We Are Not Such Things (35 page)

Since his brother Steyn was a member of the APLA trio, Mzi followed the case carefully. Later, when I flipped through the thousands of pages of evidence and testimony, I came upon a number of bail-out forms, all signed in a neat hand:
Mzwabantu Mzi Noji
. Mzi looked on as Terry, the young boy released into his mother’s care, skipped town, and he cheered when the APLA trio was released for lack of evidence. At the very least, he believed that Steyn hadn’t been part of it. His brother was a fighter, but he’d have told Mzi if he’d been at Amy’s murder scene. It was something to be proud of, not something to keep secret.

“Oh yes, back then, the dream of every black boy was to kill a white,” Mzi told me.

Mzi went through the day of August 25 with me, as he knew the tale. There had been five hundred or a thousand students at Langa Secondary School, both pro-ANC kids and pro-PAC kids. It was the Year of the Great Storm. It was Operation Barcelona. The student leaders made speeches and released a wave of kids out to the streets to cause mayhem. In Langa, they stoned some vehicles and got shot at by the police—nothing out of the ordinary for township protesters in the 1990s. The group then spontaneously split into two, each fleeing the cops and heading to a different train station. One group hopped the first train at Bonteheuwel and got out at Heideveld station in Gugulethu. The other group hopped the second train at Langa and arrived in Gugulethu ten minutes later. This, so far, was consistent with what Easy had told me, and with what I’d read in court and in the TRC transcripts. The later group marched up the street to NY1 to join the earlier group, which was dancing and singing and marching and in the troublemaking mood. One by one, kids broke off, turning onto their streets and going to their homes. There was only a core bunch left at the end. Most of that core lived around NY111 and NY119, since those were the last streets before Gugulethu’s border. This was supposed to be the end of the rally; it just turned out, by chance, to be its historic moment.

Amy, accompanying her friends, came across the angry boys, chanting “One settler, one bullet.” The kids stoned her car. She panicked and she ran, and that’s when they killed her.

“Did you hear this from Steyn?” I asked.

“No, I heard from the others,” Mzi said. “Steyn, he was not at the march. He was busy with other activities.” It turned out that the preoccupying activities he was busy with on that day, and all days it seemed, were smoking dagga and jogging, his lifelong passions.

“So who that you know was in the march?”

“Ntobeko was a leader of one batch of students, guiding them down the road. Mongezi Manqina, the one who stabbed her, he was there. The other one, Mongezi’s friend Vusumzi, he was there. Easy—” Mzi paused. He looked up.

“Actually,” he said slowly, “Easy was not in the march.”

“Sorry?”

Mzi was nodding to himself. “No, Easy wasn’t there,” he repeated. “There was an old man who owned a small shop called Viveza nearby. He paid good money to local boys who would help him go to the wholesaler and load up groceries into his bakkie. So on that day, Easy was with the old man. He was at the morning rally, but by the afternoon he was in the bakkie.”

“Easy wasn’t in the march?” I asked.

“When they drove back from the wholesaler, they passed the Caltex garage and Easy demanded to stop.”

“This is news to me,” I said, interrupting his story. I was thinking back to Easy’s colorful tale: He’d trained in the hinterland. He’d worn his gear beneath his school uniform like a superhero. He’d been sleeping rough in a shack in Khayelitsha with his comrades. A young girl served them
pap
. He’d slipped around the township on a mission, with great purpose, chanting “High discipline, high morale.” He had a switchblade in his sock. He was a young guerrilla fit for battle. He had mentioned Viveza, too, but there had been no mention of a wholesaler, or an errand. In his story, he marched in Langa, hopped the train, and then Viveza drove him and Ntobeko directly to the scene of the attack, where they again joined their comrades.

Now I was hearing that he might have been more interested in making some pocket money from the shopkeeper than in attending a political march, and that he may only have passed by Amy’s attack, rather than been a part of it. I remembered how odd it was, considering that he claimed he had access to a militants’ safe house, that Easy had slept at his mom’s place on the night of Amy’s murder, cuddled up with his girlfriend.

