‘In South Africa, you hear of disappearance all the time’: one photographer’s search for his sister’s missing years

Lindokuhle Sobekwa has made a moving attempt to retrace the steps of a sibling, now dead, whose decade-long absence left a hole at his family’s heart

When the photographer Lindokuhle Sobekwa was six years old, his half-sister Ziyanda disappeared. On the day in question, the siblings had had a fight, Ziyanda, who was about to turn 13, having demanded that he hand over some money he’d been given by his father. Lindo refused, and ran away, and his rebellious sister duly chased after him. But then, disaster. He wasn’t concentrating on the traffic; a car hit him, an accident that broke his spine. He would spend the next three months in hospital. Ziyanda, though, kept on running, not even stopping to check up on him. It would be 11 years before he saw her again.

No one in the family knew where she was until, in 2013, Lindo’s mother discovered that she was living in a hostel not far from the family’s shack in Thokoza, a township east of Johannesburg. She was very ill, and there were scars on her back, but now she came home at last, no longer the wild girl of old. Her brother was angry. He had a lot of questions. But the two of them didn’t talk much. She needed to rest, and something told Lindo, then about to finish secondary school, that he should tread carefully.

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