Joshlin Smith Mother Sentenced For Selling Her

• By Staff Reporter
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• May 30, 2025

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 life sentence given to 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 convicted and sentenced 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, asked her daughter in her victim statement on Wednesday. She now looks after Smith's oldest child and the youngest stays with her father.

Smith and her co-accused refused to take the stand during the eight-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".

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