We Are Not Such Things (29 page)

Once, she had presumably liked the schism. When she arrived in South Africa, even though she did so as the result of a tragedy, the country was in the midst of rapturous change, and she had been swept up in that glory. “Free at last! Free at last!” people yelled. The leaders of the righteous revolution, the country’s liberators, had embraced Linda Biehl of Geneva, Illinois, as their own, and she had suddenly been elevated to a figure in the transformation from apartheid to democracy. She had been offered a place in world history.

But after two decades, South Africa was mired in scandal and disappointment. Linda was one of millions who had dreamed of a soaring new nation and had seen the place instead falter under heady expectations, endemic corruption, flagging economic growth, debilitating rates of unemployment, excessive levels of crime, and persistent racism. There is an impossibility to South Africa, an undercurrent of aggression and tension that flows beneath the surface and bogs down everything, and Linda was up against it.

In 1997, USAID, the American government foreign aid program, had approached the Biehls and offered them significant funds to set up a foundation. But the agency only agreed to provide funding for a set number of years. By the time Peter died, in 2002, the funding had come to a close and Linda was alone with dozens of employees and no source of cash. South Africa was no longer a cause célèbre; the world had refocused its sympathies. Linda, shocked by Peter’s sudden death but keenly aware that staff members and a community depended on the foundation, returned to South Africa. She sustained the organization, using foundation savings for salaries and expenses, until 2005, when they had to get serious about raising dough.

The timing was tricky: Linda had to double down on her devotion to the foundation just as her kids in the States were having more children themselves. She was by then heading into her sixties and traveling nonstop. She felt guilty about abandoning her children.

Linda told me immediately, and repeatedly, how she disapproved of her foundation manager, Kevin Chaplin—a disapproval that, over the years, would grow into what seemed to me to be unadulterated fury. Kevin was tall and soft-bodied, with a slight brown mullet, a weak chin, and a shiny white face that was arranged into a permanent toothy grin. He had a closetful of crisp pastel dress shirts, wore a gold watch, and drove a luxury SUV. He bounded rather than walked, clapped flamboyantly whenever he had a good idea, and spoke at top volume, with a rolling trill of an accent.

“I was a provincial bank manager when I was forty-one,” he told me. “The U.S. ambassador called me up and said, ‘I want you to meet Peter Biehl,’ so I went to his office and I was so impressed with him.” Peter died soon after.

Kevin claimed that he had stayed involved with the foundation on a volunteer basis, and then one day Linda called him. “She said, ‘It’s no pressure, but if you don’t take over, I’ll have to close the foundation down,’ ” he told me. So in 2006, he quit his bank job and took over as managing director of the Amy Biehl Foundation. Kevin was a self-professed “catalyst for change.”

When I spoke with Kevin, he spent a portion of our meeting gazing at his wall, hung with medals, awards, and framed pictures of him with his arm slung around a diverse bunch of luminaries and everyday people, and he hollered merrily for the foundation’s receptionist to come in and rearrange them. He bemoaned the lack of integration in South African society and recounted taking his old bank colleagues for a luncheon in Gugulethu, a prospect at which they initially balked and for which they later thanked him.

“Ninety-eight percent of white South Africans and coloreds have never been in townships,” he said, snapping his fingers.

“Where does that number come from?” I asked.

“It’s just something I say!”

Kevin referred to Archbishop Desmond Tutu as “Arch,” and considered the bishop a friend. He said his mentor was the supermarket magnate Raymond Ackerman, a founder of South Africa’s Pick n Pay supermarket chain. He considered Ntobeko Peni his protégé.

In his spare time, Kevin ran a series of networking breakfasts intended to bring together entrepreneurs of different colors. As soon as I sent him a single email, I was added to his Listserv and for years received invitations to attend these breakfasts. The guest speakers spoke on topics such as “Cultural Warmth,” “How to Lead in Challenging Times,” and “Embracing Diversity and Inclusion in the Workplace.” To hear their words of wisdom, you simply paid 150 rand and showed up at this hotel or that conference center. The buffet breakfast was included.

These days, whatever love had once existed between Kevin and Linda had been lost, and the two were engaged in a complex, transatlantic power struggle, with Linda at the losing end. She and her board had appointed Kevin to his post but contact had since broken down. These days, she complained that her emails went unanswered and her suggestions unheeded. Linda worried that the foundation was merely an employment base for people with their own personal agendas. She feared that Amy’s spirit had been washed away.

