Daily Sun (May 5 2015) - IT WAS a traditional AmaMpondo celebration but the feast ended in tragedy.
A 10-month-old baby was beaten to death.
SOMEONE THOUGHT IT WAS A TOKOLOSHE!
The boy’s mum, Belekazi Sowazi (33) told Daily Sun she had walked some relatives home after the celebration and was coming back to her own house on Saturday night.
“As I walked back to my home, I saw my relative dragging something that looked like a bundle of clothes out of the house and onto the grass in the yard. He kicked it as it rolled, shouting that it was a tokoloshe. I ran when I heard my mum screaming.
“That’s when I realised it was not a bundle of clothes at all. It was Azakhanye, my son.”
She said the man was too strong.
“He pushed my mum away and she fell down. My eight-year-old son was crying and pleading with the man to stop kicking his brother.”
Belekazi, who lives in Khayelitsha, Uitenhage in the Eastern Cape, said the traditional ceremony started earlier in the day.
They were drinking umqobothi and brandy, celebrating the ugqusho lwefele ceremony.
The baby boy, Azakhanye, was asleep in his room.
Shortly after the people went home, the drunken relative staggered into the baby’s room.
He allegedly dragged the baby from the bed, shouting: “This is a tokoloshe! Voetsek, voetsek from this house!”
Then he dragged the boy to the living room, bashing him on the hard tiled floor.
The boy’s gogo, Nomfundo Sowazi (58), jumped up from her own bed and raced into the room to try and pull him away but he was too strong.
“I shouted at him that it was my grandson, not a tokoloshe,” she said.
That was when he dragged the child outside as Belekazi came walking down the street and witnessed the brutal attack.
The relative went back into the house and Belekazi picked up her groaning baby. She found the man in the living-room.
“He was just sitting there as if nothing had happened.”
She said by the time she got to the Laetitia Bam Hospital the baby had already gone quiet.
“He was declared dead on arrival. Although my baby had been kicked and beaten, there was no blood on him.”
She said family members managed to stop the baby’s 32-year-old father, Sizwe Douws, from attacking the relative.
“I will never forgive my relative because he insisted my child was a tokoloshe. I am angry. I want him to rot in jail,” Belekazi said.
Sergeant Majola Nkohli said a man (60) has been arrested for killing a baby and will appear in court soon on murder charges.
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