Tears and heartbreak over tragic story of South African girl sold by her mother

A video clip of a laughing Joshlin Smith, who was six years old when she went missing more than a year ago in South Africa, left most people in the courtroom sobbing.

It was shown during a hearing in Saldanha Bay, near Cape Town, ahead of the sentencing of Joshlin’s mother – a drug addict who is believed to have sold her for money.

Racquel Smith, also known as Kelly Smith, was convicted of kidnapping and trafficking her daughter earlier this month. The 35-year-old mother of three was found guilty along with her boyfriend Jacquen Appollis and their friend Steveno van Rhyn.

Even the court interpreter could not hold back her tears as she translated the victim impact statements into English.

A court official read out those statements first in Afrikaans, the language spoken by those in the impoverished Middelpos informal settlement of Saldanha Bay, where Joshlin had lived.

In their own words, Joshlin’s grandmother, the family friend who had wanted to adopt Joshlin and her teacher spoke of their pain and bewilderment about how she could have been sold by her mother.

One witness during the trial had alleged this was to a traditional healer, known in South Africa as a “sangoma”, who wanted Joshlin for “her eyes and skin”.

A local pastor also testified that he had once heard Smith talk of selling her children for 20,000 rand ($1,100; £850) each, but would have been willing to accept a lower figure of $275.

“How do you sleep [and] live with yourself?” a devastated Amanda Smith-Daniels, who is looking after her other two grandchildren, asked her daughter in her victim statement on Wednesday.

Smith and her co-accused refused to take the stand during the six-week trial that began in March and was held at a community centre in Saldanha to allow the wider community to attend proceedings.

But as Joshlin’s mother heard the statements on Wednesday and saw the video clip, she sobbed uncontrollably.

Joshlin’s teacher, Edna Maart, described the little girl as a quiet pupil who was “very tidy”.

She said she struggled with daily questions from Joshlin’s schoolmates about her whereabouts.

Determined not to forget her, she said the class listened to her favourite gospel song God Will Work It Out at the start of every school day. It was also played to a teary courtroom on Wednesday.

To this day no-one knows what has happened to Joshlin.

Her disappearance on 19 February 2024 caused shockwaves across the country. Bianca van Aswegen, a criminologist and national co-ordinator at Missing Children South Africa, likened it to the case of Madeleine McCann, a British girl who went missing in Portugal in 2007.

Madeleine was aged three when she vanished from a holiday apartment in Praia da Luz in the Algarve – and hers is one of the most high-profile, unsolved missing person cases in the world.

Ms Van Aswegen told the BBC that while the trio’s conviction in Joshlin’s case had given people a sense of relief, “the matter of fact is that nobody knows where Joshlin is and I think that’s the big question that South Africa is still asking”.

A picture of Joshlin’s troubled life emerged during the trial – and a better sense of her personality during this week’s hearings ahead of sentencing.

She was born in October 2017, to Smith and her former partner Jose Emke, who broke down on Wednesday and had to be carried out of the courtroom.

Their second child – she and her older brother, now 11, had both suffered from neglect, according to a social worker who testified during the trial.

Growing up, Kelly Smith had lived with her maternal grandmother and had struggled with substance abuse since she was 15 – often becoming abusive towards her and her children when she was high, social workers said.

A report prepared by a social worker for the sentencing hearing paints a stark picture of Smith’s drug addiction at the time of Joshlin’s birth.

Her grandmother had kicked Smith out of the family home because of her drug use and she had threatened to stab her own son at that time.

The judge noted that it took Smith five months to register Joshlin’s birth – by law this must be done within 30 days – and had lived intermittently at a shelter for abused women.

When she went into rehab later on, family friend Natasha Andrews stepped in to care for Joshlin – and she and her husband had wanted to adopt her.

“We could have provided for her better than her mother,” Ms Andrews said during the trial, but the plans fell apart in 2018 as the parents “wouldn’t agree” to it.

Despite this, Joshlin often visited the Andrews family for weekends and school holidays and would go on trips with them.

The clip shown in court on Wednesday of Joshlin laughing was from one of those holidays and formed part of Ms Andrews’ victim statement.

She shared this and other photos of Joshlin playing with her own daughter because “so many people… don’t know what Joshlin sounds like”, she said.

It was this and her description of her family’s pain that sparked the greatest outpouring of emotion in the courtroom.

Joshlin grew up in a corrugated iron structure located in Middelpos informal settlement with her mother, her mother’s partner, her brother and younger half-sister.

The social workers’ report described the shack as offering “little in the way of privacy due to its highly restrictive living space”.

Smith did odd jobs to support her family, including part-time domestic work for Kelly Zeegers, who lived with her family in a nearby neighbourhood and paid her with groceries instead of cash.

“This is to make sure that she and the children have a plate of food,” Ms Zeegers said during her testimony.

Some witnesses did describe Smith as a good mother; her sister told the court Joshlin was the spitting image of her mum when she was young.

The little that is known of what happened to Joshlin on the day she disappeared is thanks to Laurentia Lombaard, who turned state witness. She had been at the shack smoking drugs with Appollis and Van Rhyn at the time.

She explained that Joshlin, who had started school a few weeks before her disappearance, and her brother had stayed at home that day because they did not have clean uniforms.

The children had been mainly left in the care of Appollis as Smith was in and out during course of the day, occasionally returning to smoke.

It is not clear exactly how or when Joshlin went missing but the trial established it was some time during the afternoon – but the preoccupation of most of the adults meant the disappearance was only reported to the police at 21:00.

The social worker appointed to compile the report on the trio ahead of their sentencing described Smith as “manipulative” and someone who told “bald-faced lies”.

“It is therefore not a stretch to conclude that Smith is the mastermind behind the trafficking of her own daughter,” he said.

Ms Van Aswegen said she hoped the trio would be given “a proper sentence” that reflected a growing crisis in child trafficking.

“It is much more of a crisis than police stats actually show us due to the fact of many cases going unreported,” she told the BBC.

She said what was unusual in Joshlin’s case was that it had captured the whole nation.

“I have never really seen a case blow up like this in South Africa before [and] neither have we seen such a big search for a missing child. I think social media played a big role [and] we had political parties get involved in the case.”

According to South African news site IOL, 632 children were reported missing last year and 8,743 over the past 10 years.

Earlier this month, police spokesperson Athlenda Mathe said many children were eventually reunited with their families.

Ms Van Aswegen said this showed that one could never give up hope and the search for Joshlin would continue.

This hope was reflected most by the Andrews family during the sentencing hearing.

A poem written by Ms Andrews’ 14-year-old daughter Tayla was also read out in court. It described her pain of not knowing what had happened to Joshlin and her hope that she was safe.

“We just want to hug you again,” Ms Andrews’ said in her statement. “You are our flower, our baby and our green-eyed child.”