Pretoria - Two agonising years of searching for her daughter who was four years old when she was snatched from the backyard of a house in Pretoria North came to a happy end when Thabisa Dongolwane spotted her child walking with a woman on a dusty Soshanguve street on Sunday.
“I immediately knew it was her and I screamed for help. I never lost hope, I always felt that I would find her alive,” said Dongolwane.
Her ordeal started on March 25, 2010, when her then four-year-old went to visit her aunt at an informal settlement near Pretoria North. It is thought that the child was playing behind the house in the yard.
The girl – whom Dongolwane said shouldn’t be named – didn’t return and the pair searched for her frantically, to no avail. They told Dongolwane about her child’s disappearance the following Saturday morning.
“I immediately went to where my sister stays and asked the community to assist me in searching all the shacks. We searched but did not find her. I decided [then] to go to the Pretoria North Police station to open a case,” she said.
For two years, Dongolwane searched each and every corner of Pretoria looking for her child, but this proved fruitless. She said she spent most of her time depressed, sad and hardly slept as she wondered about her child’s fate.
Last weekend, while as she was sitting with other community members in Soshanguve’s Extension 3, her prayers were finally answered.
She saw her child for the first time in two years and recognised her. “After I screamed and shouted that the woman was walking with my child, we approached her with some members of the community. But the woman said it was her child. We then went with the woman to her house and the man there said we should go to the police station to resolve the matter,” said Dongolwane.
Dongolwane then showed police the child’s birthmark on her backside to prove that it was indeed her child.
Michael Moela, a neighbour who was with Dongolwane, said they were sitting on the side of the road when Dongolwane started screaming that her child was passing in the street.
“We had never seen the child before but when we looked at her, she looked exactly like Dongolwane. We informed the community members who had gathered there after her screams, and we [went] to the woman’s house,” he said.
While at the station, the woman apparently confessed to the police about the abduction.
According to police, the woman was pregnant in 2008 when she went to visit her family in Siyabuswa, Mpumalanga. She informed her boyfriend that she was going to give birth.
Police spokesman Constable Maanda Singo said the woman then had a miscarriage.
“When she went back to her boyfriend, she informed him that she had given birth to a baby girl but had left her with the grandmother as she was working,” said Singo. The woman evidently told him that she was going to fetch the child from her parents in Mpumalanga.
But, instead, she abducted Dongolwane’s child, who is now six.
She was arrested and faces a charge of kidnapping.
She appeared in the Pretoria North Magistrate’s Court briefly on Wednesday. Her case was postponed to September 26 for a bail application.
Pretoria News