monster lurking in our midst 18 October | 16:15 By Sheree Bega Johannesburg - All that remains of Thokozani Radebe’s shack is a black electricity cable that lies on the charred earth, coiled like a snake. The grass has grown long around it – no one dares walk here. A year ago, his angry neighbours tore his shack to the ground to erase the lingering shame that the 29-year-old’s unspeakable crimes had brought to Diepsloot. But if there’s one thing residents of Extension 1 know, it’s that life in this sprawling sea of shacks has to go on. And life is cheap. “I used to think of those little girls, of how someone could do those horrible things to them, every time I went to the toilet,” says Whitey Lesego, with a shrug. “But nothing can bring them back.” Puffing on a joint, he stares at the festering communal toilet a few metres away where Radebe allegedly dumped the mutilated bodies of his youngest victims, Yonelisa, 2, and Zandile Mali, 3, on October 15 last year. On one of the toilets someone has spraypainted, “Look after me”. A putrid stream of blackened sewage separates the toilets from Radebe’s shack, where he raped them. It’s barely 10am, and Lesego and his friends are lounging on plastic chairs, drinking beer and smoking dagga. “We all saw this man around,” he says. “He was a charmer. No one would have known he was a monster,” says Lesego. A few hundred metres away, Thabo Mcubuse stands solemnly at another of the monster’s dumping grounds: the dustbin where he discarded his first known victim, five-year-old Anelise Mkhondo. Here, just over a year ago, Mcubuse found his granddaughter after clawing away the plastic that had concealed her little body, and that Radebe had allegedly used to choke her. Like little Yonelisa and Zandile, Anelise was also raped and strangled, and tossed here, like rubbish, in early September last year. “I never walk here past this bin,” reveals Mcubuse, relieved that mercifully today the dustbin is emptied. “It hurts too much. I will rather walk the long way around and forget this place existed.” Nearing 70, he stoops a little as he shuffles in a pair of worn leather shoes that he has neatly polished. His eyes are tired – he does not get much sleep. “I saw her with my own eyes. You can’t forget something like that. The people at the mortuary told me it made them sick to look at her, that I’m lucky I only saw her from the neck up because of what he had done to her.” On Monday, Mcubuse will sit with the bereaved family of the Mali cousins, united in their grief, when Radebe’s trial starts in the North Gauteng High Court in Pretoria. He has attended every one of the alleged killer’s court appearances. “He is arrogant and evil. A monster.” At first, Radebe, who did odd jobs, confessed only to the murder of the toddlers, but police later definitively linked him to Anelise’s brutal rape and murder. After snatching the cousins from the home they shared on October 12, it would have been a brief walk for him to lead the toddlers to his lair, hand-in-hand, deftly navigating the pools of sewage and festering mounds of rubbish that marked life in Extension 1. Outside their home, a row of freshly-planted daisies fight for sun in front of a crumbling wall. Children’s clothes hang on the line and a few beer bottles are stashed in the corner of the dusty yard. Thokozani Mali, the mother of Yonelisa, stands stoically in the doorway of her shack. Her other children and Zandile’s siblings fight over a broken doll – her arms and legs missing. “I do not want to talk about the murders,” says Mali, pressing down her unkempt hair. “We’re waiting for the trial to start. We’ve been waiting for a long time. Then we will be ready to talk about what happened,” she says before disappearing inside. The horror of the murders sparked a nationwide manhunt – Radebe was later found hiding in Alexandra – and violent politically-fuelled protests, where residents of Diepsloot vented their anger on foreigners living among them. The ANC termed the spate of murders “senseless and immoral” while AgangSA acknowledged “theirs is a story of poverty, denial of dignity, hopelessness that is repeated all over the country”. For some in Diepsloot, the children’s murders were an eye-opener. “What happened to those two little girls was horrible. Horrible,” says Abigail Modise, whose small shack is near the Mali cousins’. “It will happen again here. I have learnt that I cannot leave my kids alone here. They are not safe.” In Diepsloot, poverty festers like a sore. “A lot of promises were made after these horrific murders, but nothing has improved really,” says Tsietsi Mataboge, the branch chairman for the DA. “You see a police van once every few hours. People are killed here for R20 and their lunchbox. Children are not safe.” At the heart of Diepsloot’s social ills is overpopulation, he believes. “There are a lot of illegal immigrants – they commit crimes and can’t be traced. Places like Extension 1 are a nightmare, a hub for criminals.” But ward councillor Abram Mabuke promises there is progress. The police have increased patrols and are more proactive – and the Diepsloot police station is virtually complete now. Construction started in 2008. “Things are improving. Yes, people are living in poverty – there are half a million people in Diepsloot. Most are foreigners. There are social ills, but there is development and less crime.” Mcubuse, a former bus driver, dreams of moving his family out of the small shack they share, barely big enough for two double beds. They barely scrape together a living from his meagre pension. “It’s horrible living here. We think of Anelise all the time. We wish we could move.” She vanished on September 7, while playing outside with friends. “She always stayed close to home. We called for her at 5.30pm on that Saturday and she didn’t come.” Later, they would rush to the police station to lay a missing person’s case, handing over the only photo they had of their beloved granddaughter. In it, she stands in a dress that is too small for her, her hair pulled back tightly, unsmiling. He remembers searching desperately for her, how no one helped. By the Monday, Mcubuse was about to embark on another search when there was a knock at his door. A group of Community Work Programme members, who run a vegetable farm behind the dustbin where she was found, asked him what Anelise had been wearing. “I told them, and they said: ‘She is dead’.” His wife fainted and their lives fell apart. He is soft-spoken, like Anelise was. She was the light of their lives. “She was a happy, quiet little girl. “We all loved her deeply. Our kids were grown and she was our child. We had brought her from the Eastern Cape just a few months before to live with us.” Fellow Extension 1 resident Jonah Khumalo tells how his children played with Anelise. “They always ask me where she is now and I don’t know how to tell them, even now, what happened to her,” he says, shaking his head. Mcubuse’s biggest worry is how he will get to court on Monday. There is no money at home. “The wheels of justice grind slowly.” He spits out Radebe’s name. “How can you kill three children like that? This man needs to rot in jail for the rest of his life.” Saturday Star
Posted on: Sat, 18 Oct 2014 23:55:26 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015