We Are Not Such Things (50 page)

“She’s very pretty,” Mzi said longingly when we left.

Pamela was the single mother of a seven-year-old son, who was jousting with his friend in the front yard. She also taught arts at a public school, and had founded a program—“a little famous locally”—that taught township kids dance and music and, on some occasions, sent them on trips to perform in Europe, Taiwan once, and around Cape Town. She showed us a blowup print of her troupe, dressed in bright, woven Xhosa dancewear, assembled outside the Castle of Good Hope downtown. Pamela sat on a beige leather couch and welcomed us to sit, too. She had never told her story before. When it happened, she had been too scared to talk. And eventually interest had faded and times had changed, and who cared much about the Amy Biehl murder anymore?

Pamela had been a student at the College of Cape Town in 1993, and on that August day she had been sitting in her yard with some friends. A crowd passed by, toyi-toyi-ing.

“During that time, when you see chanting, you tell yourself it’s about freedom,” she recalled. “Us African people, we love music within ourselves, and the minute you hear songs, something is boiling in you and you have to move. So when I heard the music, I went with it. The music is in me, in us. So I followed them for a little.”

By the time they’d reached NY1, Pamela sensed this was no peaceful demonstration. She picked the slogans out of the singing and carrying-on, and she felt the energy: dark, determined, aggressive.

“If the slogan says ‘Kill the boer,’ you will kill the boer,” Eunice added from the kitchen, where she was stirring a pot of beans.

“I was not so politically minded and so I wanted to leave the march then,” Pamela said. “They were stoning a brewery and bakery car, but those cars succeeded to drive away. But then I saw from a distance a white lady in a yellow car, and I thought, ‘Oooh, I wish I could tell her to go the other way.’ She was friends with two black ladies and she was not nervous. She was more in a comfort zone, but we could see it’s not gonna be what she thinks it is.”

“Did you recognize the people who attacked her?”

“There were many of them. I saw Easy, Ntobeko, the guys from the Amy Biehl Foundation, and especially the guy from NY1, Mongezi. But Amy, I don’t think she saw anyone. I was very close to her and she was just scared, lost as to what’s happening, and when you are in that place, you don’t know who anyone is. Then they were throwing stones at her, pushing her, pull her hair, took her all over the places. It was very sad. There was fifteen or twenty, but some were not even students, they were just in ordinary clothes. Like Easy. We knew Easy as someone involved in gangsterism. The gang was so violent, they used to stab at each other, rob each other, use the toyi-toyi as an opportunity.”

“When there is a march for rights, skollies will add in and then pretend they are also for rights, but they will pickpocket you,” Eunice said, sticking her head out of the kitchen. “They will pretend they are with the people, but they are criminals.”

“How could you be sure it was Easy and Ntobeko?” I asked Pamela.

“Here in the township, I knew Ntobeko by face but not by name. But Easy used to visit my classmate. I knew him before the incident.”

“Did you know Easy’s brothers?” I asked. “Did you know he had a brother who looked exactly the same?”

“Easy is the one I knew. I only knew some of his brothers. But I knew Easy very well. He used to come and sit and chat and make us laugh. Even when he was throwing stones, I still knew Easy. I know Easy. I know him as a good person, then and now. That Easy there, that was not the Easy that I knew. But as I said, there were many of them, but I remember that one man:
Easy
.”

“Did you intervene?” I asked.

“I tried to stop what the crowd was doing. When they were throwing stones and Amy started to frighten up, she ran—or she tried to run. I said, ‘No, guys, please,’ and they didn’t even listen. They wanted that lady. We were also trying to stop them, but we fear for our lives. After, I didn’t say anything to the police. I don’t involve myself.”

“The police will put you in front of the enemy so the enemy can see you, and then you will die,” Eunice said sagely. “When the police came, I said my daughter would not talk.”

“After all that, what do you think of them getting amnesty at the TRC?”

“In my opinion, amnesty is right,” Eunice said, popping out of the kitchen again. “A child can be used. The order can be coming from up high, from people you won’t see or hear about. They were toyi-toyi-ing for their rights. And those that did it, they found what they did was wrong.”

“But Pamela said the kids were gangsters,” I countered.

“But I understand them, because I was also have that hatred,” Eunice said. “I was growing up with my parents who were staying nice and progressing, and then they were moving to another place and losing everything because of the whites. So I did have that hatred for the whites.”

“Mandela thought reconciliation was the only way forward, and Amy Biehl’s parents reconciled so they could move forward,” Pamela said. “For me, I was affected and disturbed. Something like that, nobody would like to see. To try to stop it, but you can’t, and you watch a woman being killed. You know, it’s very true. Where the tourists go and pray for her, by the Caltex, that is where her life ended.”

Because Easy and his co-convicted had spent years in prison, I had long wanted to see the institution close-up. I had tried, through various official channels, to visit the prison system, but the results had been comical. South African government employees were, in my experience, either impervious and dour and unwilling to lift a finger, or friendly and polite and unwilling to lift a finger. I consistently spoke to the loveliest people, who consistently failed to follow through on the simplest tasks and who, I later came to suspect, never intended to do so. They seemed, too, to follow a policy of simply wishing-away work: if they tried hard enough, if they pretended hard enough that I didn’t exist, maybe I would vanish in a poof.

