We Are Not Such Things (19 page)

“Can you take me to see the training grounds?” I asked.

“Is very risky. The PAC people who are still there might kill me.”

In August 1993, Easy and PAC comrades had been moving from shack to shack, deep in the informal settlements. The cops were a constant threat to young militants, and an arrest guaranteed a beating or worse, but Easy wasn’t deterred.

“Then, I never feel scared,” Easy said.

“And now?”

“Now, I fear a car crash. And if I party too much, I think maybe someone will want to fight me but I can’t protect myself, so I go home early. Also: tsunami.”

The night before Amy was killed, Easy had only slept for a couple of hours on the dirt floor of a tin shack deep within Khayelitsha, among seven other boys. They had wrapped themselves in heavy coats to keep out the cold and kept on their sneakers in case they had to run at a moment’s notice. Beneath their outer layers, they wore green T-shirts emblazoned with the PAC logo: a map of a jet-black Africa, with a gold star on Ghana—the first African nation to achieve independence from colonial powers in the twentieth century—and gold lines radiating out across the continent.

Nobody in the townships had been to school in eight days, since a teachers’ strike had begun. Funding for black schools had been cut. The regional black teachers’ union wanted better pay and better resources for their schools, and they had decided to stay home and force the weakening white government’s hand.

When Easy awoke early in the morning, a young girl was stirring pap over a coal stove. She was a member of PAC, too, assigned to move around the neighborhood undetected, to cook and care for the male militants. She had already fetched a basin of water from the tap down the road. The boys washed, ate the dry pap, rolling it with their hands, drank tea, and shared cigarettes. Then they took off through the depths of Khayelitsha, slinking through the thin alleys between tin shacks.

They made their way quietly so as not to alert impimpis, informers; impimpis were everywhere, down on their luck and in need of a few bucks from a policeman. They walked in a line out onto the main road, where makeshift businesses had cropped up: a man butchering a sheep, a deli with a limited inventory of cool drinks and sweets, a line of colorfully painted barbershops, each boasting a few plastic chairs, a tub of grease, a comb, and a pair of scissors. After twenty minutes of hiking, the boys arrived at their destination: the run-down train station. They boarded an old train that snaked slowly from Khayelitsha past Gugulethu and into Langa.

Once on the train, Easy and his comrades bounced from car to car, toyi-toyi-ing: they raised their fists in the air and sang freedom songs. The train was full of commuters, and some of the passengers joined the boys in song. Soon a fair-sized group had formed, and they danced and sang around the train, picking up anyone else who might be in the mood for a protest. When the train pulled into the station, the group hopped off and headed for their assembly point at Langa Secondary School.

At around 10
A
.
M
., Easy and his friends landed at the school, a glum brick block surrounded by rusty barbed wire. The school had been empty for the past week, but now the barren sports field was filled with people gearing up for the PAC student rally. A banner with the PAC map had been hung between two high sticks, and hundreds, maybe thousands, of people were arriving, kids from all the schools in the area. Easy waved to his friend Ntobeko, who had just been elected chairperson of the Langa Secondary School PAC student organization. At around eleven, an emcee strode out in front of the crowd, microphone in hand.

“Izwe lethu!”
the emcee yelled. Our land!

“Africa!” the crowd responded.

“High discipline!” the emcee chanted.

“High morale!” the crowd replied.

Another young man took the stage. “One settler, one bullet,” he hollered furiously, and the crowd erupted. In other words, the death of each white person would help them reclaim their land.

“One settler, one bullet,” the crowd repeated.

“Settler! Settler! Bullet! Bullet!” the leader cried as the crowd cheered. “One settler, one bullet. One bullet, one settler!”

More youth leaders made their way into the center of the field. Before the throbbing crowd, the leaders discussed their aims to make South Africa “ungovernable.” Since the success of the minority white government’s policies required, in part, compliance on behalf of the subjugated majority population, that majority would refuse to comply and thereby force the government to confront a new reality. They couldn’t control the people if the people refused to be controlled—or at least, it would be exceedingly difficult to do so.

