A total of 10 children, including three girls, were rescued from an initiation school in Dennilton, Limpopo, after being taken without their parents’ permission in Ekurhuleni.
This is the second group of children to be rescued after eight others were saved from the same initiation school on Wednesday.
The children between the ages of 13 and 18 were abducted from Etwatwa and Daveyton on on the East Rand on June 18 and transported in a Toyota Quantum to Dennilton, about 150km from their homes.
Lebo Bogopane, who leads the initiation monitoring team in the Gauteng co-operative governance and traditional affairs department, said they had a list of six children who had been reported missing.
However, when they arrived in Dennilton together with the police, four more children from Daveyton and Etwatwa were rescued.
“When we rescued the children, one of them was badly asthmatic and did not have his spray with him. If we had not arrived on time at that school, that boy was going to die,” Bogopane said.
He said three girls were rescued from the home of the couple who run the school while seven boys were found on nearby mountains on Friday.
“The legal status of the school will be investigated by Cogta (cooperative governance and traditional affairs department) in Limpopo. What was concerning to us is that the people who ran the school knew nothing about the Customary Initiation Act or that there must be consent forms from parents,” Bogopane said.
One of parents was relieved when she was reunited with her 16-year-old son. “I’m so relieved that I got my son back…So far my son is okay. He was a bit nervous about the whole situation. I can see it was a traumatic experience for him because the people that run the initiation school told him that if he leaves, he would go mad,” she said.
She added that her son was taken to the initiation school despite being circumcised as a child and he did not need to go through the ritual.
Another parent had her 17-year-old daughter go missing. The teenager told Sowetan that at the school they were made to do a number of chores daily.
“They mainly taught us to dance. We woke up at 4am and we sing outside and then started a fire. We would then dip our bodies in cold water every day.
"We were beaten with sticks on our back and also on our breasts. They beat us when we failed to sing. We also had to cook. Every day we ate pap and cabbage,” said the girl.
The teenager said she had been accompanying her friends who were going to initiation but was not fully aware of what was going to happen.
The abduction of children by initiation schools is common in parts of Gauteng. People running illegal initiation schools kidnap the children and then demand a ransom from the parents.
Last year the government introduced the Customary Initiation Act, which prohibits any person previously convicted of child abuse, violence and substance abuse to look after initiates.
Contralesa provincial spokesperson Prince Manene Tabane said the abduction of girls during initiation season was common in Gauteng.
“It has been happening, especially in Sedibeng and Orange Farm. Girls go through their own traditional initiation but as men we do not enter into that space. We do not even know what happens there. But we know that girls do have their own initiation school.
“Where the girls were rescued... there are female initiation schools there. It is not a new thing at all. About six years ago we rescued 84 girls from an illegal initiation school in Sedibeng,” Tabane said.
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