The Last Train to Zona Verde (6 page)

Everything they said seemed to me lame and baseless, yet they were freed because Amy’s parents, Peter and Linda Biehl, had flown from California, attended their hearing, and listened to their testimony. They said that their daughter would have wanted a show of mercy, since she was “on the side of the people who killed her.” The Biehls did not oppose the murderers’ being released from prison.

So the killers waltzed away, and two of them, Ntombeko Peni and Easy Nofomela, were — astonishingly — given jobs by the Biehls, working as salaried employees for the Amy Biehl Foundation, a
charity started by Amy’s forgiving parents in their daughter’s memory. Around the time I visited, the foundation had received almost $2 million from the U.S. Agency for International Development for being “dedicated to people who are oppressed.”

In 2001, a small cross had been placed near the gas station where Amy had been murdered, and on a crude signboard behind the cross was daubed
AMY BIHLS LAST HOME SECTION
3
GUGS
— misspelled and so crude as to be insulting.

Now I said to Phaks, “Take me there.”

The gas station was bigger and brighter than before. A new memorial, of black marble, much like a gravestone, had been placed on the roadside in front of it, on the fatal spot.

“They killed her right there,” I said. Phaks grunted, and we drove away. The wording bothered me. “What is ‘an act of political violence’?”

“Those boys, they had a philosophy.”

“What was it?”

“Africa for Africans — it was their thinking.”

“That’s not a philosophy. It’s racism.”

“But they were political.”

“No. They killed her because she was white.”

“They thought she was a settler.”

He had told me that one of the chants at the time had been “One settler, one bullet.”

“But South Africa was full of white people who were part of the struggle. They supported Mandela, they went to jail. Whites!”

“But those boys said they were sorry,” Phaks said. “They apologized
to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. And her parents, they agreed.”

“But what do you think her parents really felt?”

“I don’t know. But you can see, they got their name there.”

“And getting their name there makes up for the murder of their child?”

“It was political. The parents, they hired the boys to work for them,” Phaks said, and now I could see he was rattled, because he was driving badly along the busy broken township roads, muttering at the traffic, the oncoming cars cutting him off.

“Phaks, do you have children?”

“Four.”

“A daughter?”

He nodded — he knew what I was going to say.

“What would you do if someone beat your daughter to the ground and took a brick and smashed it against her head? Then stabbed her in the heart and left her to die?” He winced but remained silent. “Would you say, ‘That’s their philosophy. It’s a political act’?”

“No.”

“What would you think?”

“Myself, I wouldn’t accept.”

“What if they said sorry?”

Phaks was very upset now, so I shut up and let him drive, but he was still fretful from my badgering him and kept murmuring, “No, no. I can’t. Never, never.”
Nayvah, nayvah
.

The Amy Biehl Foundation had been founded to promote peace and mutual understanding. It had also been instrumental in improving the infrastructure of Guguletu — upgrading huts and bringing in utilities. Doing that was easier than peacemaking. According to data collected by the South African Institute of Race Relations, more than seven hundred people were murdered in Guguletu between 2005 and 2010. This amounted to one murder every two and a half days over those five years.

My challenging Phaks had had the effect of winding him up. Now he was contrary, as I had been, and he was batting the steering wheel with his palm, pointing out the graffiti, the litter, the men and boys idling at shop fronts and street corners, and perhaps with the memory of the boys who’d been released after murdering Amy Biehl he began to see insolence and misbehavior all over Guguletu.

“These kids don’t behave,” he said. “They are out of control. They show no respect — and you know why? Because they have too many rights. Everyone protects them! Even the government, even the barristers!”

“You mean they’re not punished?”

“Not at all. When I was at school, if I did something wrong, I got a hiding. Then I came home, and when I told my father what had happened, he gave me a hiding!”

“Was that a good thing?”

“A very good thing. It has an impact, I tell you. It taught me a lesson. But this” — he gestured out the window; idle boys were everywhere, standing, sitting, eternally waiting — “this is really killing us.”

“Not enough hidings,” I said, to encourage him.

“Listen to me,” Phaks said. “Here there is a constitution for children. Can you believe such a thing? If you take your belt and thrash the child, he can go to the police and lay a charge against you.”

“So what’s the answer?”

“A hiding is the answer,” he said. “Take the rapist in Khayelitsha the other day. Did you hear about it? He was beaten. He was stripped naked. I tell you” — Phaks whipped his fingers — “he was really given a good hiding. He was bleeding. That was not the end of it. While he was lying there, three women stood over him and urinated on his body. Ha-ha!”

Phaks was in a good mood now, calmed with this peroration on rough justice. And he pointed out that in this part of Guguletu there
were streets of new houses, like the streets earlier he had called “the Beverly Hills of Langa.”

Improbable, this upgrade — it all seemed a neatened version of what I’d seen at New Rest, fixed and improved and hopeful, the transition from slum to township, the structures braced and thickened and made whole. And after this long day of townships was done, anyone would conclude — I certainly did — that a solution to the squatter camps had been found. Hovels were made into homes, and a kind of harmony was established.

This was how, throughout history, cities had been built, the slums made into habitable districts of the metropolis, the gentrification of Gin Lane, the bourgeoisification of the Bowery. I thought of old prints I’d seen of sheep cropping grass in Soho Square in London, of shepherds following their flocks through the weedy ruins of nineteenth-century Rome, of cows grazing on Boston Common.

