her talent can be
adjudged from the international news networks that picked the story and
distributed it further around the world.