“Kevin wants the power and the name,” she said.

Linda began to speak openly of her growing disdain for Kevin, telling a newspaper and a radio show that they disagreed on the direction of the foundation. Publicly, he kept mostly mum. In July 2012, when I joined Linda at the office, Kevin had planned a European family holiday for the weeks during which Linda would be around. In 2013, on the twentieth anniversary of Amy’s death, the two were openly at odds.

In the mid-1990s, the Biehls had written out a statement of purpose, printed near a photo of smiling Amy balancing a water jug on her head:
The Amy Biehl Foundation seeks to encourage the peaceful study, understanding and practice of democratic principles in the lives of people and nations. Special recognition is given to gender rights and to full participation of women in the democratic process.

To Linda’s dismay, the Amy Biehl Foundation no longer aimed for such a goal. The waning media attention focused, largely, on Linda’s remarkable relationship with Easy and Ntobeko. More problematic was the fact that, after a series of negative experiences, Ntobeko usually refused to give interviews. Easy, meanwhile, agreed to speak to reporters, but then skipped his appointments. He also struggled with English, which he spoke with a heavy accent. In this way, the foundation slipped closer to obscurity.

By the late aughts, the foundation, under Kevin’s tutelage, stuck to a single purpose: to provide after-school programs on the Cape Flats, where two thousand underprivileged children danced, played the marimba, drew, or practiced reading. To make some extra money, the foundation offered visitors a tour of the townships and of their programs for $50 a pop.

I never had to pay to see the programs, and I was allowed to travel along with the tourists a couple of times. On my first jaunt, I accompanied a group of Eastern Europeans, who obsessively clicked and snapped away on their iPhones and iPads and Canons and Nokias and Sonys and flip-cams. The kids, hoping for attention or free pens or lollipops or hats, tripped over themselves to look extra adorable for the tourists. Township children had learned immediately to break into poses whenever a lens was trained on them. Seeing white folks hop out of a van, the kids arranged themselves into a delightful human pyramid.

“Everyone say I love—” a tourist ordered.

“Numeracy!” half the group hollered.

“Jesus!” the other half shouted.

The kids flashed peace signs. They screamed, “Cheeeeese, cheeese!”

The Eastern Europeans were taken to a dance class, and for unknown reasons I was shuffled into a room full of ten-year-old girls, who looked at me expectantly. The local staff was accustomed to showing foreigners these cute Gugulethu kids who were benefiting from the Amy Biehl Foundation programs, and the kids hammed it up.

“So, what are your names and how old are you?” I asked, at a loss. There was no teacher in sight. “What stories do you like?”

Princess and the Pea. Cinderella. Mickey Mouse. Dora the Explorer. Hannah Montana.

They were eager to practice their English. They were buoyant. Finally, their teacher, a twenty-three-year-old beauty with copious rouge and long braids, entered the room. She was fit and impeccably groomed. One little girl, frowning, reported something in Xhosa.

“She is saying to me, ‘Why did I bring this woman who is saying swear words?’ ” the teacher informed me.

I felt my face go red.

“Sorry? We just talked about their names and ages.” I imagined a scandal in which a debased American was accused of teaching innocent South African children nasty terminology.

“I believe that she is saying you said swear words because she does not understand one thing in English!” the teacher said. She glared at my accuser, who crossed her arms.

“We talked about fairy tales,” I said, scanning my young audience.

“Yes, we did,” one girl, my sudden ally, said.

“Speaking of fairy tales,” the teacher said, dismissing the incident and looking at the girls, “tell me about your fairy-tale wedding.”

My defender blushed, confused.

“There must be a cake,” the teacher said. Weddings were on her mind. “And a groom! A groom. A man. A man and a woman, okay? No woman and woman. You marry a man.” The girls leaned in, wide-eyed. “You get a dress.”

“The white dress,” I said, happy to divert attention to more pleasant matters.

“Can the dress be pink?” the teacher asked me. Suddenly, I was a wedding expert. The little girls were captivated.

“It can be whatever color you want. It’s your wedding. I like cream.”

“Cream? Cream is okay?”

“Cream is
in
.”

“But how do I get the man?” the teacher asked. Now she looked deflated. “How do I get a proposal?”

