Saturday Mthiyane On Monday Mystery...!

Stories of children being raised by wild animals are unusual, but not unheard of. This story from Listverse shows just how strange a tale of this kind can be.

Saturday Mthiyane

Photo credit: earthweek.com

In 1987, residents of Sundumbili, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, discovered a young boy about five years old living in the wild. He had a broken leg and displayed animal-like behavior.

Those who found him took the boy to the nearest police station. From there, he was taken to a school for disabled children where he was given the name Saturday Mthiyane: Saturday because that’s the day on which they discovered him, and Mthiyane because this was the last name of the principal of the school.

He displayed violent tendencies toward the other children in the school, hitting them and refusing to play with them. He used windows to get in and out of the building and stole raw red meat from the fridge.

Experts believed that the boy may have been raised by monkeys in the wild, conjuring up an image of a scene from The Jungle Book. The boy also dug holes in the ground, had a penchant for bananas, and loved tossing food into his mouth. Ten years after he was found, Saturday only had one friend at the school, still didn’t speak, and hadn’t been sick once.

While it is obvious that Saturday was abandoned or perhaps got lost, his mother was never found. His reason for being raised by animals in the wild remains a mystery. In 2007, Saturday died in a fire, his story forever unresolved.

This boy seemed to have been treated well by the monkeys that raised him and that alone makes him better off than many children today...sad, but true.

Coffee out on the patio, if we can beat the rain.