We Are Not Such Things (47 page)

“And in prison, were you in a gang?”

“No, I just relaxing in prison.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Nomzamo, you will find the truth. Before, when you ask me about the tattoo, I was thinking that today, lots of ladies and boys and girls get tattoos. I didn’t think it was necessary to tell why I get a tattoo.”

At about that moment, a colored boy with a knit cap pulled low on his head and no front teeth popped up next to the window. Like a host on the Home Shopping Network, he artfully displayed an old taupe purse, a wallet, and a pair of lady’s sunglasses. I shook my head. Some unfortunate train passenger had just been relieved of her belongings.

“Let’s discuss August 25, 1993,” I said to Easy as we settled back in the car. “Can we try the story one last time? But this time, the true story.” I was thinking of the tale Mzi told me, of Easy Nofemela, wrongly accused, innocent, brother of the real perpetrator.

Easy spoke in a small voice: “I don’t want to go back to prison, man.”

“Why would you go back to prison?”

The Kaapse Klopse music was loud and bittersweet, a melody of saxophone, drums, and flute, and it traveled in the wind.

“It’s not only Amy was killed. Is another person.”

“It was a white guy. Killed because he was white. White, white, white.”

Easy’s face had gone pale, and his lip quivered. He searched for 2 rand for another cigarette and then called over a young boy, who was loitering on the street. The boy ran off with the money and returned with a loosie. Wind was whipping around the car, its windows open, and Easy was drunk, but he effortlessly lit a match, cupped it in his hand, and touched it to the cigarette.

“Amy died, just one hole was stabbed. But that guy, was too much. Was too much, my lady. Was too much.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about a white guy killed on the same day as Amy. Here in Gugulethu.”

I stared at Easy. He had to be mistaken. It was impossible that another white person was killed in Gugulethu on August 25, 1993. I had read thousands of newspapers, thumbed through archives, clicked through databases. In the Gugulethu police database, one black shelter dweller had killed another with a knife and gone to prison for that. But I never saw a single mention of another murder.

“Who was he?”

“I had never met him, my love. I just saw he was a white guy. We come here near the Heideveld station and when we saw that guy, everyone say, ‘Yho, God give us a target.’ That guy, he died.”

“But I’ve never heard of any such person.”

“Exactly. That’s the point. I never understand why. I also ask this question.”

“When was he attacked?”

Easy explained that the man had died in the morning. The group that had killed him had continued on to the Langa Secondary School rally that preceded Amy’s death.

“Something is burning in me. When I try to pick up my life, I don’t care. I feel bad too much. Every day.”

“No, Easy.” It couldn’t be.

“I’m telling you, one hundred percent. A white guy. I was not drunk. If you drive I can show you where.”

I headed toward the train station. Easy pointed ahead. The guy, he said, was fixing power lines. He was just a nondescript white man sitting in a big truck. His colored colleagues were working nearby.

“He was…oh why? That guy…No, was too much. Was too much, Justine, was too much. Stab. Was too much. Somebody can see suffer. Stab. The voice. Just…Amy, Amy she was just, Amy she could be fine. But that guy suffered too much. Suffered.” I pulled to the side and looked at Easy. He was limp, as though he’d been drained of all his vigor. “Is not fine in the township,” he muttered.

I had a CD in, and Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song” began to play. Amy had been a fan of reggae. Easy turned it up.
Old pirates yes they rob I / Sold I to the merchant ships.

“My friend, I am a good person but somebody, if you push it to the limit, will become other. Was my first time to stab someone when I was fifteen. I just wanna be happy, but I don’t enjoy life. Is a long story.” He finished his cigarette and flicked it out the window. “Ndumi’s had trauma. The white guy who died is trauma. I don’t feel rest. I want rest. If I’m drunk, I sleep peacefully. Otherwise, no sleep. Mzi’s place, they burned his house down. One of my friend pass away when I was young. The people who are terrible, they kill him. We run away, in the direction to go to station. We run away to get a train and my friend, he couldn’t run. He just turned back and go to those guys. They shoot him here, right here. I also see him died. And his sister come and explain to the police station. But when the police said, ‘We know exactly what happening, just tell us what you saw,’ I lied because I don’t want to be arrested. I said, ‘I don’t know that boy.’ His sister cry, say, ‘Easy, why? Tell me why?’

“Sometimes I’m thinking, alone. Worse, worse, worse. Sometimes I don’t have money to go to work. I take the train, and looking at the direction of my life and feel like, ‘Why?’ Sometimes I sleeping and I feel angry too much, I feel too much warm, I wake up, and I see the white guy. My woman wake up and is worried, but I just say, ‘Don’t worry, is old witches.’ That’s my answer. Old witches.

“Apartheid brings problems. You find yourself in a situation that you never been expecting, and it’s not easy to get out of that situation. See, Amy was exposed. Everyone knows. Parents forgive us. But that guy was not exposed. And now you ask me did I hurt Amy?”

“Did you?”

“Now I tell you what is true: No, I did not.”

“Did Mongezi Manqina?”

“We told Mongezi to stand for it, and he insist that he stab Amy.”

“Did he?”

“Don’t ask me questions.”

“Why? Did he?”

“My friend, I—”

“Just answer. Did he?”

“Everything was happening fastly.”

“Why admit to something you didn’t do?”

Easy went silent.

“Monks?” I asked.

“You know,” he said, looking at me. “My brother was very young, but I can stand any pain.”

“How old was your brother?”

