south africa: Happy reopens South Africa's racial scars

Apartheid, it seems, works. Nearly 10 years since racial segregation was abolished in South Africa, identity is still rooted in race. Or so it would appear from the case of Happy Sindane, the blond Ndebele-speaking boy who walked into a police station last month saying he had been abducted from his white family by their black cleaner at the age of six and brought up among blacks. He asked the police to help him find his white parents. The story was presented, to the fury of black commentators, as that of a lost white boy who had walked, Tarzan-like, out of the jungle. The courts demolished the fantasy last week after DNA tests established that Happy had at least one black parent.