This is a fascinating story:
Reuters
Happy Sindane, now 16, says he was kidnapped from his white parents.
Joao Silva for The New York Times
Bongani Nkabinde, 15, said Happy seemed content in Tweefontein.
Joao Silva for The New York Times
Tozi Ben, with chickens, said Happy was the child of her cousin and a white shopkeeper. DNA tests are under way to see if there is a link.
The New York Times
Happy sought help at the Bronkhorstspruit police station.
'Lost Boy' Shines Light on Race in South Africa
By LYDIA POLGREEN
RONKHORSTSPRUIT, South Africa, June 17 — Happy Sindane was always an oddity in Tweefontein township. In a country where, almost a decade after the end of apartheid, the races seldom live side by side, Happy's blond head bobbed in a sea of tight black curls. In soccer games, played on dusty fields by barefoot boys with a homemade ball of plastic bags and twine, his pale feet stood out.
Then, last month, Happy walked into a police station in this sleepy town about 60 miles northeast of Johannesburg. Speaking in Ndebele, his only tongue, Happy, now a teenager, told an officer that he was white and had been kidnapped from his Afrikaner parents by a family maid when he was a little boy. The woman had taken him to a black township, he said, where he was virtually enslaved by the black family that raised him.
Overnight, Happy was transformed from a local curiosity into a national sensation. The Bronkhorstspruit police station was flooded with callers claiming to be Happy's parents.
Jan and Sarie Botha, a poor white couple from Pretoria, emerged as the most credible of the white claimants. But no sooner had they stepped forward than Tozi Ben, a Xhosa woman, announced that Happy was actually of mixed race, or colored as they say here, the issue of a romance between her cousin and a white Zimbabwean shopkeeper.
A judge ordered DNA tests performed, hoping for a scientific resolution of the matter. Meanwhile, a paint company began running newspaper advertisements last weekend with his photograph and the tagline: "Any color you can think of."
No matter what his true lineage, Happy has come to symbolize the intensity with which South Africans still scrutinize matters of race — years after apartheid's demise and despite real progress toward building an integrated society.
Of course, under apartheid, Happy's case would have been much more than a custody battle. The court's decision on his race would have determined where and with whom, as a white, black or colored person, he could legally live, work and play. Such formal barriers between the races have now disappeared, but not their legacy.
Indeed, parsing the racial makeup of others "has always been a bizarre obsession in this society," said Graeme Simpson, executive director of the Center for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation, which studies racial attitudes. "Who you are and where you come from completely dictated what you had access to and what your place in society was."
For some whites, Happy symbolizes their fears, as a minority, of being overwhelmed by the black majority — one of the earliest rationales for apartheid.
"The story of Happy Sindane is putting the lie to some of our rainbow shibboleths," wrote Sean Jacobs and Herman Wasserman, editors of a book of essays on media after apartheid, in an editorial in The Sunday Times, a national paper, earlier this month. "From the start this has not been the story of a lost boy but of a lost white boy."
To mixed-race people, who form an uncomfortable middle band in South Africa's rainbow, Happy represents the legacy of forbidden love between the races — children fully accepted by neither blacks nor whites.
To blacks, especially those in the all-back township of Tweefontein, Happy's accusation of having been enslaved smacks of ingratitude.
"He should be grateful," said Martha Jiane, a neighbor of the family that raised Happy and the mother of one of his playmates. "No one should have raised a white boy here, paying his school fees and taking care of him. Black people are poor, but as for white people, all I know is that they are rich."
Happy, who the authorities believe is 16 years old, first appeared in Tweefontein in 1990, in the company of Betty Sindane, the daughter of a successful local farmer.
Koos Sindane, Betty's father, said he asked his daughter where she had found this white boy.
"She said his mother had abandoned him," Mr. Sindane said, sitting in a shady spot of the grassy courtyard of his home. "I felt sorry for him and treated him as one of my grandsons even if he was a white |
