By Lungi Langa
I remember scrambling for information on the April floods earlier this year in an effort to pitch a story.
As I kept checking for information, I kept uncovering details of families whose loved ones had died in the flooding, and families who were missing loved ones as their whereabouts were still unknown after they were swept away by the floods.
Nothing could have prepared me for the call that came in on my aunt’s phone.
We were informed that my other aunt’s home in Nazareth, near Pinetown in KwaZulu-Natal, was among those swept away on 12 April during a massive rainfall that had started the day before.
As a result, my aunt Duduzile Majola, her husband Bongani, and their 16-year-old son Andile were among the over 460 casualties of the KZN flooding.
This was nothing we had expected to hear as we had been following the flooding developments on the news.
My cousin Nathi, who was lucky enough to survive the ordeal, told us that he and his brother Andile and their father were outside digging a trench to allow water to pass through after they noticed that water was building up.
As they were digging, a huge gush of water came out of nowhere and swept his father away.
He and Andile tried to help him, but Andile also got swept away.
Their lifeless bodies were discovered the following day submerged in the debris.
Their house was also swept away a few kilometres from where it had been with my aunt, who was busy cleaning, still inside it.
She was also discovered the following day, unconscious, and she was rushed to RK Khan Hospital where she succumbed to her injuries.
By the time we buried them, you could hardly recognise them as their bodies had badly decomposed due to being kept at the mortuary too long since there were too many victims of the floods to process.
I had never been in a situation where any member of my family had been part of the story I was covering — but here they were part of a horrific nightmare that I shall never forget.
