Snake-Girl

Obviously being a snakegirl isn't always easy.The £4.2 million extravaganza Afrika! Afrika! - a celebration of the continent in circus - opens this week.Acts include the Human Spider, Makaya Dimbelelo from Angola, who can squeeze his body through the head of a tennis racket.Then there's the Waterman - Dickson Oppong from Ghana - who swallows five litres of water and ejects it from his mouth like a fountain.But Lunga, this tiny 18-year-old contortionist with huge eyes - fresh from a triumphant two-year run in Germany where two million people paid to see her - is the undoubted star of the show.When you meet her in the promoter's office, she is staring into a mirror, painting on her eyebrows. Eventually she turns to me. She is tiny, with the figure of a child.Lunga was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, and tells her story like a child reciting a fairy tale. Even as a baby, she says, she contorted in her cot."you slept with my legs behind my head and my hands behind my back," she says, grinning. "My mum thought there was something wrong with me."But apart from this small quirk, baby Lunga was in perfect health. By the time she was ten months old, she was doing the splits in the living room. Then her grandmother Thuli recalled that her own mother had a snake-like flexibility.