Who is happy sidane

Sindane was awarded a settlement payout by the Dulux paint company after they used an image of him in an advertisement with the slogan "any color you can think of. The Pretoria News quoted Father Charles Kuppelwieser, who often tried to help Sindane, as saying: "He had the opportunity to study to become a carpenter, electrician or get involved with computers, but he did not have the basic skills," adding, "To us, Happy was always well-mannered and a good boy, but when the weekend came he would get drunk.

The newspaper reported that Thomas Kabini, a cousin of Sindane's, said he had seen the deceased in the week before his death, quoting him as saying, "He was in good spirits and happy. Oscar Pistorius' father accused of racism. Africa's Rainbow Nation troubled by racist time warp. IE 11 is not supported. For an optimal experience visit our site on another browser. Politics Covid U. News World Opinion Business. Share this —. He believed he was rich and wanted his support.

In , Happy, then about 16, strode into the police station of a nearby town called Bronkhorstspruit. He told officers he was a white boy, stolen when he was a child by the family domestic, and raised in a little village called Tweefontein, a couple of hours north of Johannesburg. He said he had been half-starved and made to live rough, and appealed for his true parents to come forward and take him home.

It is never easy to explain the intense and ruinous fascination with skin colour in South Africa. It is there in the manner that the country responded to the story of the stolen white child. Ten years into what must be very loosely called the "new" South Africa, when colour was said no longer to matter, the truth was it counted more than ever. South Africa had its very own Mowgli. There was talk of Hollywood movie contracts. White couples whose babies had gone missing came forward to claim this "slave boy" as their son.

My guess is that by now even Happy believed his own story; and so did sponsors and well-wishers. He began appearing on TV in new clothes and expensive sunglasses. The pauper had turned into the prince. There is a revisionist line being debated in the Afrikaans press now. Some historians argue that the Afrikaner nationalists who designed and drove racial policy for half a century were rather like those whites in the southern states of the US who wanted separate schools for whites, forbade mixed marriages and ordered black people to ride in the back of the bus.

But there was no resemblance between their racial policies and those of the Nazis. Anyone who lived in the heyday of apartheid will know this is nonsense. Those who wrote the rules of racial theory were obsessed with the purity of race, blood and tribe. They thought of little else: race infected everything from hair texture to heart transplants; it reached into love affairs and there was no escape from it.

The country became a giant menagerie where divinely appointed zookeepers presided over less-than-human others, who were to be locked in the prisons of their skin. Everyone knew this. Happy knew this when he walked into the police station and told his story. So did the cops who heard him, the kindly magistrate who sent off for DNA tests, as well as the priest who befriended the boy, and the white couples who came forward to claim him as their missing son.

When DNA tests showed Happy was — perhaps — the son of a shadowy German immigrant with the unlikely name of Henry Nick and his black housekeeper, Rina Mzayiya, and that his "real" name was Abbey Mzayiya, the excitement died away. What Happy had been doing had a name, back in the bad old days. He was "trying for white", and in no one wanted to remember the bad old days. People now felt rather let down; Happy was not the son of a rich white family, stolen by the maid.

He was the son of the maid. Far from being a slave-child raised in the wild, he was a boy of mixed race, like millions of others. For some whites in Bronkhorstspruit the truth was self-evident: the lowlands of Mpumalanga province had had its own Tarzan.

Others said the tale was closer to Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Book. Either way, a child had been reared in the wild. The Sindane family regarded that as an insult, and Happy's allegations of abuse as a betrayal. Happy had a room to himself; small with peeling purple paint and a lightbulb. He had a bed with a purple blanket, a plastic chair and an armchair piled with clothes.

The only other possessions were a pair of broken sunglasses, a Men II Boys cassette, what appeared to be the guts of a transistor radio and a poster of a South African football team. Compared with neighbours the Sindanes are well off: they have electricity, a fridge, an oven, glass windows, a car and outhouses for the animals. According to a cousin, Happy's routine was to rise at 7am, breakfast on bread and tea, go to school, tend goats, dinner at 4pm, hang out with friends, bed by 10pm.

Pupils at Khuthalani school said he was a slow learner but enjoyed football and had many friends and a girlfriend. He left in without qualifications and reportedly found casual labour in a chrome mine. Life soured last September when Happy's adoptive mother Betty died and her father, Koos Sindana, took charge.