Romulus and his twin brother Remus were allegedly brought up by a wolf in the forests of Italy. Was this a good thing or a bad thing?
Well, the jury of psychiatrists is still out on this one, even though the story allegedly took place a couple of thousand years ago.
Anyway, in their youth they both apparently started exhibiting strange, violent, wolf-like behaviour, ending up with Romulus killing his sibling over some trivial disagreement.
On the other hand, having done this dastardly deed and got away with it, he went on to become a great and noble leader, founding the city of Rome (named after himself) and, apart from a sorry episode where he encouraged his followers to steal off with the wives of the men of a neighbouring tribe, he was a pretty decent guy.
This shows that Romulus sometimes showed a softer, feminine side to his nature after all, which he had obviously inherited from the same lady wolf who had infected him with that mean, violent streak while she was suckling him and his brother. And the fact that she had the decency to suckle and bring them up after they mysteriously turned up in the forest where she hung out is a demonstration of the humanity that supposedly resides even within the hairy breast of a wolf.
Then there is William Shakespeare’s play, A Winter’s Tale, which has a plot that is too complicated to explain in less than a couple of days, but has as its main strand the story of Perdita, who is discovered as an abandoned baby in the wilds of Bohemia.
The humble shepherd who discovers her has no way of knowing that she is actually the daughter of the King of Sicily, who has banished her because he is busy having a quarrel with his wife (I told you it was complicated), and so the shepherd and his wife bring her up as their own daughter, a humble, sheep-loving, Little Bo Peep of a thing.
Except that she has that visible royal streak in her, with pink cheeks, a fine bearing, good manners and all that. As a result of which the King of Bohemia’s son, out on a hunting trip near where the gentle shepherd and his family live, catches sight of her and falls in love on the spot. And so on and so forth.
Well, in the end, the confusion is sorted out, the young lovers return to the girl’s home country of Sicily, her father the king is reconciled with her mother the queen, and the young couple have the best wedding anyone could ever imagine.
The question both these European fables grapple with is whether our paths through life are shaped by nature or by nurture.
Romulus and Remus, although raised by a wolf, make their way back into the human world and become successful (if somewhat violent) members of society. They leave the wild world of the wolves behind them.
Perdita, in A Winter’s Tale, also has a journey from civilisation to a nurturing but primitive world, and eventually finds her way back to the place where she truly belongs.
The emergence of a young man known as Happy Sindane at a police station in Bronkhorstspruit, Mpumalanga, early this week initially bore the hallmarks of both of these fairytale melodramas — with the additional flavour of being played out on the southern tip of the African continent.
In South Africa we do not only have class issues to deal with when a fairy tale like this unfolds—i.e. the offspring of royalty being brought up by wolves and shepherds. We also have to take into account the racial angle.
There would hardly have been a ripple in the national press if a black youth had walked into a remote police station and demanded, in fluent Afrikaans, to be reunited with his parents, who he vaguely remembered as being Ndebele speaking.
But the Happy Sindane case is different. It was hard, initially, to understand whether he was taken from his parents against his will, as he claimed, or went off voluntarily and then became hostage to events far beyond his control. All that we knew (or thought we knew) was the angle that the press instantly leapt for: a white boy from a nice white family brought up by abusive natives in Mpumalanga.
We thought we would not gain any enlightenment for some weeks, or at least until the white woman who claimed that he was her missing son was able to prove (or failed to prove) that he was the child who disappeared from her home 12 years ago.
Then we would have had to trace the people who brought him up for those same 12 years — an unlikely scenario, given how hard it surely must be to hide a white child in a village full of Ndebeles for all that length of time.
Would the saga of Sindane end with bells, whistles and fanfares, as did the fictional tales of Romulus, Remus and Perdita? And in keeping with the fairytale ending we had come to expect, would Happy Sindane turn out to be the lost white prince who would finally kick-start the long-awaited African Renaissance?
Regrettably, cracks started to appear in the fairytale within days. Among dozens of hoaxers who phoned the cops to say they were Happy’s real parents, a black woman came forward who claimed that he was actually the illegitimate son of her late cousin, the result of a fleeting liaison with a white man, and therefore not really a white prince after all.
In no time at all, the fairytale had veered from the magical to the mundane. It ain’t over yet, but it doesn’t look as if the outcome will be as easy to swallow as we had originally thought.
We wait in wonder.
John Matshikiza is a fellow of the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research
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