“We want to kill you in front of your mother.”
These are the spine-chilling words a mother recalls community members uttering as they beat up her son after he was accused of committing a crime at a nearby informal settlement.
Martha Tsotetsi yesterday told of how her son, Mandla, was brought home by a group of people who were beating him up on Thursday.
Tsotetsi said she watched helplessly as Mandla was being tortured by residents of Qalabusha informal settlement, less than 1km away from her home on Rapulana Street in Daveyton.
“My son has a drug problem. He is a nyaope addict who has been sent to rehab for over three times. I don’t send him to steal and it pains me as a mother that out of all my children, he turned out to be such trouble. He cried out to me faintly and the attackers told him that they wanted me to see him take his last breath,” she said.
Tsotetsi said she was returning from a shop last week when she was confronted by screams around her home.
“I saw a group of people who had all sorts of dangerous weapons pulling and pushing my son around. He was covered in blood and was begging for his life. I tried pleading for [forgiveness] for him but I was just pushed away.”
The community beat him to a pulp and left him for dead. Mandla is fighting for his life at the Far East Rand Hospital.
A distraught Tsotetsi said she fears he won’t live. When the Sowetan team called her yesterday, she said she thought it was the hospital calling to give her the bad news.
“The state he was in when the ambulance took him is not promising. He had a very big wound on his head and had lost a lot of blood,” the mother said.
“I’m ready to hear that he’s gone.”
Sipho Philani, a neighbour who rescued Mandla, said the fuming community members were definitely going to kill him.
“They took a dustbin from his house to hit him on the head and the two people who held it kept shouting that we want to kill you in front of your mother and make her watch. That’s what made us mobilise as a community and help our neighbours,” said Philani .
“We do not condone criminality and drugs but it takes a village to raise a child, so we should let police do their job and assist each other as a community in fighting nyaope and drug sellers.
“If they could stone the drug dealers like this then maybe there would be change, not to kill our own children for mistakes they make while growing up in a messed-up society.”
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