We Are Not Such Things (38 page)

At other camps throughout Africa, ANC loyalists suspected to have erred reported having their testicles squeezed with pliers, their lips burned with cigarettes, and their chests burned with liquefied plastic. Prisoners dug their own graves. One prisoner, suspected to be an apartheid double agent, was put under house arrest, guarded by ANC soldiers. He died suddenly of poisoning, and nobody could figure out who did it, the ANC or the National Party. Both had reason, and both were capable.

In 1998, the ANC furiously applied for a stop on the publication of a final TRC report that implicated them in human rights abuses. The ANC argued that ills committed during the righteous fight for freedom were not comparable to those committed in the name of persecution and subjugation. But Tutu was prescient and devoted to transparency.

“We can’t assume that yesterday’s oppressed won’t become tomorrow’s oppressors,” he pleaded. “We have seen it happen all over the world and we shouldn’t be surprised if it happens here.”

Ultimately, a court upheld the right of the TRC to publish and deliver the report to President Mandela.

“We hold up as heroes those who are not clean,” Rhoda Kadalie once told me. She was referring to certain liberation leaders, hailed as demigods, who had skeletons in their closets.

In the end, of the over seven thousand amnesty applicants, 80 percent were black. Only two thousand were genuine political amnesty applications—the rest were deemed to be from prisoners trying to get out of jail—and of those, the commission granted amnesty in only 849 cases, and rejected the rest. The logic behind who did or did not apply for amnesty was curious. For a person serving a prison sentence, applying for amnesty offered the possibility of freedom. For a free person, applying for amnesty meant admitting to crimes with which one had never been charged, and therefore risking imprisonment. Because of the apartheid system, the prisons were full of black and colored men. The prisoner, far more likely to be black, had nothing to lose by applying for amnesty, but the free man, more likely white, risked everything. The government kept reasserting its plans to prosecute those whom it suspected of crimes but who had refused to apply for amnesty, but after a few bungled attempts in the early 2000s, the plans were largely abandoned. The commission recommended that the new government pay victims reparations and offer them rehabilitation. But these recommendations were largely ignored.

“Now we ask ourselves, who was oppressing whom?” Letlapa Mphahlele, the current PAC president and former APLA commander, asked me one day in his office on a largely ignored floor of Parliament, where he occupied the PAC’s sole remaining seat. It was a wide, clean space, very quiet, where the government had stationed the waning members of a number of largely irrelevant political parties, most of which garnered less than one percent of the vote. Mphahlele arranged his face in an expression of faux wonder. “Were
we
oppressing
ourselves
?”

Mphahlele was a handsome, lanky man who looked younger than his fifty-two years and had a sharp sense of humor. He offered me half of his vegan almond-butter-and-avocado sandwich on seed loaf and discussed his recent spiritual voyage to India, where he had considered renouncing everything and wandering the land with only a spoon and a plate, relying on the kindness of strangers to feed him. However, his girlfriend rejected this lifestyle plan, which included a renunciation of sex. Mphahlele, now returned, seemed most concerned about transcribing his second volume of memoirs (a follow-up to his essay collection,
Shining the Searchlight Inwards;
his poetry collection,
Mantlalela! The Flood Is Coming;
and his autobiography,
Child of This Soil: My Life as a Freedom Fighter
). He wasn’t great at touch-typing so the whole endeavor was taking forever. He had been late to the interview because he had been trying to return a pair of trousers to a department store, on account of the pockets being defective.

“
T
is supposed to stand for truth, but there’s nothing like truth as far as interests of different classes and groups are concerned, especially if they are in conflictual relations,” Mphahlele said to me. “Unless we reduce truth to mathematics—and the mathematical truth is not the same as the sociopolitical truth—your truth will always be different from mine.”

“So if not truth, then what do you think was the purpose of the TRC?”

“To deepen the myth of South African magic. That we South Africans, we are special. We have done what the world never expected us to do. To sell South Africa internationally….Let’s get to the crux of the matter: Who still owns the means of production in this country? Whites. So then you need people like Tutu to tell you if you don’t get what you want in this life, you will get it later.”

While the world welcomed the myth of magical South Africa, South Africans themselves were wary. The journalist Rian Malan noted that despite international fanfare surrounding the process, the TRC had ended up as “a sweet and somewhat muddle-headed organism cast very much in the mold of its chairman Archbishop Desmond Tutu.”

Zapiro, the country’s most famous political cartoonist, published a black-and-white drawing advertising “Amnesty Washing Powder,” featuring a mustachioed housewife who bore a striking resemblance to a white police officer who had overseen the massacre of eleven innocent black people, mostly women and children.

“Just look at this shirt!” the housewife clucks. “Stained with the blood of eleven people!” But once the shirt had been laundered with “Amnesty Washing Powder,” it emerges sparkling white. “Spotless!” she announces with a smile. “Amnesty changed my life.” Zapiro had added a tagline:
BLOODSTAINS IN YOUR CLOSET? GET AMNESTY ® (YOU’D BE CRAZY NOT TO!!)

Many were impressed with the commission, but others had begun to feel that amnesty had been reduced to a brand-name product marketed and sold to the masses. The TRC had been the result of a bargain struck between politicians. The people were asked to trade justice for peace, and at first they agreed. But it started to seem like a bum deal, where criminals went entirely unpunished while so many still suffered the aftereffects of their crimes. Was it enough to admit you had suffocated a man with a wet bag and inserted an electrical cattle probe up his anus? Was it enough to simply tell what you’d done? The country had avoided war and immediate ruin, and in exchange, it seemed, those who wreaked havoc on so many lives for so many decades got to retire to their beach houses while the poor still lived in soggy shacks.

