A young face stares out of a dog-eared identity book. An older face peeks out of a US passport which, judging from its visa stamps, has seen a good deal of East Africa.
A young face stares out of a dog-eared identity book. An older face peeks out of a US passport which, judging from its visa stamps, has seen a good deal of East Africa.
Both lie among dozens of passports, identity books, bank cards, pension claim cards and student cards from as far away as Fort Hare in Alice.
Every single one is a piece of lost property brought to the offices of Radio Grahamstown by good samaritans that have come across them in the streets of Grahamstown.
According to the interim station manager Khaya Thonjeni, many of the lost documents are found near the railway line, on the ground by the taxi rank, or left behind in taxis.
Some, he believes, were lost innocently or by people unable to keep track of their belongings. “On weekends, there is an increase,” he explains, adding that the station receives as many as two or three lost documents every week.
Those who find documents frequently drop them off at the radio station, as Radio Grahamstown has a policy of occasionally announcing the lost items on the air during broadcasts in the hope that their listeners may know the individuals concerned and pass the message onto them to come in and collect their lost property.
While many mislaid identity books, passports and bank cards are successfully reunited with their owners, a small group still remains and has grown larger over the months.
Thonjeni believes that these unrecovered documents are generally those which belong to non-listeners of the radio station, who are not known to its existing audience.
Thonjeni also points out that “Home Affairs has recently improved their service, making it easier to get a new [identity document]than to find a lost one.”
Even as the hope of reuniting owners with their lost identity documents grows dimmer over the months, Radio Grahamstown refuses to throw them away.
