By Rebecca Harrison
Racist sharks that devour white swimmers, husband-snatching witchdoctors and a magic tree with penis-enlarging properties.
Such lurid tales ensure that South Africa's young tabloid industry is riding a wave of sales.
Driven by a classic formula of sex and celebrity with a distinctive African flavour, the tabloids have proved a hit with the country's black majority.
"It has all the news about what's happening in the townships, and it's cheap," said security guard Jacob Jaleni of top-selling tabloid Daily Sun.
"Some people don't like it, but I think it tells the story like it is."
Publishers in South Africa used to target the richer white minority with upmarket titles in English and Afrikaans. But media companies have realised there is money to be made in the mass market, prompting a flurry of tabloid titles that are luring hundreds of thousands of readers, mainly from the townships.
"Our research shows most Daily Sun readers had never bought a newspaper before it was launched," said Steve Pacak, chief financial officer at Naspers, which publishes the Daily Sun.
Daily Sun hit newsstands three years ago and now shifts more than 400 000 copies a day with a solid diet of sex, sensation and sangomas.
Two more daily titles - the Afrikaans Die Son and English Daily Voice - and two Sunday papers have since followed and more are in the pipeline.
The boom in tabloids reflects a wider trend. Previously, black consumers were considered too poor, but their buying power is now recognised as massive.
Higher incomes and improved literacy among the black majority, as well as the end of apartheid-era censorship has prompted the launch of more populist newspapers.
"The black majority is now free to vote and free to access the media," said Karl Brophy, executive editor of the Daily Voice which was launched recently in Cape Town.
"I think people finally realised what a completely untapped market it was."
Brophy said South Africa's tabloids were based on Britain's tabloids, whose paparazzi staked out stars in search of scandal - but with a local flavour.
One recent Daily Voice edition featured a "racist" shark that only devours white victims. Daily Sun interviewed a woman whose husband had dumped her for the local traditional healer and another who claimed to have been raped by a gorilla.
"We are a lot like the British tabloids... but there is also an African element. Instead of the romping vicar there is the romping sangoma," said Brophy.
But while stories about sex are a staple, nudity is a touchy subject.
Daily Voice decided to risk a "page three girl"- the British institution that puts topless women on page three - but some shops refuse to stock the paper, particularly in Muslim areas. Daily Sun steered clear of this tradition.
Some other African countries already boast tabloids. Uganda's raunchy Red Pepper features plenty of female flesh and Zimbabwe media firms publish two tabloids, albeit slightly more high-brow than some of their South African counterparts.
The Daily Sun says its readers prefer stories about ordinary women with their clothes on, and if Jaleni's reaction was anything to go by, its editors are right.
"Naked women? In a paper?" he said. "No, that is not good."
After watching the huge success of Daily Sun in South Africa, other media firms followed with their own tabloids.
Ireland's Independent Newspapers, which ditched a plan for a tabloid 11 years ago as too risky, launched Daily Voice in March. Naspers went daily with Die Son shortly afterwards and launched Sunday Sun in 2002. Independent Newspapers, which also publishes Zulu-language tabloid Isolezwe, says it wants to expand Daily Voice and may launch a Johannesburg version.
South Africa's second biggest media company Johnnic Communications was forced to drag its more serious Sowetan newspaper downmarket as new riskier titles lured away its readers.
The tabloid Press tends to shun tales of political intrigue in favour of crime and human interest stories about ordinary people from the poorer parts of town.
But they do speak out on community topics like the slow delivery of decent housing, water and electricity - thorny issues for the government - and their political clout could be on the rise, experts say.
The success of the new tabloids and demise of Sowetan, which championed the voice of the oppressed black majority under apartheid, may also illustrate a shift in the priorities of younger black people, say experts.
Young South Africans who have enjoyed 11 years of democracy under a black-led government are more interested in getting a job, car and wardrobe of designer clothes than in the racial politics than defined their parents' generation.
"I think young people are different now, politics is no longer everything and they want to read about everyday issues," Pacak said.
A surge in newspaper reading was arguably inevitable after the end of apartheid since black people were no longer alienated from mainstream culture and politics, said Alan Dunn, editor of the Sunday Tribune.
"Under apartheid, black people were not so interested in reading about a society they couldn't be part of," he said.
"That has changed - this is their country now."