We Are Not Such Things (18 page)

Soon after Easy told me of his plans to communicate his history to Aphiwe using me as a proxy, I arrived on the street below the foundation offices with a bottle of peppermint cough syrup, which Easy had requested for his perpetual cough, brought on, he told me, by a week-long binge on cheap brandy and spicy meat. We drove over to Cape Town’s old Company’s Garden, near the foundation’s office, a lush park set on the grounds cultivated by the first Dutch settlers of 1652 to provide fruit and vegetables to ships rounding the Cape and heading to Asia for the spice trade. The “Company” referred to the Dutch East India Company. Today, the garden is across the street from the courthouse where Easy was tried for murder.

We navigated our way past sprinklers, an ancient pear tree, and groups of yelping teenagers, and sat down on a bench in the gardens. Easy opened the lunch his mother had packed him, took out a chicken drumstick, ate it clean, and then winced in pain. Agony from his bleeding ulcer shot through him every once in a while, and he would grab on to some surface and bear it until it passed. I braced myself, biting my finger and watching until he turned to me and smiled brightly.

“We only have one hour,” he said. He had to be back to the office soon. “So let’s talk.”

“Okay, Easy,” I said. It was a warm day, and I had moved closer to him, out of the sun. “I want to talk about August 25, 1993. I want to talk about how, exactly, Amy died.”

“Eish,” he said, and mumbled something.

“Sorry?” I asked.

“I said, I love you so much right now,” he said.

“Why?”

“Because finally you ask the real questions.”

Easy was a member of the student wing of the Pan Africanist Congress of Azania, an offshoot of Mandela’s ANC. Though they had never garnered any significant percentage of the vote, the PAC had, over the years, kept itself intermittently newsworthy by committing violent acts—the most infamous targeting whites.

The ANC, founded in 1912, had steadily gathered the loyalty of most black South Africans, a loyalty it maintains today. By the 1950s, the formerly blacks-only party was actively reaching out to other races. They formed an anti-apartheid coalition comprised of a range of political groups, including Indians, black and white communists, left-wing whites led by several famous Jews and Afrikaners, moderate coloreds, and unionists and women’s rights organizations.

In 1955, the coalition, spearheaded by the ANC, adopted the Freedom Charter, a political document upon which the current South African constitution is broadly based. The Freedom Charter laid out the ANC’s core principles, from land reform to democratic government to workers’ rights and human rights. But the charter’s most notable commitment was to a “multiracial” South Africa. Its now famous preamble set forth the ANC’s belief that:
South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white….We, the people of South Africa, black and white, together—equals, countrymen, and brothers—adopt this Freedom Charter.

The apartheid government immediately categorized the Freedom Charter as a dangerous communist document and tried 156 coalition members—including Mandela and many of the country’s future leaders—on charges of treason. They were ultimately found not guilty, but would soon enough be tried for other crimes, and many would be imprisoned.

But the apartheid government was not the only group that took issue with the Freedom Charter. African nationalists within the ANC rejected the idea of multiracialism, which they felt could only result in further oppression: if you allowed nonblacks into the liberation movement, so the thinking went, they would only co-opt the Struggle for their own purposes. The PAC’s founder and president was a former member of the ANC Youth League named Robert Sobukwe.

Sobukwe was an elegant, fragile-looking schoolteacher, born to poor, uneducated parents in a little Karoo desert village so dominated by Afrikaners that a local cop, defending himself in a suit that alleged he had tortured a detainee, told the judge: “I come from Graaff-Reinet, where even the dogs bark in Afrikaans.” An organic intellectual, Sobukwe proved himself at the University of Fort Hare, the country’s only black university and Mandela’s alma mater.

When he went to college, Sobukwe was an obedient young Christian and as such he was supported in his studies by a pair of white missionaries. Having spent his youth focused only on God and grades, he had never questioned the country’s race relations, and so his initial intention was to become a civil servant. To reach this goal, he majored in “Native Administration,” which was the study and implementation of laws aimed at the black population. But as Sobukwe began reading, he witnessed the intricate structure of the apartheid government: its meticulously planned attempts at subjugating and ruining the black population, all in the erroneous, impossible name of “separate but equal.” Up until that point, Sobukwe had lived his life within the system, but he had never peered inside the machine and seen how it had been assembled to crush the black population. He forgot about becoming a bureaucrat and slowly waded into the dangerous field of activism. He joined the ANC, but, increasingly disappointed by its open policies, eventually founded the PAC.

In his inaugural speech on April 6, 1959, in Soweto, Sobukwe argued against multiracialism before a crowd of three thousand delegates. He called it “a pandering to European bigotry and arrogance” and “a method of safeguarding white interests.” Sobukwe then laid out the blueprint for his party. The political aim, he stated, was “a government of the Africans by the Africans and for the Africans.”

The state newspapers, censored and often vehicles for government propaganda, immediately characterized the PAC as a “powerful splinter group” of “extremist rebels,” expounding on “anti-white policy.” The ANC also took a grim view of their defectors. In his memoirs, the normally even-keeled Mandela called the PAC “immature” and “naive.” While the ANC and its allies initially sought to work in tandem with the PAC, the PAC seemed more interested in competing against the ANC for followers.

“Many of those who cast their lot with the PAC did so out of personal grudges or disappointments and were not thinking of the advancement of the Struggle, but of their own feelings of jealousy or revenge,” wrote Mandela.