One day, Mzi and I sat in his front yard, each of us perched on a plastic chair, talking about the TRC. In the back bedroom, Mzi’s eldest sister was recovering from what should have been a routine appendectomy, but free government healthcare in South Africa was infamously deficient. She had been rushed to the hospital, where instead of promptly removing her appendix and sending her home, the staff had installed her in a room and kept her on painkillers. Finally, after four days, her appendix burst and was removed. A foot-long scar now ran up her belly, and she’d come to her mother’s to be nursed back to health.

While she was in the hospital, some drugged-up criminals had robbed her house, and her sixteen-year-old son had returned home from school to quite a scene. Days before, Mzi and I had driven over to find the teenage boy, still in his pale blue school blazer, staring at a pile of human shit by the back door. This was the third time the house had been robbed, and the second time the perps had taken a crap. They stole small items—DVDs, a hat—and left the big-ticket items, like the TV.

“These skollies watch too many Hollywood movies,” Mzi said, using Afrikaans slang for township gangsters. A lifelong socialist and black nationalist, Mzi liked to blame the West, and America in particular, whenever he got a chance.

“In what Hollywood movie,” I asked, “is there a band of pooping thieves?”

“Isn’t there?”

Now, while his sister recuperated, Mzi and I were sharing an egg salad sandwich from the supermarket. Mzi’s five-year-old nephew was alternately doing cartwheels around us and sucking on a red lollipop that was slowly staining his white tank top. Then he changed into a green T-shirt and had a piece of cake, which he smeared on his new outfit.

“What will happen on Judgment Day?” Mzi wondered aloud, scooping another nephew onto his lap—a toddler so chubby and bald and beatific that we had nicknamed him Buddha. “What happened in South Africa, it made me look forward to Judgment Day. I thought it would be on the democratic elections, but that didn’t happen. Now I’m looking forward to see Tutu answering to God. Why did he allow the TRC to go that way?” Mzi balanced the chair on its back legs, and faced the sun with Buddha. Then he lowered himself down. “No, man, judgment can’t be done in a day. In South Africa, we need a Judgment Decade.”

Amnesty hearings were modeled on the trial system. Defense lawyers, paid by the state or paid privately, represented those applying for amnesty. Other attorneys, often representing victims or families of the victims, acted as prosecutors, arguing against amnesty and trying to prove that crimes had not been politically motivated, sometimes showing evidence. The judgments were made by a five-person commission comprised of judges and lawyers. While the hearings did not operate within the court system, the resulting amnesty decisions were legally binding.

The four young men convicted of Amy Biehl’s murder were provided with two lawyers: Norman Arendse, a prominent colored defense attorney with the face, build, and demeanor of a friendly bulldog, and Nona Goso, their junior counsel from the criminal trial.

Arendse himself was a minor figure in South African history. He’d served a controversy-laden term as the first nonwhite president of Cricket South Africa. He’d been arrested for drunk driving. He’d also helped win the freedom of a young black farmhand accused of murdering a famous white supremacist.

By 2014, Arendse had a sleek beige-and-black office on a quaint cobblestone lane in downtown Cape Town, helmed by a middle-aged blond secretary and decorated with a framed portrait of Mandela and a large cartoon image of the famed colored cricketer Vernon Philander. He also displayed a portrait of Dullah Omar: Mandela’s lawyer, Amy’s teacher, Arendse’s mentor, and the country’s minister of justice from 1994 to 1999.

The Biehls had not secured the services of a lawyer since they did not plan on opposing amnesty (other victims’ families were often represented by lawyers arguing against amnesty for the perpetrators). For much of the two-day hearing, the Biehls sat, like spectators, in the audience while an elderly white TRC-appointed advocate named Robin Brink tried to make a case against the amnesty of the four young prisoners. Brink sported a golden pinkie ring and had the pointed face of a bird. His thinning gray hair stuck to his mottled head.

The amnesty committee was comprised of four men and one woman. All had legal backgrounds and had made contributions to the anti-apartheid cause. The chairman was a gray-haired septuagenarian Indian immigrant who was the first-ever nonwhite jurist in South Africa. He was joined by a dour, pink-complected judge of British extraction; a heavyset, middle-aged black judge who seemed to be in a state of sustained, contained fury; a long-nosed, brown-haired Afrikaner advocate, who would later claim he was merely a “token with no power” and resign; and a largely silent black female advocate who wore her braids piled atop her head. These commissioners sat raised behind a high dais, their complexions tinted yellow in the fluorescent glow of the ceiling lights.

The effect, visually, was that four young black men of meager means sat far below an imposing, multiracial panel of legal professionals. Two brown-skinned attorneys argued for their release while one white attorney argued for their continued incarceration. As in their criminal trials, the young men could not adequately understand English and relied on an interpreter, who, as in the criminal trials, bungled at least a few sentences. The hearing lasted for two days; everyone changed their clothes but for the applicants, who wore the exact same outfits each time, down to their socks.

Easy and his co-accused had decided that the TRC was propaganda, since they assumed, generally, that any government-sanctioned process was propaganda, even if the government was now black-led. But eventually, prominent PAC members visited them at their various prisons scattered around the Western Cape, and convinced them to take part in the process. Despite a deep-seated mistrust of ANC government processes, the PAC leadership, led by Mphahlele, had grudgingly complied with the TRC, mostly so their imprisoned adherents would have the chance at freedom.

Though the leaders of the PAC insisted in their own submission that Amy Biehl had been “wrongly targeted,” they acknowledged that those convicted of her murder were members of PAC’s student branch and had been involved in a protest on August 25, 1993.
Misguided as the deed was, we support the amnesty applications of all those convicted and sentenced for the offence,
they wrote in their submission to the amnesty committee.