There are stories one reads and moves on from, and there are others that refuse to leave you, sitting heavily on your chest, following you into silence and making you put down your phone and stare into the distance because, for a moment, words simply fail. The killing of 14-year-old twin brothers Bonolo and Bohlale Makena in Mamelodi West is one of those stories.
On Friday, October 2, 2026, the lives of the Makena family changed in circumstances that are almost impossible to comprehend. Bonolo and Bohlale were found dead inside their family home in Mamelodi West, Tshwane, having suffered multiple stab wounds. Their mother, Merriam Makgopa Makena, had returned home from work when she made the devastating discovery. Police were called to the house and subsequently opened a murder investigation, with the circumstances surrounding the killing still under investigation and, at the time of writing, no one having been arrested.
For those encountering their names for the first time, Bonolo and Bohlale were not simply the two 14-year-olds whose deaths became another horrific news story. They were twin brothers, sons, schoolchildren and members of a community who, only hours before their deaths, were living the ordinary lives that children should be allowed to live. Their killing inside the place where children should feel safest, their own home, has left a family grieving, a community searching for answers and the rest of us confronting yet another painful question about the safety of children in our country.
No parent should ever have to encounter what Merriam found when she returned home that Friday, nor should any family have to begin the unbearable task of learning how to live after two children have been taken from them in this way. To the Makena family, I offer my deepest condolences because there are no words equal to this loss, nor is there a sentence that can make the next morning easier. Re lla le lona. We mourn with you and carry you in our thoughts and prayers.
Perhaps this tragedy has stayed with me so deeply because Mamelodi is not simply a name on a map to me. I arrived in Mamelodi West as a young university student, a stranger without status, money or influence, simply trying to find my way in the world, and what I encountered was a community that made room for me.
The Mahlangus, the Mathebulas and the Catholic Church community in B3 received me, opening not only their homes but their hearts and teaching me something that has remained with me throughout my life: family is not always defined only by the blood that runs through our veins; sometimes it is found among people who make room for us when we arrive carrying nothing but ourselves. That was the Mamelodi I came to know, which is perhaps why it is so painful to confront what children such as Bonolo and Bohlale can experience in the same community today.
The grief of their mother is something none of us can fully know because every parent’s grief is their own, yet there is a particular anguish in the loss of a child that I came to recognise through my own mother, who buried four of her children. What remains with me is the sound of her crying whenever another devastating call came, a cry that seemed to come from somewhere words could not reach. Ke sello se se gagolang pelo, a cry that tears the heart apart, and it is that memory that makes me think particularly of aus Merriam and the unimaginable grief she must now carry.
A parent should be worrying about whether their children have eaten, whether they are warm, whether they are doing well at school, whether they will find work, fall in love, build families of their own and fulfil their dreams. A parent should never have to choose a coffin for a child, and there is something fundamentally wrong with a society in which parents increasingly have reason to fear for the lives of their children.
That fear forces us to look beyond this individual tragedy and ask what has happened to the communities in which our children are growing up. Mamelodi has changed faces over the years, and I remember a period when Moretele Park regularly hosted jazz and other major events, when people gathered, music travelled through the township and there was a palpable sense of life, movement and possibility.
That memory should not be romanticised because there was crime, car theft was a problem, hijackings happened and families struggled, while the structural disadvantages deliberately created by apartheid did not simply disappear with the arrival of democracy. Yet something else has shifted over time, and I remember sensing it very strongly in 2016 when we were preparing to host Bill Gates for the 14th Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture at what had once been the Mamelodi campus of Vista University and had become the University of Pretoria’s Mamelodi Campus.
A few colleagues and I drove into Mamelodi ahead of the lecture to prepare and engage the community for an international event taking place in its midst, and what struck me was the sheer number of young people standing, walking and sitting around, with too many of them neither in classrooms nor workplaces. There was energy everywhere, but too little opportunity into which that energy could be channelled, and even then, one could see unemployment beginning to carve its scars into the community.
