Eastern Cape community secures arrest of man after his son (8) escapes from being chained up in dark shack

The community of Peddie knew the boy (8) as the one who would always stay out late.

Until they didn’t see him any more.

“Now we know why he never wanted to go home,” child activist Petrus Majola said. “Now we know why he wanted to stay with his friends. What happened to him was barbaric and extremely cruel.”

On 31 May, on the third day of Child Protection Week, the child, a Grade 2 learner, managed to escape from the dark shack where his father kept him chained up.

Wearing a pair of camouflage pants, his feet dirty from the mud, he dragged his chains behind him until he got to his neighbour’s house. It was dark already as it was around 6pm.

The neighbours knew his father and were scared of him. But they took the boy, still in cuffs and chains, to a nearby house where there was a funeral and as Majola put it, “strength in numbers”.

Majola said they fed the child and gave him something to drink while there was a search for a bolt cutter to cut the chains off his legs. Community members went to the police and reported the plight of the boy. 

“This community did everything right. They listened to the child. They believed the child. They acted. The police also did everything right. They came and they investigated,” Majola said, “and they tracked down the father and arrested him.” 

The boy reported to investigators that he had been raped. Majola said the police were waiting for the medical report.

“On that night when his dad left him alone in the dark shack, the boy knew that he could manage to get away as on that night the chain was not fastened to something else. He was dragging the chains with him. 

“He is just a child but has been subjected to terrible violence and abuse,” Majola said. “That night was not the first night that he was beaten and assaulted. We think his makhulu [grandmother] was also maybe assaulted by his father because she too is very afraid. She wouldn’t tell us where this man was.”

Majola described the scene where the boy was held. “When you enter the premises there is a house by the gate. Here the makhulu lived by herself. Behind the house, there is a shack where the boy lived with his father. I just keep asking myself, why not let the boy live in the brick house?”

Praise for community and police

Turning the tide of violent crime