We Are Not Such Things (39 page)

A few months before the hearing, the men were supplied with amnesty application forms. These were completed hastily in English in a single hand and mailed to the amnesty committee. The four applications stated the names of the applicants, their dates of birth, prison ID numbers, their victim’s name, their crimes, and their political affiliations. The men identified Amy as an “aid worker” if they identified her profession at all. Only Mongezi Manqina had, additionally, completed a separate application in Xhosa in his own handwriting, listing his victim as “Amy Bill.” In killing Amy, the men claimed to have been implementing actions to make the country ungovernable, as was the aim of the ANC’s Operation Barcelona and the PAC’s Year of the Great Storm, both launched in 1993. In Mongezi’s application he claimed that he had attacked Amy to fulfill the purpose of “Oparation bhaselona” and “The Year of Cream Stone.”

“Mention of ‘This is the Year Cream Stone’ is not correct,” Arendse announced staidly before the commission.

Goso and Arendse helped the men draw up affidavits that put forth a corresponding story of the day. The affidavits were written with each point numbered and typed out. Ntobeko, Easy, and Mongezi had all been between eighteen and twenty-two when Amy was murdered, yet they were still high school students; none of them had graduated and they struggled to speak and understand English. Vusumzi, who turned twenty-two on the day Amy died and is developmentally delayed, had been attending sixth grade. At the initial criminal trial, the defense attorneys had urged the court interpreter, when asking Vusumzi questions in Xhosa, to “be a bit slow when you talk to him…a bit slower than usual,” and to use “little words,” and had sent him out for a psychological evaluation.

“His mind is not normal,” his attorney said. “He is not mad, but he has mental ailment.”

Despite this, court psychologists declared Vusumzi to be of average intelligence and decided he had a full understanding of the charges against him and the trial proceedings.

Four years later, during their preparations for the TRC, Easy and the other two tried to teach Vusumzi a simple PAC slogan:
This land was taken by the barrel of the gun and the land must be returned
. They made him practice, to little avail.

“We sit down with Vusumzi, we tell him, ‘You not going to eat until you learn,’ ” Easy recalled. “Just that one sentence. We repeat on and on and on and on and on. He couldn’t get it.”

At the TRC, Vusumzi’s affidavit stated: “I have a very low intelligent quotient and I would regard myself as mentally backwards….I am not able to articulate any political ideology or motivation for my conduct. I am sure however (given my limited mental capabilities) that I am a firm supporter of the Pan Africanist Congress of Azania.” He signed his affidavit in a child’s uncertain cursive.

When I met Arendse, he wore a fine blue pin-striped suit and intermittently yawned and checked his BlackBerry. He spoke for a while about the four young men at the TRC but eventually exclaimed that he was actually mixing up the Amy Biehl men with other APLA soldiers—those involved in the St. James Massacre—that he had represented the following day. Still, he insisted that all his clients had told the truth to the TRC.

“From where I was, what they told me, evidence under oath, they were consistent,” he said. “They were all very clear that they were involved and the extent of their involvement was recorded in the statement.”

PAC president Mphahlele, sitting in his office in Parliament with his almond-butter-and-avocado sandwich, disagreed. “Every story, without exception, was peppered and salted and put some condiments on. A lawyer would take weeks drilling the applicants, and I know lots of PAC applicants had their stories changed or tampered with….And of course, a lot of people, their lawyers told them, ‘If you say you did this, if you say you knew this, you are not going to get amnesty,’ so you must say something you do not know to get amnesty.”

At the hearings in July 1997, Goso and Arendse presented the men’s cases, one by one, reading out loud the affidavits as the applicants listened to an interpreter through headphones. Each affidavit was between four and seven pages, and ran down the events of the day. According to the affidavits, Easy and Ntobeko had operated separately from Mongezi and Vusumzi, coming together only at the scene of the crime. The four only came to know each other, they said, either during the criminal trials, in prison, or during preparations for the TRC.

