Anele Mazeka has been missing since the April 2022 KwaZulu-Natal floods, when her family home in Maoti collapsed. Her mother, Nonhlanhla, continues to hope that her remains will be found.
More than four years after devastating floods destroyed her home and claimed the life of her 16-year-old daughter, a Durban mother is still holding on to the hope of finding her child's remains beneath the rubble.
For 40-year-old Nonhlanhla Mazeka, from Maoti, the trauma of April 2022 has never ended. She is still searching for her daughter, Anele, while raising two other children who survived the disaster but were left with serious physical and emotional scars.
Her family had been visiting her on the day the floods struck. With heavy rain continuing, Mazeka decided the children should spend the night at her home rather than return to their grandmother's house.
"Because it was raining heavily, I told them not to go back to sleep at their grandmother's house," she recalled.
Their home was situated on high-lying ground, but as water began entering the house, Mazeka decided to seek help from a neighbour.
It was after 9pm when she left to borrow a spade.
"I was still inside my yard when I heard a sound, but I did not think much of it. I continued walking," she said.
When she returned, her home had collapsed.
She immediately began searching for the children and found two of them trapped in the wreckage, both seriously injured. Anele was nowhere to be found.
"The boy had a huge scar. It looked as though his head had been almost split in half. I shouted for the neighbours, and we rushed the children to hospital while others continued searching for Anele," she said.
The two surviving children remained in hospital until the end of May.
Although they survived, the consequences of that night continue to affect them.
Mazeka said her son refuses to cut his hair because of the scar on his head, fearing that other children will notice it and feel sorry for him.
Her daughter also has scars on her face and has struggled with how other children treat her because of them.
"I have received reports that she has been beating other children because they make jokes about her scars," Mazeka said.
For Mazeka, however, the greatest pain is not knowing what happened to Anele or being able to lay her daughter to rest.
She said she had approached the ward councillor for assistance in finding her daughter's remains but could not afford to hire a TLB to clear the rubble.
"Sometimes it gets too much. I think about her a lot. I tried asking the ward councillor to help me find her because I cannot afford to hire a TLB. I believe my child is still in there," she said.
The disaster also left Mazeka without a home. She currently lives with her mother because she cannot afford to rebuild the house destroyed by the floods.
She said eThekwini Disaster Management officials and local politicians had visited her after the tragedy, but she had yet to receive alternative accommodation.
Responding to questions from DailyNews.co.za, eThekwini Municipality spokesperson Senzelwe Mzila said Mazeka might not have been included in the municipality's profiling of flood victims.
Mzila said the municipality's Disaster Management team had visited affected areas, where victims were profiled and provided with temporary accommodation before being moved into permanent housing.
"Everyone who was affected was profiled and placed in temporary structures before eventually being moved to permanent structures recently," he said.
Mzila said he would investigate Mazeka's circumstances and establish why she had not received alternative accommodation.