'Lost Boy' Shines Light on Race in South Africa
June 19, 2003
By LYDIA POLGREEN
BRONKHORSTSPRUIT, 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."
Mr. Sindane said his daughter, who died last year, told him
she was in Johannesburg when a woman named Rina asked her
if she could watch the little boy who was with her, whom
she called Happy, while Rina went to the liquor store. Ms.
Sindane agreed, but Rina never returned.
Worried that his mother would miss him, Ms. Sindane took
the boy to a police station and filed a report. The police
said she should take Happy home and wait for them to call.
But they never did, and eventually Ms. Sindane secured an
affidavit that said Happy had been abandoned. She
informally adopted the boy, and eventually brought him to
her father's house.
Happy had a relatively normal boyhood in Tweefontein,
despite his physical differences from those around him.
"We used play football and listen to music together," said
Petros Jiane, a 17-year-old friend of Happy's. "We look
after cattle together and chop wood."
Other boys would tease Happy, calling him Mulungu, the Zulu
word for white, Petros said, and he would get into
fistfights, declaring to anyone who would listen that he
was not white but Xhosa, the language he spoke when he
first arrived in Tweefontein.
But as the years passed, most of the people who knew him
simply forgot that he was different.
"We even forget he was white because he is just like our
children," Ms. Jiane said.
"Happy was happy here," said his friend Bongani Nkabinde,
15. "I was very surprised he went away."
But Happy's attitude seemed to change when Betty Sindane,
whom he called his mother, died. Friends said he was
inconsolable, often going to her grave to weep. He felt
very alone, Mr. Nkabinde said.
On May 19, Happy told his friend Petros he was going to
leave home for good. He took a minibus to the police
station in Bronkhorstspruit.
Since his case became news, government officials have kept
Happy in protective custody. Before being placed in the
government's care, however, he gave interviews to local
newspapers in which he said he simply wanted find his real
family.
Today, government officials informed the Bothas and another
white couple that the results of Happy's DNA tests showed
that he could not be their son. His link to Ms. Ben's
family was inconclusive, officials said, and more tests
would be required.
The court hearing to establish Happy's legal identity has
been postponed to next month.
Mr. Simpson, of the Center for the Study of Violence and
Reconciliation, said the public's interest in Happy Sindane
reminded him of nothing so much as the Population
Registration Act, the apartheid-era law under which people
were classified into racial groups. It included more than a
dozen variations of colored.
"This just goes to show that you can rid the Population
Registration Act from the statute books," Mr. Simpson said,
"but how deeply this is ingrained in South African's view
of each other is incredibly powerful and symbolic of the
difficulty of changing a society."
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