In separate statements, Easy and Ntobeko confirmed that they had attended an afternoon PAC student rally at Langa Secondary School, caused trouble on the streets of Langa, and hopped a train home. From the Heideveld train station, they walked and toyi-toyi-ed up the street until they caught a ride with Viveza the shopkeeper in the direction of NY111. When they passed the Caltex, they saw Amy running across the road, pursued by a small group and surrounded by a larger group. They hopped out and stoned her. Easy “stabbed at her about three or four times.”

“You told us in your affidavit that you stabbed at her and you don’t know if you stabbed her or not,” one commissioner said, puzzled. “You tried three or four times and you don’t know if you stabbed her. I am asking you why you did not know. You feel if you stab someone.”

“Things were happening very fast,” Easy said evenly. “There were more than seven, eight or more of people, so that’s why I don’t know whether I did stab her or not because there were many people there.”

“You had the knife in your hand, you could feel if you did it. Don’t say it was because there were seven or eight people you don’t know. You in fact know from the medical evidence that you didn’t stab her, don’t you?”

“Can you repeat your question please.”

“You know from the medical evidence that you didn’t stab her. She was only stabbed once. You heard the evidence of the post mortem, didn’t you?”

“Yes, I’ve heard that in court.”

“So you can’t give any explanation why you didn’t know what you were doing?”

“No, I am sorry, I won’t know whether I did stab her or I attempted to, but I can remember that it was three or four times,” Easy insisted.

“I am concerned about the suggestion…that the applicant is now tailoring his evidence to suit the finding,” Arendse cut in, and from there, the argument meandered away from the question of why Easy did not know whether or not he stabbed Amy—the answer to which Easy himself would hint at to me years later. Easy, who could so effectively play the fool, had appeared befuddled, and Arendse had redirected the questioning. The commissioner gave up, and the hearing moved on. But the commissioner had raised an important point: don’t you
know
when you stab a person, when the knife in your hand pierces their flesh? If you did not stab Amy Biehl, why are you hedging? Why not just claim your innocence?

For his part, Vusumzi said that he had been hanging out with his childhood friend Mongezi, whom he followed to the Langa Secondary School rally, where, he noted, “I did not understand much of what was being said.” Vusumzi then rode the train with Mongezi to Gugulethu. There, he stoned Amy. All three men testified that they had seen Mongezi trip and stab Amy, which Mongezi confirmed.

Later, Brink cross-examined Easy. Brink was arguing, to a commission whose faces were becoming increasingly stony, that the applicants were not political revolutionaries but regular street criminals thirsting for blood. Brink, with his pinkie ring and his ruddy complexion, harked back to a different time, and he wasn’t warming up the five pseudo-judges sitting before him. Easy, meanwhile, had gone still with fury, drawing his rage inward.

“You see what I am going to suggest to you, Mr. Nofemela, is that the attack and brutal murder of Amy Biehl could not have been done with a political objective,” Brink said. “It was wanton brutality, like a pack of sharks smelling blood. Isn’t that the truth?”

Easy’s eyes turned to slate and his upper lip twitched once. He leaned forward slowly, burning.

“No, that’s not true, that’s not true,” he seethed in Xhosa, as the translator spoke his words in English. “We are not such things.”

Earlier that year, the Biehls received a fax at their Newport Beach home. The men convicted of killing Amy would likely apply for amnesty at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. If the Biehls were willing, the government would fly them to South Africa to attend the proceedings.

To Mandela’s newly elected ANC government, the Biehls’ presence at the TRC offered some benefit. For one, South Africa was looking for foreign investment and wanted to shine on the international stage, so a pair of well-heeled Californians would lend global legitimacy to this national process. The ANC knew that the Biehls were sympathetic to their cause and broad-minded, and they suspected that the family might become examples of the power of forgiveness. For the Biehls, the TRC presented an opportunity to honor Amy before the world and before South Africa. Since her death, Amy had become, according to Linda, “a situation.” At the TRC, they hoped to make her, once again, into a person. The Biehls called Tutu for counsel, and the archbishop’s advice was simple: Speak about Amy, about who she was and what she meant to you.