The theme of that year’s lecture was “Living Together”, and there was an extraordinary resonance between what we had observed, and the message Bill Gates subsequently delivered. He spoke of Africa as the world’s youngest continent and of the possibility that its young population could become a source of extraordinary dynamism, but his optimism came with an important warning: the potential of young people can only be realised when societies deliberately create the conditions and opportunities that allow them to thrive. His central proposition was simple but profound: if Africa wants to achieve the future it aspires to, it must invest in its young people now.
Ten years later, that challenge feels even more urgent. What became of the young people we saw standing on those streets, who invested in them, and how many were left to navigate adulthood surrounded by unemployment, inequality, drugs, violence, despair and the daily humiliation of possessing potential but having nowhere meaningful to place it?
None of this excuses what happened to Bonolo and Bohlale. Poverty does not make people murderers and unemployment does not excuse criminality, while millions of South Africans living with deprivation continue to lead honourable, decent and loving lives every day. To suggest otherwise would be an insult to them. Those responsible for the murder of these two boys must be found and held fully accountable, and justice must be done.
Justice, however, cannot be the end of the conversation because accountability for a crime and responsibility for the conditions in which violence flourishes are not mutually exclusive. When schools fail, families become overwhelmed, recreational spaces deteriorate, jobs disappear, drugs become readily available, policing loses the confidence of communities and young people begin to believe that tomorrow offers them nothing, something dangerous happens to the social fabric. Hopelessness can never excuse violence, but neither should a society that repeatedly manufactures hopelessness be surprised when violence finds fertile ground.
The deaths of Bonolo and Bohlale therefore confront us with questions that extend beyond finding those responsible for their murder. What kind of Mamelodi are we building for the children growing up there today, and what do they see when they walk out of their homes? Where are the libraries, functioning sports grounds, arts programmes and mentors; where are the businesses absorbing young people and the apprenticeships preparing them for meaningful work; and where are the safe spaces in which a child can imagine a future without constantly having to negotiate danger?
The responsibility for answering those questions cannot be assigned to one institution. Government, business, civil society, churches and communities all have a role to play, while those of us who escaped the difficult circumstances into which we were born must also ask what responsibility we carry towards those coming behind us. We cannot outsource the raising, development and protection of our children and then become surprised when too many of them are lost.
Yet the community spirit I experienced all those years ago has not disappeared. It survives in mothers who share what little food they have, neighbours who watch over one another’s children, teachers who spend their own money helping learners, coaches who keep children on football fields beyond their official working hours, priests and pastors who understand that ministry extends beyond the walls of a church, and young people who continue to dream despite everything around them. These everyday acts remind us that communities are not powerless, even in the face of circumstances that can sometimes feel overwhelming.
That is where hope must begin, not as an anaesthetic that comforts us while nothing changes, but as a decision to become part of making things better. Its true measure will be found in whether the children growing up in communities such as Mamelodi are protected, supported and given meaningful opportunities to build their futures.
The challenge issued in Mamelodi in 2016 was to invest in young people because tomorrow depended on the opportunities available to them. Ten years have passed, that tomorrow has arrived, and the deaths of Bonolo and Bohlale force us to confront what we have done with the intervening years and, more importantly, what we are prepared to do with those ahead.
Two boys should be alive today, annoying their mother, laughing together, arguing over something trivial, making noise, going to school, playing sport, changing their minds repeatedly about what they want to become and dreaming the impossible dreams that children are entitled to dream. They should have been allowed to grow up.
Their names must therefore become more than another headline in our endless national catalogue of violence. Bonolo and Bohlale must become a question addressed to our collective conscience: what are we prepared to do differently so that the next children get to live?
To their mother, their family, friends, schoolmates and the wider Mamelodi community, re na le lona. We stand with you and mourn with you.
Robala ka kagiso, Bonolo. Robala ka kagiso, Bohlale.
May justice find those responsible, may love surround those left behind, and may our grief eventually become action because we still have a chance to reclaim our communities and create places where young people do not merely survive childhood but are given every opportunity to fulfil their potential.
We have a great deal of work ahead of us, and perhaps the greatest memorial we can build for children whose futures were stolen is a society in which the futures of other children are fiercely protected. We owe Bonolo and Bohlale that much, we owe their mother that much, and we owe future generations much more.
Sello Hatang is the executive director of Re Hata Mmoho