Stolen babies
In just less than a week The Herald has reported incidents of mothers losing their newly born babies to strangers. I’m not going to dwell into the emotional feeling of losing a baby, cause I just don’t want to take my mind there. It’s torture, unbearable. The first story which was carried during the Easter holiday was of a woman who lost her one week old baby to two female strangers at Parirenyatwa hospital after she had just been discharged. When I read the comments to the story knives were out for the mother who left her newborn in the hands of strangers whilst she went to look for food for 30 minutes. The two reasons that came to my mind as I read this story were that the baby was stolen for either ritual purposes or for the baby thief to keep as theirs. I ruled out ritual purposes slightly as I remembered an Ndebele drama I watched in my childhood days.
In this drama a woman made her South African based husband believe that she was expecting. When the time for the husband’s visit to the country was nearing, she visited a local clinic where she joined a queue with expecting mothers and some with their babies. She got friendly with one of the mothers who had a newborn and offered to hold the baby while the mother went to ladies, and that was it, she stole the baby. This drama series was not much different from the second case reported by The Herald, where the unsuspecting mother was lured into somehow ‘trusting’ the baby thief. The baby thief was said to have been looking pregnant and was seeking accommodation.
Police dealing with these cases rely heavily on the public to assist and come forward with information. If you see someone saying they have been blessed with a baby and yet you don’t recall seeing them pregnant, that is a cause for concern. Without the assistance of the public, such cases can be hard to deal with.