In my attempts to visit and better understand the prison system, I had first been directed to a parliamentary liaison officer, who spoke with great vigor and certitude when he said I had to simply email my request to another parliamentary liaison officer, and that the matter would be sorted. But the officers both soon disappeared into the ether, specters who had email addresses but who never seemed to be able to send a single reply. My application lingered, presumably, in various in-boxes until, after four months of silence, I tracked down a dinosaur communications chief for the national commissioner of prisons. His name was Koos Gerber, he sounded appalled at how shoddily my case had been handled, and he promised, in his clipped Afrikaans accent, to personally streamline the process. Then he disappeared. Weeks later, a man from the national commissioner of prisons office called and gave me the good news: I had been cleared to tour Pollsmoor.

Excited, I drove over to the suburb of Tokai, where Pollsmoor sat below the mountains and a few miles from the pine forest where I sometimes hiked with my dog. It was a suburb of boutique coffee shops and farmers’ markets. At one such outdoor market, a baboon the size of a preteen had mugged Sam, menacingly grabbing our tote bag. The baboon rushed into the trees and called his baboon friends over to share his take; moments later, I spotted a smaller baboon sitting on a rock, smugly munching on one of my organic pomegranates.

The prison was barely visible from the road. Through the gates, inmates in orange jumpsuits worked in the shade, digging holes and patching walls. The day was blisteringly hot, and I parked my car on a lawn in the sun. I checked in at reception and was led to a small room, where I was informed by an extravagantly pleasant communications officer that in fact there was no documentation granting me access to the prison.

Soon enough, the officer’s superior, a well-coiffed woman, greeted me. She, too, lacked any documentation that would allow me official access, but she was willing to circumvent the process on the understanding that indeed such documentation was forthcoming. Meanwhile, the delightful man from the prison authority, reached on his cellphone, assured me that the documentation was on its way: an official would indeed be faxing the approval “justnow.”

“Justnow” is a South African term that actually means “at some imprecise time fairly soon.” Its preferable counterpart, “nownow,” means “immediately.” My heart sank when the man spoke the words “justnow,” but I was locked in a battle, and I naively thought I could persevere against one of the world’s most opaque bureaucracies.

Meanwhile, the well-coiffed superior, at a loss for how to entertain a journalist sitting expectantly in her office, circled the table. “It will be a positive report, yes?” she asked me.

“Yes?” I answered.

If that was indeed the case, the superior figured that I would be able to begin the tour as she awaited the documentation. Therefore, a slight and bookish guard, fresh from the Eastern Cape, no older than twenty and no heavier than a ballerina, was assigned to my detail. I suspected that, given the right situation, I could have personally disarmed the man, and I worried for his safety in this new line of work. He led me to the records room, where a dinosaur clerk sat locked behind bars, wheeling a desk chair to and from various filing cabinets.

“Without documentation, I can’t show you anything,” the clerk said. This was a man from the old regime, and the old regime had, it seemed for the most part, followed the rules—no exceptions, no sweet-talking.

My guard, now increasingly frazzled, led me to another room, where a young white clerk seemed unfazed by my request for the prison records of the men accused in the Amy Biehl murders, and started combing the system. He printed out Mongezi Manqina’s sentence on the rape conviction—received after he was given amnesty—but the record mentioned nothing about murder. Easy’s and Ntobeko’s names were nowhere in the system.

“Why would this be?” the guard asked, turning to an older white woman with teased hair and a sausage-shaped body. Everyone called her
tannie
, which is Afrikaans for auntie, and she was their institutional memory.

“Anyone granted amnesty at TRC had their records removed by the head office,” she said. “They came one day and took them all away.”

Disappointed, I headed for the actual prison with my young guard. Up above was Mandela’s special former apartment, built for him by the apartheid government. In 1982, after seventeen years in a slender cell on Robben Island, Mandela was, without warning, transferred to Pollsmoor. He brought with him a few cardboard boxes, full of his worldly belongings, and was accompanied by three senior ANC members who had been with him on Robben Island, and he was joined by Ahmed Kathrada months later. In 1985, after Mandela, in secret early meetings with apartheid leaders, would not agree to become the “moderate” African the state wanted in exchange for his freedom, he was separated from his comrades.

I had hoped to see Mandela’s cell, but my guard informed me that it was now used to house tuberculosis-ridden prisoners, to keep them from infecting the general population. I wanted to see normal conditions of prisoners, I said, and so my guard escorted me to the maximum security section. I walked through the security checkpoint and through the puke green halls. We made our way up the steps and I could see below the line of visiting family members snaking into the guts of the building. I hoped to see the interior, which Easy had called “not a place for human being.” A place run by the Numbers gangs.

But I only got as far as the office of a warden’s secretary, who had arranged a little shrine to nail care on her desk, including a dozen hand creams, a pair of scissors, an orange stick, and several jars of cuticle softeners. “I’m sorry, but we need proper paperwork to show you anything,” she said.

And so, four hours after arriving at Pollsmoor, I left. I sent an email to Koos Gerber, expressing my distress. Though he had promised to streamline my access to the system, he now responded curtly that I would in fact have to fill out an entirely new application to visit the prisons. I did so, at length, and six months after my initial request, multiple emails and phone conversations, Gerber finally responded simply:
Your request was considered by Management but unfortunately they did not approve of your request.

I imagined what it must be like to be a prisoner stuck inside such a system, a labyrinth of rules and policies that were either adhered to or disregarded, seemingly at whim. As an American with a university degree, I couldn’t work out how to navigate the simplest of processes: gaining visitation to an institution supported by taxpayers. I could only imagine how an inmate, typically poor and with few resources, might manage.