But the day was not done. We left the bungalows of Guguletu and took a side road into what looked like a refugee camp: thrown-together shelters, sheds covered with tin, skeletal frames patched with plastic sheeting and piled with boulders and scrap wood to prevent the sheeting from blowing away, pigpens, doghouses, crude fences draped with threadbare laundry. The shacks stood close together, with only foot-wide passageways between their outside walls. Smoke rose from cooking fires, lantern light glowed in the growing dusk, and improvised power lines hung overhead, like the web of a drunken spider, spun higgledy-piggledy, the visible images of string theory mapped in the twilit sky — squatters tapping illegally into the national grid.

This settlement was new, housing the most recently arrived people, land snatchers and hut makers and desperadoes. Some had arrived yesterday, more would arrive tomorrow, the shacks stretching for another mile across the dusty wasteland.

What looked like a refugee camp
was
a refugee camp — for the
poor fleeing the provinces, having renounced the countryside and the rural villages, just coming to squat at the edge of the golden city. They too wanted real homes, running water, and electricity. There was no end to this township: the hostels led to the shacks, the shacks to the hovels, the hovels to the roadside and the bungalows, and beyond the bungalows and the shebeens were the newcomers in the twig-and-plastic lean-tos, straggling across the flatland. No sooner had a solution been found than a new solution was needed. It was the African dilemma.

“People keep coming,” Phaks said. “There are more townships you have not seen — Bonteheuwel …”

As he was listing them I saw, chatting by the roadside, in the vilest corner of the squatter camp, three teenage girls in white blouses, blue skirts, knee socks, and matching black shoes on their way home from school. They held satchels that bulged with books and homework. They stood out vividly because of the whiteness of their blouses in the failing light — harmonious and hopeful and a little surprising, like the sudden blown-open blossoms you see in a stricken ditch.

It was growing dark, and I had to return to town. Phaks said, “But I haven’t shown you the last thing. It is a surprise.”

We drove back to Khayelitsha. Phaks’s surprise was a hotel, Vicki’s Place, run by a cheerful woman who advertised her home as “the smallest hotel in Africa,” just two rooms in a rickety two-story house. Many foreign journalists and travel writers had publicized Vicki’s Place. Vicki had the newspaper and magazine clippings, all mentioning her good humor, her effort, her enterprise in this township.

Phaks had yet another surprise: his van wouldn’t start. He sat wiggling the key in its slot, next to a fistful of wires he’d pulled out, hoping to find the problem.

“I’ll take the train,” I said.

“Bus is better.”

Ten years before I had wanted to take the train but had been discouraged from doing so by the clerk in the ticket booth.

“I’m taking the train,” I told Phaks.

He walked me through the back streets to the station and stayed with me and insisted on buying my ticket. When the train arrived we shook hands, we hugged, and he glumly said he’d have to return to his broken car.

“Keep your hand on your money,” he said.

The train was fairly empty because it was headed to the city. Returning from Cape Town, it would be full. I looked for potential muggers and, scanning the passengers in the car, caught the eye of the woman in the seat across from me.

“Why are you here?” she asked.

“Just looking.”

“Whites don’t come here. White people don’t live here,” she said with almost boastful conviction.

“But I’m here,” I said.

“Because you have that man to help you,” she said. She must have seen Phaks at the ticket office. She looked defiant, almost contemptuous. “You wouldn’t come here alone.”

“What are those lights?” I asked her, to change the subject, and pointed to the slopes of Table Mountain.

“Rondebosch, Constantia.” She had answered without looking up.

3
Cape Town
:
The Spirit of the Cape

N
OTHING, APPARENTLY
, is hidden in Cape Town: it is a city like an amphitheater. Its air breathing upon me sweetly, I sat in elegant, embowered, villa-rich Constantia, the district on the ridge I’d glimpsed the day before from the shacks of Khayelitsha. I was sipping a glass of sauvignon blanc in the majestic portico that was the tasting room of the main house at Constantia Glen Vineyard. From this vantage point I was able to see over the rim of my wine glass the poisonous cloud of dust that hung above the Cape Flats.

This visibility is one of the unusual features of Cape Town. The estates in its wealthiest enclaves, in the cliffy suburbs of the middle slopes of the mountain (Constantia, Rondebosch, Bishopscourt, Newlands), have views of the bleak horizontal profile of the suffering squatter camps and poor sprawling townships on the flatland below. The orderly green vineyards look down on brown muddled scrubland, and likewise, through the wide gaps in the plank walls or the rips in the blue plastic of the shacks in Khayelitsha it is possible
to enjoy a panorama of university buildings and colonnades bulking on the heights of leafy Rondebosch.

Gated communities all over these highlands display signs warning any unwelcome intruder of 24/7
MONITORING AND ARMED RESPONSE
, yet the poor have an unimpeded view of the rich, and vice versa. And each exposed person, squinting from this distance, looks passive and ubiquitous, like a sort of human vegetation.

The last time I’d been in Cape Town this winery did not exist — no vines, no casks, no activity except the mooing of cows. It had been a dairy farm, bought by an entrepreneur named Alexander Weibel, who’d had money and been interested in making wine. He plowed the hills and discovered that the land had clayey subsoil, had good water-holding capacity, and was rich in mica that would impart a “distinctive minerality,” as he called it, to the white wine. He planted vines, fenced them, staked them, pruned them. He invested in winemaking equipment, and in 2007 he had his first harvest. His wine was acclaimed. All this within ten years.

“I know that’s Khayelitsha,” I said, looking down at the townships on the Flats.

“And that’s Mitchells Plain,” the helpful woman in the wine-tasting portico told me. “And Guguletu, and over there, past Langa, is Bonteheuwel. Coloreds live there.”