“Yah, this is not the dominant narrative,” Mzi said flatly. “But no, Easy was not in the march.”

“Did he attack Amy?”

“No,” Mzi said, shaking his head. “He did not attack Amy.”

Mzi sat across from me at Royale Eatery and continued with his story. In it, Easy had attended the Langa Secondary School rally but had then returned home early with Mzi’s brother Steyn. Steyn rolled a joint in his room, laced up his sneakers, and went for a run. Easy, meanwhile, hung out on the corner with a neighborhood kid named Quinton. Viveza found them and offered them a quick buck. Quinton and Easy hopped in the back of the bakkie and headed to a long block of warehouses in the next township over. There, they filled the truck with soda, chips, eggs, candy. Then they sat in the open back, guarding the items, as Viveza navigated to his shop on NY118.

On the way, Viveza passed the Caltex where Amy lay beneath the frothing mob, unseen. From the truck, the boys could only hear shouting, slogans: “Kill the boer”; “Africa for Africans”; “One settler, one bullet.”

Months later, I met Quinton and Steyn (Viveza had died long ago). Mzi and I drove to Steyn’s tin shack in the settlement of Kanana, the Xhosa name for Canaan. It was a rambling collection of lean-tos built on the stinking dirt that had been smoothed over an old garbage dump site, a quarter mile from NY111 in Gugulethu.

“Land of milk and honey,” Mzi said bitterly.

Steyn was a tall, rangy, bone-thin man with a vacant expression and very few teeth, the survivors just hanging loose to his gums. Quinton was a diminutive, sad-eyed man who lived with his mom and wore an old blue workman’s suit. Both Quinton and Steyn were in their early forties, and neither one of them seemed to have experienced sobriety in some time. Steyn, for one, had been hit by a car a while back, and suffered from seizures. They emerged, confused, from Steyn’s shack with smoke stuck to their skin, and then sat at Mzoli’s eating meat and looking stricken by the noise and stimulation of the restaurant. I asked them for their recollection of August 25, 1993, and Mzi translated, as neither spoke much English. They corroborated Mzi’s version of events: That Easy jumped off the bakkie after the fact, and that Steyn had been busy smoking weed. That Viveza kept driving, slowly, through the traffic. The old man had seen enough beat-downs in his time; he just wanted to restock his shelves.

After lunch, when I dropped the two men at the entrance to Kanana, they bantered with each other in Xhosa and then Steyn leaned forward.

“Justine, I can ask you do me a favor, you mind?”

“He ask if he can ask you a favor?” Quinton echoed.

“I can’t pay money, I’m sorry,” I said, before they could even bother, and they both shrugged. They had been defeated long ago, and they no longer had the energy to nurture anger. They left the car politely and were always friendly when I later saw them.

“What can you do?” Mzi later said when I related the story. “Give him more money for more drugs? And then? He is committing a slow suicide. So many people in the townships are committing a slow suicide.” Years later, Steyn ended up in prison for stabbing his elderly neighbor in Kanana; he said the voices drove him to it.

Back in Royale Eatery, Mzi delved into a theory of why Easy may have been convicted of a murder that he didn’t commit. By August 1993, Mzi noted, most people in that particular area of Gugulethu knew Easy. He’d gotten into his share of brawls, dated his share of girls, and was also, quite unremarkably, part of a local street gang. Easy attended his share of political rallies, too, since it was the norm in the township to be affiliated with a gang and a party. The distinction between pure-hearted freedom fighter and local street gangster was not always so delineated in South Africa. In fact, senior PAC members often tried to redirect local criminal energy into political fury, with great success. For disenfranchised kids whose initial sense of belonging was tied to gang membership, the meetings and marches and songs offered something to do and a sense of a greater purpose.

As a bonus, politics allowed for a rebranding of criminal enterprise. Mzi explained that during the Struggle, when you took money or items from a white person or a white-owned establishment, the PAC considered such an activity “repossession.”

