We Are Not Such Things (52 page)

The man in the SUV now seemed to consider a potential fight. He looked at me and then he looked at Mzi. Mzi sat in the passenger seat, his camouflage hat shading his eyes. The man grumbled to himself, and sped away. Mzi and I then drove down the street slowly, in silence.

“I must tell my sisters to be careful when they get off in the street,” Mzi said eventually. “Those taxis are dangerous, opening the door in the middle lane.”

Three days later, I pulled onto Mzi’s front lawn at 6:30
A
.
M
. It was a Saturday, and visiting day at Pollsmoor. Mzi had recommended the early start, since the prisons were overcrowded and the lines were long. At that hour, the sky was navy. I saw Mzi’s head peer slowly over a fence, the cherry of his cigarette glowing against his silhouette. He wore his
UNIVERSAL MESSAGE
hat and a T-shirt that said
TAKE BACK THE STREETS
in neon green, and when he got into the car he smelled like he’d spent the evening at a Grateful Dead concert.

“I guess
you
had a nice night,” I said.

He turned to me, his eyes bloodshot, then inspected himself in the mirror. “Is it obvious?” I nodded, and he buried his head in his hands. “It is true: I have been smoking dagga with a community of Rastafarians.”

Once we entered the Pollsmoor grounds, we parked by the entrance. Because most visitors came in on public transport, even on a busy day the lot was nearly empty. We gamely got in line, shuffled among moms and sisters and sons and daughters, with a dad and a brother and a friend thrown in. The women clutched Tupperware containers of food and treats. Of the hundreds of people, I counted exactly five white folks, myself included. If you had a good enough lawyer, rumor had it, she would at least get you into the fancy Malmesbury Prison instead of this place.

Once we checked in, we walked through metal detectors, were patted down, and emerged into a spacious, pale green room, outfitted with rows of long train-station-style wooden benches. A large flat-screen TV was bolted to the wall above the bathrooms, but it was turned off. There were doors to one side of the room, leading to an interior courtyard, where dozens of colored women were wandering around, smoking cigarettes. A sign reminded us of the rules:

No short skirts (miniskirts) allowed in Pollsmoor

No showing of half breasts (cleavage) allowed in Pollsmoor

No short pants (shorts) allowed in Pollsmoor

No transparent tights allowed in Pollsmoor

No transparent pants allowed in Pollsmoor

Your behaviour will be highly appreciated

Mzi and I were herded into a line. I gave over my passport and Mzi presented his identity document. The document had been created in 1996, just after his first release from prison, after his participation in the 1994 attempted APLA attack on a police station in the Eastern Cape. In the picture, he was all fury and jutting cheekbones, his skin darker and the contours of his face sharper. His eyes were black and vacant.

“You look rough,” I said.

“They tortured me,” he said, matter-of-factly. “They made me wild.”

A Nigerian gentleman with a grand belly sidled up to us. He wore a black and neon-yellow tracksuit and a watch the size of a cookie. He stepped on my foot and did not apologize. He was here to visit his brother, he explained, who had been sentenced to two years for beating a woman, but it wasn’t his brother’s fault that the woman was a troublemaker, and moreover, if his brother had hired a well-connected lawyer,
like he had advised
, instead of a state defense attorney, he would be walking around in the world today.

“The free lawyers is
kak
lawyers,” the Nigerian said, moving closer to me, using the Afrikaans term for crap. “You find a lawyer who went to school with the judge and other lawyers, so he was sitting next to the judge in class. They talk, you walk.”

“He was trying to con you,” Mzi later said, though neither of us knew how the con might have unraveled. “That’s what Nigerians do.”

Finally, after three hours of waiting—to enter, to be searched, to give the inmate’s name, for that name to be called—we were bused, in a shiny red van, to C Section. The van stopped and we piled out before an unremarkable brick building. In the run-down entrance area, a guard stood by a small table of doughnuts, taped with a sign that said
FOR SALE
,
4 RAND
. Mzi figured this was a side business for the guards. They were all bursting from their khaki uniforms and carrying cups of steaming coffee and tea.

On the wall, someone had pasted a sign:
BE WISE NOT WEIRD SAY NO 2 DRUGS
☺. There was a small commissary, where visitors could buy smokes or candy or chips for themselves and prisoners. We bought a Baggie of tobacco and a lighter for Terry. A bag was better for prison than single cigarettes, Mzi explained, as the tobacco could be traded like currency for a longer period of time.

We were then led to a visiting room, and sat on two wooden stools, carved with hundreds of names. I carried a notebook, which wasn’t allowed, but Mzi explained that we were doing work on account of the PAC and that the notebook was absolutely necessary for this endeavor. I nodded resolutely and the guards, in their confusion and laziness, accepted the explanation.

After a few minutes, Terry emerged from the back. He sat down across from us, separated by glass and metal webbing. He was small, dark, and bone-thin. His inch-long hair was working its way into matted little dreadlocks, and his arms were covered in pink scars. He was growing a scraggly excuse for a beard and wore a dirty orange jumpsuit, from which his gaunt neck protruded. A white crust was affixed to the corners of his lips.

Terry was neither particularly surprised to see Mzi nor particularly interested as to the reason behind my presence. When we asked if he would talk about the Amy Biehl case, he explained first that he had “head problems.”

“My memory is not right.”

But he would try to remember what had happened. On account of his being in and out of prison countless times, most of them for shoplifting, people had long stopped visiting. Any visitor broke the monotony, and Terry was a man with pretty much nothing to lose.

Terry settled in and started to walk through the day, August 25, 1993. He was fifteen then, a mediocre student. He had been in the shoplifting game for a while; stealing was already his habit.

