The Voice (Francistown)
Nomsa Ndlovu
1 April 2008
Francistown — The small girl in this picture is dead. Raped and strangled by a neighbour she looked upon as a friend.
Little Ditsala Mmolai was five when the picture was taken; at 11 she was full of life, an innocent angel, the pride of her family.
Her brutal murder has sickened and shocked villagers at Nokaneng Village in the Okavango District where she was buried amongst scenes of anguish and disbelief the week before Easter.
Maun police are holding a 23-year-old man, who lived next door.
Nobody will ever know what demon possessed the killer of an 11-year-old girl to insert his manhood into her, brutally raping and later strangling her to death.
But for the aunt who sent her on an errand to the shops, from where she never returned, there is no explanation for the horror that has fallen upon their family.
Ditsala Mmolai, a Standard Five student at Nokaneng Primary School, was found about 500m away from her home in bushes next to a playground.
What has most dumbfounded residents of the small and hitherto peaceful village is that the man, who confessed to the murder in front of them, lived with his parents next door. Ditsala looked upon him with trust and regarded him as a brother.
Gaoganediwe Mokhutswane 23, well known locally as Bashimane, is at present in the hands of the police after the discovery of the girl's decomposed corpse.
Aunt Gakemotswana Senyemba, 20, choked back tears as she went over the details of the child's last moments. She told how Ditsala had come home from school during the lunch break to find one of her uncle's at home.
"I called her as soon as she arrived and gave her five pula to go and buy tea at the nearby store. She never came back. At first we thought that she may have lost the money and decided to return to school.
"Then when the sun set and she was still not home, I started to sense that something was wrong. It was unlike her to be absent from home all that time. That is when I started going around looking for her amongst friends and relatives, but she was still not found by the time we went to bed."
Next morning, Gakemotswana notified her mother and brothers as villagers assisted her in the continued search. Then came the chilling news that one of the search teams, amongst them the suspect, had reported finding the body sprawled in a small bush adjacent to the local football pitch.
Fingers then started pointing at Bashimane because a neighbour had apparently seen him following the girl when she left home. Another witness also told how she had stumbled across the youth coming out of the bush where the body was found. He was reportedly zipping up his pants at the time.
"That is when the boy confessed that he had pulled my granddaughter into the bush, raped and later strangled her because she had threatened to tell. He also told us that after the incident he took the five pula from her and bought khadi with it," Senyemba said.
Two weeks after her child was buried, her tearful mother, Boikobo Mmolai, is still dry for words as she struggles to come to terms with the tragedy.
She asks herself if she will ever be able to forgive as the serene features of her vibrant little girl haunts her like a ghost, whilst each day she has to face the parents of the youth accused of her murder.
The victim and the suspect's parents are not only neighbours, but have shared decades of friendship, always staying close to each other either in Nokaneng or their cattle-posts.
What makes the pain worse is that she was away in Maun when her daughter was killed.
Another distraught relative, the girl's uncle, James Senyemba, 41, said that they were pinning their hopes on the justice system to revenge the death of their daughter.
"Our tears will only be wiped away by a death sentence. There is no sane person that can rape a minor and subdue her to such a cruel death," he said.
Officer Commanding Simisani Zhibi of Maun Police revealed that officers arrived at the scene to find the body already decomposing. He confirmed that the suspect was in their hands.
"What surprised us is that this girl was killed in broad daylight after being pulled from a path that twists its way between a playground and a bush attached to someone's yard. We found the body in that bush," he said.
The officer advised that children should be accompanied whenever possible, and warned of the dangers of walking alone. "People nowadays have turned into animals," he said.
Be the first to Write a Comment!
Copyright © 2008 The Voice. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). To contact the copyright holder directly for corrections — or for permission to republish or make other authorized use of this material, click here.
AllAfrica aggregates and indexes content from over 125 African news organizations, plus more than 200 other sources, who are responsible for their own reporting and views. Articles and commentaries that identify allAfrica.com as the publisher are produced or commissioned by AllAfrica.
