A short bulletin in the news wire service, South African Press Association or SAPA, on April 1, 2013, announced the death of Happy Sindane. If you didn’t know who he was (and South Africans are notorious for their short memories), Sindane “made headlines in late May 2003 when he alleged that he was a white boy who had been kidnapped by black people,” as SAPA summarized his claim to media fame.

Until the day he walk into a police station in Bronkhorspruit, in South Africa’s Mpumalanga province, Sindane had lived with a black family, the Sindanes, in a black township Tweefontein.  Sindane’s story, not surprisingly, dominated the headlines in South Africa for a few months. As The New York Times correspondent Lydia Polgreen reported in 2003, Sindane came “to symbolize the intensity with which South Africans still scrutinize matters of race — years after apartheid’s demise and despite real progress toward building an integrated society.” Later in 2003, a local judge ruled that Sindane’s real name was Abbey Mziyaye, and that he was the son of a black domestic worker and her white employer, who had both abandoned Sindane after he was born.

It being South Africa, Happy was the punchline for many racist and insensitive jokes. On the anniversary of the 1976 Soweto uprising that year, Lowe Bull Calvert and Pace, used an image of Happy with the slogan “any color you can think of” to sell paint products for Dulux. They probably reckoned, consistent with rainbow nation politics, that everything was up for grabs in the “new South Africa.” Happy sued and won a small judgment. It was cold comfort. His adopted mom died and he was inconsolable.

Then Happy vanished from the media view, except when, a few years later, Sindane was arrested for some minor crime. The sad news this Monday was that, alarmingly, he had been stoned to death. But to go back to when the story of the lost white boy first “broke.” At that time my friend Herman Wasserman and I co-wrote an op-ed on the Sindane case for South Africa’s Sunday Times (published on June 1, 2003) which is worth reposting below. At that time, Herman was on the media studies faculty of Rhodes University in South Africa and I was a graduate student at Birkbeck College of the University of London.