Two-and-a-half-year-old Sanele Thanga is no different from any other ”terrible two” — active, naughty, loud and experimental — except that his home is a prison.
His bedroom is a ward lined with beds and cots and he shares it with other children who were born in prison or who came there when they were as young as a month old.
These children know no home outside the prison walls. Unlike their peers, they do not go to town with their mothers at month-end, or any other day.
Sanele has spent almost half of his life in prison for a crime committed by his mother, Thandeka Thanga. She has never taken him to a park or to movies.
The only family he knows is his mother’s fellow inmates. His father died when his mother was pregnant and his mother’s relatives are in the Eastern Cape and cannot travel to Johannesburg to visit them.
On Thursday the Department of Correctional Services, in an attempt to ”instill the spirit of Christmas”, held a Christmas party for babies behind bars. Seventy-five children and their mothers from three Gauteng women’s prisons, Pretoria, Heidelberg and Johannesburg, gathered to celebrate Christmas.
Like all the women at the party, Thanga would not disclose the reason for her imprisonment.
Sanele and 44 other children in Johannesburg prison will spend Christmas and the rest of the festive season behind bars with their mothers. They have no hope of leaving prison until their mothers serve the rest of their sentences or unless they are taken in by foster parents.
In a speech at the party, provincial prisons commissioner Zach Modise expressed his sadness about children being raised behind prison walls, saying it denied them the opportunity to be in a normal environment and do the things that their peers do.
”These children are not fortunate enough to go on holiday,” he said.
The children made sure their presence was felt; they cried and screamed throughout the speeches.
They enjoyed their semi-freedom, except the music — which they were probably hearing for the first time in their lives — as they stood still on the dance floor.
And they were too young to appreciate the significance of a Christmas cake.