“Fourteen. I stand up. I sacrifice. I don’t know is a punishment now he’s paralyzed.”

“You think it’s a punishment?”

“Maybe.”

“Does he think it’s a punishment?”

“Sometimes, maybe.”

“Do you ever talk about it?”

“No, I don’t want to stress him.”

“You’ve never talked about it?”

“He knows. I was already named within the system. They know why exactly I’m going. They said, ‘This one, I know this one.’ ”

“So you didn’t attack Amy?”

“To me, Amy was a lady. She was beautiful. I only go to her car, try to burn her car, but to injure her or hurt her? I know, I know. You ask me before and I never give you answer, right answer. I never give you an answer. I was involve. But I never do the Amy.”

“Who should have been arrested?”

“All the PAC leadership, who use innocent people.”

“After time, at the TRC, why didn’t you tell the truth?”

“At the TRC, they already know me. I was already named within the system.”

“And after the TRC, why didn’t you tell someone?”

“Long time ago, I am not sure which journalist, but I said, ‘I didn’t kill Amy.’ She didn’t even listen to me.”

“So you stopped trying?”

“People want to recognize you. They want to recognize your contribution. How many people knows me? How many people admire me? How many people acknowledge it’s me? When any journalists ask to me about it, I give them what they know exactly. They know Amy was killed by the mob. So I just tell them that. I didn’t see any point that I should tell them the truth. I didn’t see any point. I was just telling them the story that they know.”

“Easy, I’m a writer. Why are you telling me all of this? I’m writing a book about this.”

“I know you a writer. I know I not supposed to trust you. But your true colors show. I know you a writer, and you want to know the truth, but there is another side of you. I can see you.”

Easy sat back. He closed his eyes, and for a moment I thought he had fallen asleep sitting up. Then he opened his eyes and looked over.

“Oh, Justice, I never born a killer. I born a beautiful boy. I see to become something, but something change. I managed to change. But everything I told you is my secrets inside of me. You look sad, my friend. But what would you do? If it was you, and your little sister do this? What’s your pressure?”

“I don’t have a sister.”

“I know. Tell me, do you have a brother? No. So then think of it this way: your little brother is me. Tell me, what would you do?”

Most people would not consider a township to be an exclusive community, but it is, by grand design, a restricted area peopled by a specific group, largely closed to the outside world. If you want to find someone in the township or learn something about the place, you either need to live there for a while or you need a guide. In the course of my research, I found that people who went by full names in the court transcripts were instead known by nicknames in the townships; their lives were fluid and often off the grid. They rarely had Facebook profiles, email addresses, or office jobs that would allow a person to find them online. They usually only had cellphones, and the numbers were unlisted and constantly changing. But Easy and Mzi could find almost anyone anyway, through old friends or family members or common local knowledge.

Soon after Mzi told me that Easy’s brother Monks had attacked Amy, I decided I was ready to track down more people who had been involved in the case in one way or another. My first order of business was to visit Easy’s ex-girlfriend Pinky—real name, Linda Mayekiso. She had attended the Langa rally and had been lying in bed with Easy in the dawn hours of August 26, 1993, when Pikker and his crew pulled Easy out. She had testified to this in court, and was pictured in newspaper articles wearing sunglasses and screaming, as Monks—then mobile, then strong—held her back.
ANGRY
, began the caption, which described her as Easy’s girlfriend, in the midst of attempting to throttle the photographer.

“Our parents, they are cowards for the boer,” she told
The New York Times
back then. “The youth are not scared, and they have power.”

Easy knew where Pinky lived: on the other side of Gugulethu, behind an abandoned house in one of four backyard shacks, each of which was inhabited by a single woman and her children. Pinky did not have a bathroom, only an outhouse, and sometimes crossed the street to a house where Easy’s relatives lived to do her washing. Pinky’s most recent boyfriend and the father of her youngest child had been a nice, soft-spoken man who became convinced that his epilepsy was the result of a sangoma’s curse, got hooked on a drug called the Rock (“It’s more than
tik
, you
never
sleep”), and stalked the townships, robbing, raping, and murdering people. Pinky left him around that time, and he promised to slit her throat, so for a year she lived in terror. Since the police couldn’t—or wouldn’t—catch the man, the community eventually surrounded his house with the aim of burning him to death, and he decided to shoot himself in the head rather than face their wrath. I was told that after he was buried, community members dug up his coffin and threw his body on the road. Since then, Pinky had decided to steer clear of relationships, and now just relaxed with her female friends.

Easy directed me to his relatives’ house, and they in turn pointed out Pinky’s place. When I found her, she was sitting in a spot of sun, washing clothes in a big plastic tub. Two little kids sat by her. They belonged to a neighbor who had to take her third child to the hospital “because he was bleeding from the nose.” She had glowing light skin, and short straight hair, and wore a purple tracksuit and slip-on sandals. She was substantial, maybe pushing two hundred pounds at five-five, a feat of which she was proud.

“I was wishing to get fat. I would see fat people and they have dignity, so I thought if I get fat, maybe I will have dignity.”

“Being fat means you’re automatically dignified?”

“No, because sometimes fat people also do bad things and in that case, being fat is useless.”

Pinky dropped the kids at another single mother’s shack and we headed to the sidewalk. Since Pinky had no space to conduct a proper interview in her shack, we would speak in the Nofemela house, where Wowo’s sister lived. Wowo’s sister welcomed us in and placed us in her own bedroom, me on the bed and Pinky on a chair.