“Would you be repossessing this from me?” I asked, holding up my phone.

“No, I would be robbing you.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Only the time we are in. After the election in 1994, it’s robbery. Before, it’s repossession.”

Mzi remembered how popular Easy had been. I thought of how, nearly twenty years on, when I drove through the township with him, he hollered or waved hello to passersby constantly.

“Everybody knew Easy. Everyone could identify Easy,” Mzi said.

“Are you telling me that the witnesses identified Easy because they could?” I asked. “Not because he did anything, but merely because he was there and they could put a face to the name?”

Mzi nodded, but I was confused. From what I’d read in the court transcripts, Miss A was certain she had seen Easy Nofemela from NY111 stab and stone Amy. Why would she lie? Moreover, even if the witness had misidentified Easy, why would Easy take the blame at the Truth Commission? If he was innocent, why would he tell me—and everyone else—elaborate stories about his guilt? About Amy’s long, loose hair falling in her face? About her strength and resistance?

Easy had once even led me through a reenactment of that fateful day. He led me through the events of August 25 moment by moment, taking the wheel and chauffeuring me through Langa. He pointed out the school, the street, and the train station, as I sat in the passenger seat and scribbled in my notebook. We sat by the Caltex and he detailed where they’d walked, where they’d marched, where they’d come upon Amy. If Easy hadn’t been there, why would he have given me a tour of the incident? If Easy wasn’t an APLA soldier, who was Masana—that man who claimed to have trained Easy in the art of war?

“Masana is a gangster,” Mzi explained. Masana was also a member of PAC, Mzi added, but his main claim to fame was as a senior member of a gang Easy had been a part of. Masana really was Easy’s commander, but perhaps not for the PAC, or not only for the PAC.

Regardless of the hazy separation between gangs and politics, why would anyone who was innocent go to such lengths to describe the scene of a crime that he hadn’t actually committed? For twenty whole years?

“You know Easy’s brother Monks, the one who is crippled?” Mzi asked.

I did: the handsome brother with the gold incisor who lay beneath the blanket in the warmest room of the house or out in the old Ford on the sidewalk in the bright sun. The brother who had been thrown clear from a taxi full of drunken friends back in 2009.

“Monks was trained by my brother Steyn,” Mzi said. “He was very physical strong, very brave—a natural for APLA.” He was especially natural, Mzi observed, because he was quiet. In the Nofemela family, it was true, Easy was the only loudmouth. “They are all mute, but Easy is speaking.”

The thing about little brother Monks, Mzi continued, was that he was so silent and so young back in 1993 that people hardly registered his existence. At twenty-two, Easy was a chatty social butterfly, but eighteen-year-old Monks was an unknown kid from NY111, brother number five out of seven.

“So what I believe happened was, the witnesses saw Monks doing whatever he was doing and then he disappeared into the crowd. Then Easy is there suddenly, getting off the bakkie and running to see what is happening.” Mzi used his hands to mime one boy slipping away and another popping up in his place.

“But they don’t look alike.”

“Not now,” Mzi said. “But then.”

I thought of the little faded photograph Easy had given me a while back, for no discernible reason at the time. The photograph of him and two of his brothers in their tiny, oversized suits. I thought of the collage Wowo had made, the enormous framed collection of photos that sat in a place of honor in the Nofemela TV room, where the boys were indistinguishable from one another.

“But why didn’t the police—”

“This is South Africa,” Mzi said, as if that fact alone explained the lack of a proper investigation. He sat back. “It was like this: Amy Biehl was accompanying her friends home, she came across a group of angry boys, one of them shouted ‘Settler,’ and she was the only settler there. She panicked and then she went out of the car.”

“Monks was there, not Easy?” I asked.

“Yah, but what can Easy do?”

“Tell somebody?”

“They don’t believe us,” Mzi sighed. “And it’s his little brother.”

“But Easy always takes full responsibility for this,” I said. I thought of the day on the bench in the Company’s Garden, where he touched my ribs and told me where Amy had been stabbed. “He says he did it, down to the details.”