So on the second day of the proceedings in July 1997, after Robin Brink rested his case, the committee chairman motioned to Peter Biehl. Peter, in his freshly ironed shirt, sat before a microphone at a wooden table. Linda sat to his right, her face placid. The four young applicants, perched at the front of the room, averted their eyes.

“We come to South Africa as Amy came, in the spirit of committed friendship,” Peter began. He continued:

Amy was one of our four children. Her sisters are Kim, who is now thirty-one, Molly, twenty-seven, and her brother Zach, aged twenty. We are very proud of all our children and their accomplishments. But because Amy was killed in South Africa we are here to share a little of Amy with you….Amy was a bright, active child. She loved competitive sport such as swimming, diving, gymnastics among others. She played the flute, the guitar. She studied ballet. She was a focused student from the very beginning, always striving for straight As….At Stanford, she evolved as a serious student and began to focus her work on the Southern African region. Her love of Nelson Mandela, as a symbol of what was happening in South Africa, grew….Who is Amy and what is her legacy here? Linda and I were struck by photos which appeared immediately after Amy’s death in the
Los Angeles Times
and other newspapers around the world, which showed Amy as a freedom fighter….We think, in view of the importance of freedom fighting in our world, this is a precious legacy of Amy for us. We think Amy’s legacy in South Africa additionally is as a catalyst, and perhaps her death represented a turning point in things in this country, with specific regard to the violence which was occurring at the time.

I was reminded of how Peter subtly martyred his daughter when I spoke to Arendse, the defense attorney. “If my friends or family go to Syria or Iraq or Cairo, where there is unrest, if you find yourself shot or blown up, for me it would somehow make a difference because it’s a war zone,” he reflected, sitting at a paper-strewn desk. “Wanton violence is one thing, but if the death is because of political unrest, it makes a difference.” A random and haphazard death offers less comfort and meaning to its survivors. Better that a life be lost for some greater cause, in the midst of a world-altering struggle.

“Knowing Amy, knowing what I learned from her, I could see this happening to her,” Linda once told me. “People said it made no sense, but it made perfect sense. She lived exactly what was happening in the country until the end.”

With the help of the TRC, Amy the Fulbright scholar and researcher who accidentally drove into the arms of a furious mob could be hailed as an international liberation hero. Her death did not have to be “senseless,” as Detective Ilmar Pikker believed it to be. Her murder could be more than the indiscriminate, gruesome killing Rhoda Kadalie described: “A white girl was in the traffic, they took bricks, and they smashed her to a pulp.” At the TRC, the murder of Amy, who prosecutor Nollie Niehaus had told me was called a “white bitch” by the mob before they took her down, became a legitimately political act rather than an arbitrary crime. She therefore became a political figure rather than a chance victim who died because young people were bored, disenfranchised, and angry. Amy’s parents and her killers and the entire post-apartheid political apparatus all agreed on how the story had played out, and so the narrative was shaped for posterity. A Diane Sawyer special would soon focus on Amy and the Biehls’ new role in South Africa.

“She left all this,” said Sawyer, in her husky voice, as a camera spanned the landscape of Newport Beach, where white people Rollerbladed past yachts and waterfront homes. “For
this:
” then a shot of screaming black people running from exploding tear gas canisters. “The inspiring story of Amy Biehl.”

The chronicle continued, playing on TV sets across American living rooms, asserting that South Africa’s “history” had begun “three hundred years ago, when settlers arrived.” This common interpretation of South African history—as a creature that had appeared, spontaneously, upon the arrival of white people—reminded me of an African proverb Mzi had once related to me: “Until the lion learns to write, every story will glorify the hunter.”