Some days ago
A Sudanese man has been forced to take a goat as his "wife", after he was caught having sex with the animal.
The goat's owner, Mr Alifi, said he surprised the man with his goat and took him to a council of elders.
They ordered the man, Mr Tombe, to pay a dowry of 15,000 Sudanese dinars ($50) to Mr Alifi.
"We have given him the goat, and as far as we know they are still together," Mr Alifi said.
Mr Alifi, of Hai Malakal in Upper Nile State, told the
Juba Post newspaper that he heard a loud noise around midnight on 13 February and immediately rushed outside to find Mr Tombe with his goat.
"When I asked him: 'What are you doing there?', he fell off the back of the goat, so I captured and tied him up."
Mr Alifi then called elders to decide how to deal with the case.
"They said I should not take him to the police, but rather let him pay a dowry for my goat because he used it as his wife," Mr Alifi told the newspaper.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/4748292.stmSudan's famous goat 'wife' dies
Charles Tombe
Charles Tombe is refusing to comment on the affair
The best-known goat in Sudan has died months after being "married" to a man in the South Sudan capital, Juba, the BBC has learned.
Local elders ordered a man found having sex with the goat, later called Rose, to "marry" her last February.
"The idea was to publicly embarrass the man," says Tom Rhodes, editor of the Juba Post, which first ran the story.
The BBC's story of the "wedding" caught the public imagination and became one of the most read internet stories.
Rose, black and white, is believed to have died after choking on a plastic bag she swallowed as she was eating scraps on the streets of Juba.
'Sense of humour'
After the marriage, Rose had a male kid - but "not a human one" - Mr Rhodes said, hastily.
The "husband", Charles Tombe, said he was drunk at the time but has since refused to comment on the issue. The kid is owned by Mr Tombe.
Wow - what have we done? We have triggered a monster
Tom Rhodes
Juba Post
More than a year after the BBC story was first published, it is still picked up by various web forums and being emailed across the world. Recently it got more than 100,000 page views for five successive days.
Over time, it has received several million hits - making it historically one of the biggest-hitting stories the BBC News website has published.
A Google search uncovers more than 1m different web pages, based on the same story.
Mr Rhodes, a Briton who helped found the Juba Post in 2004, was shocked when he learned how many people around the world had read the story his newspaper had originally published as a short, light-hearted account and not even bothered to publish on its website.
map
"Wow - what have we done? We have triggered a monster," he said.
He said that he had seen that it occasionally returned in the BBC's "Most read stories" and was worried that he would have trouble with South Sudanese, accusing his paper of tarnishing the image of the region - now trying to rebuild after 21 years of war.
But he says he has not come across any such anger.
"It doesn't portray Sudan in a bad light - it shows the Sudanese have a sense of humour," he says, referring to the elders' original punishment.
He has, however, had people come up and say to him: "Oh, you're the goat man."
Mr Rhodes explains that South Sudan remains a conservative society.
If a man is caught sleeping with a girl, he is ordered to marry her immediately in order to save her honour and that of her family, he says.
This was the basis for Mr Tombe's punishment, after the goat's owner found him with his animal and complained to local elders.
They ordered him to pay a dowry of 15,000 Sudanese dinars ($50, at the time) and also named the goat Rose.
Afterwards, he left with the goat, not quite hand-in-hand, more hand-in-hoof, to his home in
the
Hai Malakal suburb of Juba - and not in Upper Nile State as we originally reported.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/6619983.stm