He lived on NY111, near Easy and Mzi, and therefore had also been indoctrinated in PAC ideology. That morning, he accompanied his friends to Langa Secondary School, attended the PAC student rally, and then marched down the road. They were shouting an anti-white slogan—the slogan itself, he couldn’t quite recall.

“One settler, one bullet?” I asked, and he nodded uncertainly.

Terry could remember seeing a bunch of local kids at the rally and in the march in Langa: Ntobeko and Easy and Monks included. Of the three, Monks was Terry’s best friend, since the boys were closest in age. With part of the group, including Monks, Terry hopped on the train at Langa—the last he saw Monks was on that train—and hopped off at Heideveld station in Gugulethu. The crowd was a few minutes behind the first group coming from Bonteheuwel, which had already arrived in Gugulethu. From the station, the second group followed in the first group’s footsteps, toyi-toyi-ing up the road. Near the Caltex, Terry saw a car. A stone had been thrown into the backseat, and the people inside the car were quickly getting out. The kids from the first group were all around.

Up until this point, Terry had been in a revolutionary mindset. But as soon as he saw an empty car, he went into his default petty-thief mode. He didn’t care about slogans or politics anymore. He dove into the open door, rustled around, and took a moment to observe a cracked brick on the floor by the backseat. A heavy rucksack had been abandoned in the car, and Terry grabbed the item. Then he took off running.

Terry rushed straight to the Nofemela house on NY111. He was hoping to meet Monks there, but Monks hadn’t returned yet. Easy was there.

“Easy and his other brother and Easy’s girlfriend Pinky,” Terry said.

“Easy was not at the march at that point?” I asked. Terry shook his head.

“Easy was home, but Monks was not home?”

Terry nodded. Everyone else I’d spoken with contended that Easy was indeed at the march. Some said he had been at the march and had attacked Amy. Others said he arrived at the end of the march and merely happened upon the end of the attack. Easy himself insisted he had indeed been there, and alternately claimed to have attacked Amy and to have done little more than toss a stone. But Terry, like Easy’s girlfriend Pinky, insisted Easy was not at the march at all.

At the Nofemela house, Terry opened the rucksack. He removed a red camera, some schoolbooks, and the ID card of a student—probably not Amy Biehl, since Terry thought he’d remember if a white person had been pictured. While Pinky had told me that Terry had found an ANC card, Terry had no recollection of this. Then again, Terry’s memory was, as he attested, “not right.”

Terry waited for Monks, who eventually returned home, since Monks was a potential customer. Monks didn’t want to purchase Terry’s take, though he and the others admired the haul, and then Terry headed over to the DairyBelle hostels. Terry liked to unload his take at the hostels because you were guaranteed to find someone willing to buy stolen goods for cut-rate prices. He didn’t burn the camera, like Pinky said. Instead, he sold it, along with the books, and kept the rucksack for himself. He’d look nice with a new schoolbag, he figured.

Terry looked down and closed his eyes. Then he turned to Mzi and spoke in Xhosa.

“The things that is troubling him is the voices in his head,” Mzi translated. “There are voices that interrupt him when he is talking to us. The voices are talking about us.”

“Are the voices a new thing?” I asked.

“From last November they started,” Mzi translated.

A woman, on her way out, carried a little boy in her arms. He was looking over her shoulder, repeating, “Bye dada, bye dada, bye dada!”

Terry resumed his story. After he had sold the items, he returned home with his new bag slung across his shoulder. His mother and grandmother were sitting in the living room, watching TV, and they informed him that a white lady had been killed on NY111.

“Get rid of that bag, Terry,” his mother advised. And so he went to the backyard and burned the bag.

Terry was soon arrested anyway—presumably somebody had given up his name—and taken to the local police station. He was in the second group of suspects that had been swept up, and he met the APLA trio at the station. Then, because he was underage at the time of arrest, Terry was released to his mother’s custody, on the expectation that he would appear in court.

But in October 1993, six months before Mandela won the nation’s first democratic elections and while the apartheid government was involved in negotiations, a team of twelve South African commandos stormed a house in the nominally independent homeland of Transkei, part of today’s Eastern Cape. The state claimed that the place was an arms cache for APLA members and that eighteen militants were harbored there. In fact, the only inhabitants of the house were five sleeping children, ages twelve through seventeen. Commandos shot each one in the head with an Uzi, then searched the premises and found no weapons. De Klerk announced that he had ordered the raid.

The PAC, incensed, bused students and supporters to attend the boys’ funeral, and Terry rode along. Monks went, too. They discussed the best plan of action for Terry, who was scared of being tried. They decided that he should hide out in the Eastern Cape until things cooled down. Terry didn’t return to Gugulethu, and instead ingratiated himself with APLA members in the bush. He trained for a few months, once in a while meeting up with Mzi, who was in the midst of planning the police station attack that would result in his first imprisonment. At one point, Terry stole a party member’s petty cash and bought some booze; he was subsequently relocated to another member’s house. The man he considered his commander was killed. His last words to Terry: Do not surrender to the enemy.

“After that, Terry went underground,” Mzi explained.

“Is he still underground?” I asked.

Terry and Mzi laughed.

“Ever since I was underground, I never came up,” Terry said.

Eventually, Terry did return to Cape Town. The murder charge against him was withdrawn, for reasons unknown to Terry (the prosecutor Niehaus noted lack of evidence), but by the time he was eighteen, he would enter the prison system anyway. Mostly, he was arrested for stealing, which he did often and not very well, probably because he was usually high when he committed his various offenses. He was currently serving a year for stealing a pair of trousers from a mall, though he had no idea how far into his sentence he was.

“But the voices are saying I get out next month,” Terry added without enthusiasm.

That’s when a guard came by and informed us our time was up.