On Wednesday morning seven boys, aged between 6 and 10, from Topville outside Namakgale, left their homes to go hunting with their dogs.

They paused their hunt for fresh meat to go for a swim in a stream near the Makhushane Dam. Tragically, two of the boys lost their lives in the too strong stream.

Their friends ran to fetch help from a nearby village. On the way, they ran into Ronnie “Chikitsha” Mashalane, who immediately accompanied them to the site of the tragic misadventure.

According to Mashalane, he was on his way to his mother’s house to have lunch when he crossed paths with the boys.

“One of them immediately came towards me and before he could say a word, I realized he needed help urgently. I grabbed his hand and instructed him to run with me to the site of the drowning. This brave little boy ran as fast as he could and I never had to slow on for a second,” said Mashalane.

Having grown up in the area himself, Mashalane knew the place well and immediately headed for the stream.

He instructed the children to wait at the mouth of the stream and investigated further by himself.

On the bank of the river he found the missing boys’ clothes and shoes.

The stream however, had grown much stronger since the days of his youth and even though Mashalane entered it, he soon realized the force of the rushing water was too strong for him.

He left the water and called Namakgale SAPD.

The police arrived 30 minutes later.

The SAPD officer did not enter the water, instead he left to call for backup.

He later returned with one private vehicle, a double cab and two police vans. The police who responded were normal uniform branch, as the diving unit was already on a scene elsewhere in the province.

They cordoned off the scene with yellow police tape and took photographs.

At around 16:45 three rescuers managed to retrieve the two bodies. Ba-Phalaborwa Municipality’s COPE PR Councillor, Tryphina Sekhwela Malobane, who was present when our journalist and Mashalane went to the crime scene on Thursday between 12:00 and 13:50, called on traditional leaders and Indunas to carefully look into the business model of granting rights to remove sand in the rivers.

“Our rivers have big holes and streams, due to lack of maintenance by those selling sand to residents because when they dig for more sand they leave our rivers in a bad state. Yes, boys have always hunted during our time, but that was a small stream in the past and it only became huge recently through human error and we need to arrest this problem as a matter of urgency,” she explained.

Namakgale Police Station’s spokesperson Constable, Dineo Sekgotodi, said two inquest cases have been opened and investigations are underway to determine was led to the sudden deaths of the two boys aged between 6 and 7.