“Threaten him. Tell him he commits or he’s out!”

“But what if he doesn’t come back?”

“He must! He must come back!”

The teacher wanted me to stay and counsel her on matrimonial dos and don’ts, about which I knew precisely nothing. But Easy was standing at the door, beckoning me to come along with him. I looked at my wee accuser; in a different sort of situation, she could have brought me down. At moments like that, my whiteness, my foreignness, my otherness, seemed like a grave liability. All the safety and calm that I enjoyed in the townships were exposed as fragile constructs that could be toppled.

In addition to its after-school programs, the foundation also put on summer camps and took kids swimming at the Sea Point pool overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. The kids attended traditional African dance classes, and the worst dancer in the room, a five-year-old, embarrassed me with her prolific talent. The kids also received charitable lessons from fancy schools in the suburbs, where flute teachers and ballet teachers offered their services once a week. With the exception of these outings, most of the kids rarely left the township.

The obstacles to going to town were often insurmountable for your average township parent. Specialized music or art lessons were a distant dream. Amusement parks and botanical gardens and fairs—all of which were set in the city or its suburbs—cost money. You also had to have the energy to spend your free day taking kids on an expedition, which usually involved walking some distance to a minivan taxi, loading them in and out, and traipsing to your destination, carrying what you needed. Consider also the fact that most households were brimming with children: could you really take two and leave six behind?

The logistical and financial difficulty of taking a child to a park—or a music or dance lesson—was compounded by the fact that grandmothers often ran households; they were in their sixties and seventies, and from a time when such activities were inaccessible to black people. If parents ran the households, they often worked long and exhausting weeks at low-paying jobs, and had to spend any free time cleaning, shopping, doing laundry, ironing school uniforms, and cooking. All of these factors combined to mean that without programs like those run by the Amy Biehl Foundation, thousands of township kids would spend their summers and after-school hours either watching television, playing on the streets, or getting into trouble.

Linda knew that the kids, who had nowhere else to go after school or on holiday, enjoyed the programs. But these programs had little to do with her initial vision of a foundation devoted to nurturing Amy’s passions: women’s rights, racial equality, democracy. How did the foundation in its current state reflect her daughter or the Biehl family values?

“Amy’s legacy is not after-school programs in Gugulethu,” Linda said. “It should be a much broader, more intense, rigorous kind of environment that can lead to more international understanding.”

Without the strong, warm leadership of a committed Peter and Linda, the foundation seemed to lose some of its moorings. In one incident, Kevin attempted to sell expensive vitamin juice to board members. In a lengthy 2012 email to two of Linda’s close friends and supporters of the foundation, Kevin detailed the miracle of Juice Plus.

Since taking the product I have never felt better and [my wife] too….[My wife] has been on Menopause tablets and her skin has been constantly coming out in a rash, but since taking this product it has cleared up for the first time and stayed clear. One of my customers in France who has been on it for 3 months recently sent me an sms to say thank you so much, it is working so well. I met a British Headmaster who, through stress as kids got naughtier at school and life more complicated, was constantly getting colds and heartburn, but since taking Juiceplus for about 8 years he has never had colds or flu or heartburn.

The message was set above a signature identifying Kevin as the managing director of the Amy Biehl Foundation. Upon finding out about it, Linda forwarded it to me. “Talking about his wife’s menopause rash!” she exclaimed desperately.

Foundation employees expended energy on strange endeavors. Nonmanagerial staff, for example, were usually required to spend Friday mornings at Pick n Pay supermarkets across town, hawking Amy’s Bread and Amy’s Wine to bored shoppers. These were items made by local bakeries and wineries that had entered into partnership with the foundation and gave a small portion of their profits as a charitable donation. Once, in the course of an interview, I accompanied a worker to a downtown location. He was a middle-aged black man in a largely white market. He looked small, bored, and humiliated. “I am here for the Amy Biehl promotions,” he said uncertainly to a supermarket manager. The manager gave him the side-eye and shrugged his shoulders, so we walked over to the bread aisle and the staffer stood awkwardly by the orange packages containing loaves seemingly identical to those in blue packages but priced slightly higher.
Amy’s Bread
, each package said,
The bread of hope and peace
. The staffer, who had been doing this for over ten years, tried limply to interest a few women who were eyeing other loaves.