A young man was killed in a dispute over a cellphone, hours before family elders were due to bring him home from initiation school.
A young man was killed in a dispute over a cellphone, hours before family elders were due to bring him home from initiation school.
Xolisani Lamani, 18, from eThembeni near Extension 7 died at the initiation school after he was hit on the head with a rock by a fellow initiate.
They had been arguing about a missing cellphone.
Lamani died in front of community members who had been called to the veld initiation school to resolve a fight between three initiates.
Lamani had undergone the initiation ritual together with his childhood friend Luthando Sajini, 18. The two young men were sitting together in their hut, enjoying their last hours at the mountain with a third initiate who allegedly murdered Lamani.
Speaking to Grocott's Mail a visibly emotional Sajini said he still struggled to relive the moments leading up to his friend's death.
"Even now I don't want to think about this thing," he said.
The young man said the incident was triggered by a phone that had gone missing. Sajini said he asked the third initiate (who cannot be named due to the fact that he faces murder charges) what the time was.
"He gave me his phone."
He says after looking at the time, he handed the phone back to its owner and they continued to chat.
The third initiate fell asleep shortly afterwards.
"When he woke up he started asking for his phone and we told him that we had given it back to him," Sajini said.
The young man allegedly went into a fit of rage and he denied taking his phone back from his fellow initiates.
Sajini said it was around 4am on Saturday 20 December last year when they hastily started looking for the phone inside the hut, to no avail.
The young man grew even increasingly agitated when he couldn't find his phone, according to Sajini.
The situation became violent when he started pelting Lamani and Sajini with rocks and chasing them around the area.
Sajini said it got so bad that he ran further into the veld, while his friend Lamani ran towards the township to get help.
Help eventually arrived, according Sajini, and it looked like the fight had been stopped for a few minutes.
But Sajini said the alleged attacker kept saying, "I'm going to kill Xolisani," adding that he wouldn't bleed alone.
According to Sajini's brother Sivuyile, the attacker came into the hut and hit him on the face with a rock before going on to deliver a fatal blow to Lamani's head.
Meanwhile Lamani's distraught mother, Nomalungisa Fondini, is still trying to come to terms with her son's shocking death.
She said someone had come to her house in the early hours of 20 December, asking her and her family to intervene in a fight at the initiation school.
Relatives rushed to the scene and found Lamani lying unconscious on the ground.
"They came back saying they could feel a pulse on him and wanted to call an ambulance," Fondini said.
Fondini, however, said her parental instincts told her that her son was dead.
"Why would they all come back if he was still alive? They wouldn't leave him alone if he was still alive. I told them I know that my son is dead," she said.
The initiate who allegedly attacked and killed Lamani is from Port Elizabeth according to Sajini's mother, Bulelwa.
He had come to Grahamstown to undergo the ritual with her son. Bulelwa said the situation was disturbing for her because she work with the dead boy's mother and their sons had been friends from a very young age.
Bulelwa said despite all of this, there was no tension between her and Fondini.
"Our children were very good friends. We talk to each other still and we work the same shift. We had planned to have the homecoming ceremony on the 20th of December because we were both off duty that day," she said.
The attacker, according to both families, was arrested on the same day and spent the weekend in prison.
He appeared in court the following Monday and on his second appearance in December was granted R500 bail.
Bulelwa said she had asked her mother to take him back to Port Elizabeth.
Grahamstown police were not available for comment at the time of going to press.