This tension came into full contrast within a year of the PAC’s founding. In 1958, over 100,000 black men had been convicted and sentenced for infractions relating to passbooks, and a new law had passed, submitting black women, too, to the indignity of carrying a passbook. Since December 1959, the ANC had been meticulously planning a countrywide anti-pass campaign, during which black citizens would protest the pass laws.

The ANC’s campaign was scheduled to begin on March 31 the following year, so the fledgling PAC, which refused the ANC’s offer to work together, announced its own anti-pass campaign on March 21. Though protests took place across the country, the events in a township called Sharpeville put the PAC on the map and changed the course of South African history.

In Sharpeville, about fifty miles south of Johannesburg, a crowd of black civilians stood before a police station, remaining relatively peaceful and friendly, as Sobukwe had directed. But after several hours, the police arrested a demonstrator. Then the crowd, riled up, pushed against a barrier erected outside the station. Though the exact chain of events remains unclear, analysts and spectators believe that a single inexperienced policeman panicked and fired a lone shot, setting off a chain reaction of bloodshed. Most demonstrators were unarmed, but the police carried revolvers, rifles, and Sten guns, which they used to spray 705 bullets at the crowd, reloading and shooting for a full forty seconds. When the dust settled, sixty-nine black people had been killed, including forty women and eight children. Most of the dead had been shot in the back.

The images of the gruesome scene were a public relations disaster for the apartheid state. The photographs from that day are in black and white. In some, lifeless bodies of the unlucky, the slow, the first, the last, lie scattered on the same dry field or on the pebble- and bullet-strewn pavement. White policemen in pressed uniforms, guns holstered around their waists, survey the damage, leaning over to inspect victims, presumably to determine who is alive and who is dead. A woman, flanked by two friends in the uniforms of domestic workers, weeps into her hands as a barefoot boy looks on.

The United Nations Security Council recommended, for the first time, that South Africa abolish apartheid and strive for racial equality. The Johannesburg stock market plummeted and overseas investors got cold feet. Black citizens continued their protests, with the vast majority of black workers in Cape Town, Johannesburg, and Port Elizabeth staying home from work. A portion of anxious white South Africans, even those within the National Party, started to wonder about the efficacy of the approach to the “native question.”

Fearing riots, Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd, a charming, authoritarian man with a porcine face and short white hair, declared a State of Emergency and invoked martial law. Verwoerd, who had invented the homelands, was so devoted to a separation of the races that he would have sacrificed almost anything for his project to succeed. “Rather poor and segregated than rich and integrated,” he once announced.

The PAC and ANC were deemed illegal communist organizations; the punishment for membership was prison or a steep fine. Leaders were rounded up and imprisoned, starved, and humiliated. People were detained without charge. Meetings were banned, as was making anything that could be deemed a “subversive statement.” Many fled into exile.

By 1963, Sobukwe was serving time on Robben Island, the two-mile-long tract of rock and sand set in Table Bay, nine miles off the Cape Town coast, where rebellious Khoikhoi had been sent three centuries earlier. Sobukwe, unlike all the other prisoners, lived in isolation. His wife and his four children were rarely able to visit. He was continually resentenced under what Parliament called “the Sobukwe Clause,” which allowed them to detain a prisoner indefinitely. Upon Sobukwe’s release in 1969, he was banished to house arrest in the northern mining city of Kimberley, where he died in 1978 of lung cancer. His appeals to seek treatment in the advanced hospitals of Johannesburg had been denied for too long.

Founded in 1961 in reaction to Sharpeville, Poqo (meaning “pure” in Xhosa) became the PAC’s armed wing. Poqo was a disorganized assembly of militant Africanists, stoked by fury and desperation and armed with machetes and stones. In contrast to Sobukwe’s peaceful ideals and intellectualism, an early Poqo pamphlet read, “The white people shall suffer, the black people will rule. Freedom comes after bloodshed.”

Poqo members—and whether the group was organized enough to boast legitimate members remains debatable—took to killing black informers and policemen within the townships. In 1962, a destitute bunch of Poqo-affiliated men in the farming town of Paarl, an hour from Cape Town, attacked homes, shops, and the police station, and killed two white civilians. A few months later, members murdered two young white girls and three white adults in the Eastern Cape. In the 1960s, 101 political prisoners were executed by hanging, 100 of them black and 61 of them aligned with Poqo.

By 1967, Poqo, fractured by shoddy leadership, reinvented itself as the Azanian People’s Liberation Army, or APLA. Azania, an ancient Greek term for parts of Southern Africa, had been adopted by several black nationalist groups as a noncolonial name for South Africa. Mzi, my friend, guide, and translator, who had attended the twentieth anniversary of Amy’s death, was a card-carrying APLA veteran, and Easy and Ntobeko, as well as their codefendant Mongezi Manqina, claimed to have been aligned with APLA in the 1990s.

“I love you so much right now,” Easy said, sitting on the bench in the Company’s Garden. Then he began to recount what had happened on August 25, 1993.

He was rail-thin and round-faced, his hair trimmed into a short Afro, pimples dotting his cheeks, a caterpillar of a mustache sprouting above his lips. He had turned twenty-two a couple of months earlier but could easily have been mistaken for a fourteen-year-old. He had spent a total of eight months in Transkei homeland in APLA camps, in 1987, 1989, and 1990, training to shoot AK-47s.