We Are Not Such Things (13 page)

That day, Easy and I sat on a café patio across from the ocean. The clientele at lunch hour was mostly rich moms in yoga pants; their husbands worked and their maids cooked and cleaned, and so between school drop-off and school pickup, they practiced Pilates, ordered salads, and had chemicals applied to their hair and faces to look more youthful. Easy ordered a vitamin-C-enriched sports drink “for hydration,” and, deeming it the least complicated item on the menu, Chinese chicken. He tried to express to the teenage waitress that he wished only for the chicken element of the dish, minus vegetables or sauces, but she stared at him with wonder and he gave up. When his lunch arrived, he ate it daintily, picking out every sliver of red pepper and pineapple.

I started off with a long introduction, rambling on uncertainly until Easy looked at me, blew his nose, and said, not unkindly, “Just throw the question.”

At the time of our first meeting, journalists both foreign and South African had been snapping photos and asking Easy questions about Amy Biehl for eighteen years. Since 1993, he had been locked in a strange relationship with the press. I later realized that despite being the subject of much media scrutiny, he rarely consumed any news and therefore was largely unaware of and unconcerned by the various representations of him.

He had no idea that
The New York Times
called him “a small man, a little imp of a guy…his eyes are quick, set deep in his face, and can harden as fast as an African storm.” He had not read Nancy Scheper-Hughes’s article on suffering, published in a 1995 issue of the academic journal
Social Justice
, in which she detailed the scars etched on his young body, which told a “vivid story of township violence: stab wounds, brick bashings, machete chops, second-degree burns, scars from untreated infections and botched, discriminatory medical care.” In 1994, when the press crowded around the courthouse during the criminal trial for Amy’s murder, Easy emerged onto the steps and his face fell into a bashful smile, all the flashbulbs and attention on him. He wore a patterned wool sweater and a gold chain hung with a palm-sized medallion shaped like the African continent. He seemed to enjoy the taste of celebrity, no matter its origin, and he didn’t understand how his grin might be perceived. At the very least, he didn’t quite know what to do about all the flashing cameras except to say cheese.

Since then, Easy had forgotten how many people he’d spoken to. He gave them all similar quotes. He knew the drill. He was supposed to discuss issues facing the township, the power of forgiveness, his own shining rehabilitation, and the credit due his American benefactors, the Biehls. He was to juxtapose the old and the new, the radical and the reformed.

“At that time I was young and under the influence of the PAC,” he told an American journalist, referring to the Pan Africanist Congress, the political party upon whose orders he claimed he acted when killing Amy. “Now it’s democracy, and we understand each other. I’m happy, I’m free, I’m normal, I’m positive because of Makhulu and Tatomkhulu—they make me strong.”

“Politics can cost you your life, family, and everything important to you,” he explained to a reporter from New Zealand. “I decided it was time to look after myself and my family first.”

“I know that previous it was apartheid, so once the foundation come to us, I think, this is my dream, to seek to work for my people,” he explained, in halting English, to a grinning Katie Couric.

The Amy Biehl Foundation liked to sit visitors in a lightless back room and play an old
Dateline NBC
segment, “The Amy Biehl Story,” narrated by Diane Sawyer, followed by a documentary that celebrated the Biehls’ acts of forgiveness. Easy tended to duck out when the screen lit up; he could not bear to see his younger self on film. He had once asked a manager to stop playing the DVD to guests, but to no avail. Once, he’d been shocked to find a picture of his daughter in a Dutch magazine. Sure, some people came and snapped photos, but he hadn’t understood they’d be published.

“Please take the picture out,” he begged Linda, who informed him that she was not able to remove a print from a published magazine.

Since then, he’d only grown more accustomed and resigned to the media presence in his life. He was no longer thrilled by his little piece of fame. At this point, doing interviews was a way to please others, mostly his bosses at the foundation, who marched him out as a fundraising and public relations asset. Ntobeko had recused himself from such requests.

“I’ve lost my interest in journalists,” Ntobeko informed me on the single occasion he had agreed to speak with me, at Linda’s request. The breaking point, he said, was a 2005 article that began:
The mother of murdered US aid worker Amy Biehl attended the wedding of her daughter’s killer and danced with the groom
. The article contained a quote by Ntobeko, though he swore he’d never given an interview. Ever since then, he’d decided that he despised journalists.

“I don’t even read the news,” he added. “Lately, I’ve just been reading motivational speakers.”

Since Ntobeko refused to be paraded before the media, Easy was the foundation’s best chance at putting a face to their unique story. Plus, Linda often urged Easy to speak to journalists, and he could not refuse her. And then there were the journalists themselves, many like me, who came from so far and seemed so desperate and were so easily placated. How could he deny me, a sorry character who had been, at that point, begging him for a meeting for nearly two months?

Easy Nofemela was born on June 6, 1971, as Mzikhona Nofemela. Mzikhona’s literal Xhosa meaning is: “We have a home [through him].” Easy’s mother, Kiki, is from the Sotho ethnic group, and his father, Wowo, is Xhosa; the two met in Gugulethu in 1968.

“The time I see Kiki, I was only Kiki,” Wowo remembered. “I was running after her and try and try and try, and it work.”

Wowo was twenty-one. Kiki was thirteen. Within the year, she had given birth to their first son.

“If you can see her then, you can’t see she is young, but I was nearly in jail for that,” Wowo explained, forty-seven years later. “But I said to her family, ‘I do everything for her.’ And from that time, I not leave her.”

