We Are Not Such Things (53 page)

As we drove away from the prison, I remarked on Terry’s downward trajectory. Grappling with drug addiction and mental health issues, the man bounced aimlessly between the township and the prisons.

“We have a saying in Xhosa,” Mzi said. “
Indlala inamanyala.
Poverty makes you perverse.”

I had now spoken to five of the eight men arrested for killing Amy Biehl: Easy, Ntobeko, Mongezi, the lone surviving member of the APLA trio (Mzi’s brother Steyn), and now, finally, Terry. Since two of the men were dead, only Vusumzi eluded me. This was because Vusumzi came from Langa, a different township, and therefore a different ecosystem. Mongezi, who had been childhood friends with Vusumzi, and who had brought him to the site of Amy’s murder, was my closest link to the man. Mzi accompanied me to meet up with Mongezi, and Mongezi agreed to help us look for him. We spent a couple of days bopping around Gugulethu, as Mongezi led us to various empty houses that he said had previously been inhabited by Vusumzi’s relatives. We even once drove over to Vusumzi’s aunt’s house in Langa, but nobody was home. Vusumzi had fallen off the grid, if he had ever been on it.

“What do you think of Mongezi?” I asked Mzi. We were sitting in the car as Mongezi knocked on a door.

“I think apartheid created monsters,” Mzi said philosophically. “Anyway, he doesn’t want us to find Vusumzi.”

“He doesn’t? But he says he does. He’s even helping us now.”

“No, he’s lying,” Mzi said. “He is hiding something. What, I don’t know. We’re going to have to find this Vusumzi on our own.”

“Sorry, ma’am,” Mongezi said, sliding into the backseat. “Nobody is home.”

Having given up on Mongezi, Mzi and I tried to retrace our steps a few weeks later, back to the aunt’s Langa house. As Cape Town’s first township, Langa was a more contained neighborhood, closer to town. Its population was a bit over 52,000—as compared to Gugulethu’s nearly 100,000 and Khayelitsha’s 400,000-plus—and most families lived in cement apartheid-era houses on neat lanes, with small, well-tended front lawns or gardens. It had the feel of a small, pleasant, very poor neighborhood.

Mzi drove my car—he liked driving, and was better at navigating the townships; this allowed me to take notes from the passenger seat. Finally, after an hour driving up and down the same streets, we recognized a small spaza shop and decided the house was on this very street. Mzi asked a passerby if he knew where the Ntamos lived, and the man pointed at a home with an orange door. We parked and knocked, and an ample-chested woman, wearing a tank top and no bra, welcomed us in. This was Vusumzi’s aunt. She had a mole the size of a raisin over her left eye and a curly gray bob. The room’s central decor was a portrait of her striking a pose in a large sun hat. Her blaring radio was competing with a blaring radio down the street. She sat at her pink kitchen table eating goat stew directly from a pan, listening as Mzi did his standard, long-winded, explanatory pitch. They were shaking hands like old friends, immediately familiar, and Mzi was lowering himself into a chair.

“Mmmm,” the aunt said when Mzi was done. “Vusumzi did say he threw a stone, but he never did stab Amy. He can talk to you, but he is not staying here.”

The aunt’s son, a skinny thirty-year-old wearing a knit yellow T-shirt and baseball cap, was sitting with her, fiddling with an ashtray. He had kind eyes and crooked front teeth. Mzi whispered that I should give the man a few rand to buy minutes for his phone, which I did. He then made a quick phone call and said he would be most pleased to take us to see Vusumzi, who now resided with his mother in Delft township, near Khayelitsha. The cousin needed a lift that way anyway, so he packed a quick duffel bag and hopped in back, leaning over the seat to offer directions.

We took the N2 to Delft, a desert: no beach, no water, only sand, in great quantity. Sand blowing across the flats, stuck in the weeds, coating the paved streets, surrounding the houses. Sand, and whole neighborhoods of tidy, beige, single-story block homes on small plots, the same design repeated again and again, differentiated only by small touches: a Bible verse painted by the door, a colorful window treatment. Set behind and around the government houses of Delft were the typical cracked pastel structures, the backyard dwellings, the shacks, and then, peppered among them, the built-up, improved-upon houses of the tentative middle class, those township-born professionals who, at least for this generation, couldn’t leave their roots but could certainly beautify and modernize them. The area was home to a mix of black and colored people, and when a colored truck driver blocked our path down a one-way road, Mzi leaned out the window and pleaded in Afrikaans, which the driver heeded.

