FINALLY, WE HAVE CLOSURE

A Soweto family’s sense of dread has turned to sorrow after the body of their missing son was found

- LESEGO SEOKWANG

AT FIRST everything gave them hope – a knock on the door, the ringing of a phone, the sound of a car stopping outside the house. Each time they dared to think it might be good news: that their little Khaya had been found and was on his way home.

But as the days dragged into weeks they knew it was hopeless. The little boy who had brought them so much joy was gone – but the thought of him being lost forever in the sewer system that snakes under the city was too terrible.

They needed closure. And now at last they have it. Six-year-old Khayalethu Magadla’s body was recently found near Eldorado Park Cemetery in Johannesburg, bringing to an end an exhaustive three-week search.

Kholekile Magadla, the boy’s father, and Nolwando Ngxanga, his mother, made the agonising trip to the scene where they identified their firstborn.

“His body was still intact,” Kholekile tells YOU. “He just got burnt a little by the chemicals in the sewerage system.

“His mother cried a lot. We both did. She just had to release the pain that was inside of her. We’ve been crying and praying daily for three weeks.”

The couple had made peace with the fact they’d never see the little boy with the gap-toothed grin alive again, but they needed to see his body to truly be able to let him go.

“All we needed was a bone so we could get closure,” Kholekile says.

“We’re relieved we have found his body.”

THE family home in Dlamini, Soweto, is filled with people when YOU visits a day before the discovery of the body is made.