“We are black tigers,” the leaders said in Xhosa. The young crowd cheered. “There is no time to negotiate. Enough! Go liberate the country!”

“My spirit was brewing,” Easy told me, sitting on the bench by the old pear tree. He took in a breath, and smiled at the memory. “I was feeling like, why not?”

By noon, Easy and his comrades were ready to march through the streets. They gathered together and prayed to their ancestors and to their gods to guide them, to keep them safe, and to bring them victory against their oppressors. Then they left the school yard in deliriously high spirits.

In Langa, they saw a truck driving in from the city, and pounced on it. They stopped the truck, forming a ring around it, and ordered the black driver to get out and walk away. Then they siphoned the gas out of the fuel tank and poured it around the overturned truck. The truck was carrying furniture, and they helped themselves to some chairs and sofa sets. As they were about to light a match, an armored vehicle filled with white policemen arrived, shooting, and the group split. One half took off to Langa train station and the other to Bonteheuwel. Easy and Ntobeko boarded the homebound train at Langa. Along with their friends, they began to sing again. The train cars shook. People coming back from work joined in ecstatic freedom songs.

“I was feeling like liberation is close,” Easy recalled. “To bring our land back to the right owners.”

Easy and Ntobeko jumped off at the Heideveld train station off NY111. From the station, Easy claimed, they hopped into the back of an old man’s bakkie. They bounced down the road until they saw some kids who had taken the Bonteheuwel train dancing in the distance, swelling, a force of nature moving through the streets, unstoppable.

“Settler, settler!”

When Easy first saw Amy, she was crossing the street, a pack of people following her. She was bleeding from her face. Easy and Ntobeko hopped off the bakkie and ran into the crowd. Along with a small group that had broken away from the larger mass, they cornered Amy by the petrol station. She was trying to get away. Some asked for knives, and people gave them freely. They were standing above Amy, just inches from her. Easy kept a switchblade in his sock, so he was prepared. The men beat her, kicked her, punched her, and stabbed her. She did not die.

Amy pulled herself up again. That’s when the police vehicle, driven by Officer Leon Rhodes, came flying over the sidewalk. Again, the group scattered. But Easy stayed on, pressed to the side, arms crossed, slipping into the back of the group. “I’m standing, looking, yes, feeling good,” he said. “We implement one settler, one bullet.”

He watched as Amy walked to the police vehicle, which would take her to the police station. “That is where she lose her life.” Why, Easy had always wondered, did they ferry her to the station? Why didn’t they take her to the hospital? “She could be alive, just police take time to take her to the hospital. Doctor said if they run to hospital she could be alive but they take time. She stay there and lose her life.”

“Easy, did you see her face?” I asked. “When you stood above her?”

He shook his head. Her hair was so long that it covered her eyes, he said. Her arms were up as she tried to shield herself. She was blocking the blows, one by one. Easy put his hands in the air, miming her. He stopped five imaginary blows, as if in slow motion. The blows were perhaps not the only imaginary elements of this story, but I didn’t know that then.

“She stabbed only one time,” Easy said. He looked incredulous. He reached across the bench and touched me on the top of my left rib cage, softly. “Here.”

That first time, listening to him, and for months after, I thought he meant: after such an onslaught, it was remarkable that Amy sustained only one stab wound. It did not occur to me to wonder if Easy’s story was accurate, because why would anyone admit to an act he hadn’t committed—and in such detail?

It was only later that, when I started to piece together the different strands of what happened that day, I realized that I might have been wrong. When I looked through my notes, and then through old interviews and press statements dating back to the murder trial, I realized that Easy had been pointing, in his own purposely tangled way, toward a possible different “truth” about what had happened that day. He’d been doing it for twenty years, and perhaps to relieve the boredom and amuse himself, he mixed it up once in a while. But no one—not the police, not the prosecutors, not his own defense counsel, family, or friends, not the journalists—had been listening. The narrative of August 25, 1993, had quickly taken shape and was to remain stuck in the same mold for twenty years, and Easy and everyone else had gone along with it.

