By Solly Maphumulo and Sapa
He claims an Afrikaans heritage but was raised in a rural black community. Now Happy Sindane wants to know who his real parents are - and he may already have succeeded.
The teenager claims he was abducted 12 years ago by a domestic worker, whom he called Rina, when he was six years old. The painfully shy Sindane was brought up as a herdboy in rural Mpumalanga and can speak only Ndebele.
After countrywide publicity about Sindane on Tuesday morning, Pretoria police Inspector Percy Morokane said an investigating officer had already received a call from someone who claimed to have lost a son 12 years ago.
Morokane said police would investigate the caller's claims, but the onus was on the caller to prove a family connection with Sindane.
After Sindane was flooded with requests by the media for interviews on Tuesday, the Bronkhorstspruit magistrate's court ordered that he be housed in a place of safety, and it severely restricted media coverage of the case in terms of the Child Care Act.
Justice department spokesperson Heinrich Augustyn said the court would rule on Monday on the estimated age of the boy, after he had been properly examined by a physician.
Meanwhile, he said all information gathered on Sindane up to the issuing of the court order at 1pm on Tuesday could still be published.
Care had to be taken, however, with publishing or broadcasting new information about the youth, especially regarding his real identity and possible parentage.
Augustyn advised media organisations to place the child's welfare first and, where possible, to run new information past him or the investigating officer.
Augustyn said the blanket media attention the case had generated following the sensational revelations had left Sindane "very traumatised".
Speaking to the media on Tuesday morning, Sindane said he had lived for the past 12 years with a black family, with whom Rina had left him, on the dusty streets of Tweefontein, Mpumalanga. Until he ran away on Saturday, he had to look after cattle and goats and do menial jobs in the Sindane homestead.
He claimed he recently decided to leave Mpumalanga to look for his parents after Koos Sindane, the father of Betty, his foster mother, threatened to poison him. The abuse started after Betty died in September last year, he said.
He arrived at the Bronkhorstspruit police station on Monday afternoon, telling duty personnel there he had been kidnapped by a domestic worker at the age of six. He remembered that he had been born on May 4 1985.
Sindane, who was visibly traumatised, said: "I will be relieved if I can meet my parents. It is my dream."
Twelve years ago, he remembered, he lived in Johannesburg with an Afrikaans-speaking family. Rina, who was looking after him, had told him to go to the shops with her.
"As we were walking, we came across a construction company. She asked for directions and left me in the construction company. She left me with Betty in the building and never came back," the child said.
The brown-eyed, blond teenager said he could not remember much about his early years before the abduction.
He could not recall the names of his parents or their address in Johannesburg, but remembered he had kept a small dog.
He said his desire to meet his parents grew when he saw his picture on a missing-persons programme on television in 1994.
"Since then, I told myself, the day I meet my parents, everything is going to be all right."