They married in 1970. Mzikhona, their second son, took on the nickname Easy, for his easygoing temperament.

“Easy come, easy go. Easy to accept pain. Easy to release the pain,” Easy once explained to me.

Only Kiki continued to call him Mzikhona, especially when she was cross. “Mmm-zee-KOH-na,” she would say loudly, her face stern, and Easy would hop to:
Sorry, sorry
. Then he’d usually do the same wrong thing, whatever it was, the very next day, and on and on into his forties, which is to say he never stopped getting in trouble with his mom.

Kiki had her generous breasts sucked dry by the stream of ravenous babies; she put peanut butter on her nipples to get them to leave her alone, but they still cried for more. Kiki fell pregnant with a girl, but endured a stillbirth late in the pregnancy.

“If that girl was living, I got eight children,” Wowo reflected.

In the end, she produced boy after boy, until she had borne six of them, from 1968 until 1982. She nearly died having her youngest child, to whom she gave birth alone while working as a maid; her boss returned home an hour later to find Kiki and the baby clinging to life in a pool of blood. Then there was an adopted son, the child of Wowo’s sister, who was raised as one of the brood, too, bringing the grand total in the Nofemela household to seven boys.

Other young cousins came to stay for weeks or even years, sent to Gugulethu from the rural parts of the country, or from other townships. They lay their blankets on the floor and helped with the washing and ate the dinners of samp, a cornmeal mush, boiled together with sugar beans and onions; meat on a good day; potatoes on a bad day; and pap, the pale cornmeal staple cooked into a porridge, for nearly every meal. Everyone drank their tea weak, made instant coffee with lukewarm water, and took three tablespoons of sugar, at least.

The seven brothers, and eventually their children, remained the center of Kiki and Wowo’s world. The main decor in the house was a framed, poster-sized collage of family photos, compiled with glue and cardboard by Wowo, a neat and precise retired gardener who also liked to sketch. In the middle, he had pasted a portrait of a young Wowo and Kiki, a sturdy and handsome pair in formal wear, staring out, unsmiling in the way of those unaccustomed to being the subject of a picture. Below, he pasted a large print of his own late parents and his wizened grandmother standing in a row on a tile floor, decades of hard labor and loss and crappy mattresses etched on their faces. Next to them, Wowo pasted a snapshot of Kiki’s late mother, glowing and vigorous, smiling next to a birthday sheet cake. Wowo inserted, wherever there was space, baby pictures of various grandchildren, often propped up on couches.

Then Wowo made a border around the photos, using large, rectangular grade-school portraits of each of his sons. They wore their V-neck sweaters and finest collared shirts and posed against blue backgrounds. Xola, the adopted cousin-brother, stands out against the rest, with his broad distinctive face and upturned nose. But the other six Nofemela boys, the genetic melding of Wowo and Kiki, are indistinguishable: dainty, light-skinned faces, little noses, almond eyes, full lips. The first time I saw the collage, I studied it, trying to pick out this boy from that. It proved impossible. It didn’t seem relevant to me then that I couldn’t distinguish one from the next, but it would become so later on.

Today, in their thirties and forties, the brothers all look different, adulthood having stretched and molded them into unique physical specimens. Easy is the shortest and most childlike, Martin the roundest, Vusumzi, the eldest and most imposing, Misiya the tallest, Gagi the most refined. And Mongezi—Monks, for short—is the most beautiful, with a smooth movie-star face, high cheekbones, and straight white teeth, punctuated with a single gold cap on the incisor. It is hard to tell his build or his height because he was paralyzed in 2009, thrown from a minivan taxi in the early morning hours, vertebra C4 injured.

These days, Monks often reclined in a stationary Ford sedan in front of the house. He had a compulsive fear of “fever,” though I later realized he was in fact terrified of contracting pneumonia, a common secondary ailment in paralyzed people, whose lungs are already compromised. He didn’t know why, but he sweat constantly, and he was concerned that the combination of damp sweat and a gust of cold air could cause him illness. Everyone was convinced that Monks could outwit pneumonia by staying very hot at all times, and so the rooms in which he convalesced were outfitted with heaters, and he was constantly shuttled between a sweltering bedroom, a sweltering TV room, and a sweltering automobile, parked in the noon sun. During much of the shuttling, everyone despaired of Monks, who was always making demands and barking orders. Wowo and all the brothers pulled out their backs monthly carrying Monks from bed to couch to car. Once, Easy had said to me, unaware of the reference to the song, “He is my brother, and he is
so
heavy.”

But back then, before they were marked by the ravages of time, those two Nofemela boys, Easy and Monks, looked just like each other. Months after our first conversations, for reasons I’ll probably never know, Easy gave me a photograph of the two of them that eventually helped me unravel a shred of the truth about what happened on that August day in 1993, the day of Amy’s death.

During Easy’s childhood, there were always too many people in a small space. There were two chocolates for ten kids, one shirt mended and handed down for twelve years, shared shoes and toothbrushes. The seven brothers were almost one organism, separated only by the corporal borders of flesh and bone. They slept together on a hay-filled sack, a pleasant experience of fraternal intimacy that had one big problem, according to Easy. Time and again, an unknown miscreant was “deep, deep dreaming that he is in the toilet.”

“Before we go to sleep, we talk, laughing, feeling great. But in the middle of the night, somebody is going to give you a dam of water.”