“Amy, she was very strong,” he said, shaking his head. “Amy, she was very, very, very strong. Strong more than people think.”

Rhoda Kadalie was Amy’s old mentor, and the woman who had warned Amy against going into the townships. In an early issue of the Amy Biehl Foundation newsletters, Rhoda had written an essay about her love for Amy. She had at one time served on the foundation’s board, and had been widely quoted in the media. She had not supported amnesty for Amy’s killers, but she seemed to admire the Biehls. I assumed they were friends and I expected Rhoda to be open to an interview. Instead, I received an immediate denial:
Dear Justine, Whatever I had to say about Amy has already been captured on all kinds of media. I am estranged from this family and do not wish to be interviewed. Kind regards, Rhoda.

I called the number on her email signature and the receptionist patched me through to Rhoda, who picked up on the first ring and listened to my rushed introduction. Then she let out a huff.

“I’m sick of it!” she exclaimed.

“Sorry?”

“I’m sick of it, I’m sick of this wretched country!” she hollered, rolling her Rs. “I’m so cynical. This wretched country!”

“Well…If you won’t talk about Amy, would you talk to me about your cynicism?”

Rhoda let out a laugh. “I might be in an even worse place then, but okay, come next week.”

Six days later, I arrived at Rhoda’s office on Adderley Street, downtown’s main thoroughfare, named for a British Conservative politician who in the mid-1800s had successfully staved off plans to turn the Cape into a penal colony. It was several blocks from the Amy Biehl Foundation, and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission had rented its regional headquarters here in the late 1990s. From her office overlooking the city, Rhoda ran a small NGO that provided grants to innovative social endeavors.

Rhoda greeted me from behind a desk piled with manila folders, holding her finger up in a “wait” signal as she schmoozed a donor on the phone. She was a short, sturdy woman with glossy black hair, glossy pale brown skin, glossy pink lips, and rectangular glasses. She looked a decade younger than her fifty-eight years and was wrapped in various high-quality textiles in different shades of gray. Her office was chilly and spacious, warmed by a large electric heater, decorated with heavy green drapes, and brightly lit. A photograph of Rhoda whispering into an attentive Mandela’s ear was hung near a picture of her daughter at her college graduation.

“To tell you the truth, we have no money,
none
,” Rhoda said over the phone. “We need your help.” Hearing an affirmative answer, she smiled broadly. Soon enough, she hung up the phone, unwrapped a chicken salad sandwich, and pumped up the heater. She turned to me.

“I despair about South Africa,” she said. “It will go down deep before it goes up.”

Rhoda was a born contrarian, the granddaughter of the famous Malawian immigrant Clements Kadalie, a trained teacher who, after being senselessly assaulted by a policeman as he walked along a street in South Africa, became an activist and the founder of one of the country’s first labor unions.

In 1993, Rhoda was a card-carrying member of the ANC. Now she was a card-carrying member of the moderate-right opposition party, the Democratic Alliance. Once Mandela’s human rights commissioner, she now wrote weekly columns for the Afrikaans-language daily
Die Burger
, criticizing the ANC and bemoaning politics and society. She also spoke at various universities, where she paced back and forth in front of lecture halls, shouting, “I don’t want these fuckers to govern me!”

Rhoda claimed to want to move to America and stop reading the newspapers. Her daughter and son-in-law, with Rhoda’s granddaughter, had settled in California. Rhoda swore that she was ready to relocate to the Golden State any day now. There she would slip quietly into her retirement years, reading novels, playing with her curly-haired progeny, and living in a garden flat. All she had to do was sell her house, and then she’d have precisely no problem leaving, no problem whatsoever.