“Broer, asseblief!”
Brother, please!

Finally, we pulled off onto a dead end and parked to the side. We knocked on the metal door of a blue one-room stand-alone house, and a boy of twelve or so let us in, uttering a few words in Xhosa before he shuffled back to sit on his bed, set a foot away from a bright TV. The dim dwelling contained two neatly made beds, separated by a wooden armoire, and a barren kitchen with a hotplate and three pots. The toilet, set alone in the backyard, was shared with several other houses.

We loitered in the house as the boy ate cereal before the TV, until the cousin saw a woman whose age I estimated to be somewhere between sixteen and twenty-six. She was short and wore a powder-blue housecoat and slippers. She approached, and he grabbed her face, examining the acne covering her forehead.

“There’s a very effective pimple cream available at the pharmacy,” he said. “It only costs five rand.”

While the cousin was conducting a dermatological consultation, an emaciated older man shuffled into the house: small, with bits of close-shaven gray hair and a sunken, hollow face, his body—just skin pulled taut over bone—disappearing beneath a baggy maroon pajama top and black athletic pants, his oversized flip-flops exposing gnarled dark toenails. But I recognized those features: the handsome younger man he had once been, the man I had seen staring, uncomprehending, from newspaper photos and captured on old video.

“You must be Vusumzi,” I said, offering my hand. “I’m Justine and we’ve been looking for you.”

“Hello, ma’am,” he said, averting his eyes.

Vusumzi was only forty-two, but he could have passed for ten or even twenty years older. His hand was clammy, and though the day was hot, he smelled cool and smoky. We were heading to his mother’s house, I was informed, and as we turned to leave, the young woman in the housecoat admonished Vusumzi for going out in sleepwear. He turned at once, shuffling to the armoire. In the corner, facing away, he pulled off his shirt. I glanced over to see his curved back, every jagged rib visible, as he slipped into an orange tank.

From there, we drove to the house that belonged to Vusumzi’s other aunt, one of those beige government-issued places. The old lady—a short, fat, light-skinned woman in a navy maid’s uniform, her hair pulled back under a purple-and-white scarf—met us at the door, addressed me as “lovey,” and pulled my hand to her lips to kiss it. A placid, developmentally disabled teenage girl, wearing a bright orange minidress, stood behind her. Vusumzi’s aunt, the girl in the orange dress, Vusumzi’s cousin, and Vusumzi himself headed out to my car. As the group was arranging itself into the small backseat, Mzi leaned to me.

“Is strange family, this,” he whispered. “They all seem to be mentally challenged.”

We drove farther into Delft to another collection of government dwellings.

“Straight, m’Africa,” Vusumzi mumbled to Mzi. “Straight, m’Africa, straight, m’Africa, straight, m’Africa, straight, m’Africa. 085, 085, 085, 085, 085.”

We pulled up at house 85 in another government development. A heavily pregnant black dog slept on the sand beneath a roof overhang. Vusumzi’s mother opened the door. She was a tall, warm woman with a nagging dry cough and a broad, open face, dressed in a blue-and-white blouse and long denim shorts, her hair braided tight to her head. She welcomed us into a spotless, spartan room, its main furnishing an enormous home theater console that boasted a disconcerting pair of life-size white ceramic terriers, a ten-strong DVD collection that included
Dreamgirls
and
Mr. Bean’s Holiday,
and a flat-screen TV.

The house was unfinished, its walls and floors bare cement: the state provided the structure, but no tiles, frills, or finishings. There were also neither chairs nor tables, so the older ladies sat on a couple of ottomans, while Mzi and I balanced on a narrow hand-hewn bench. The cousin settled onto a yellow jerrican in the corner. The girl in the orange dress pulled up a wooden stool. She was sweating heavily from the temples. A drill sounded outside, metal boring into concrete. Vusumzi lowered himself to the floor, took off his shoes, and pulled his knees to his chest. He rested his arms on his knees, and then lay his head in the crook of his elbows, the posture of a small child who has been punished.

First, Vusumzi’s mother and aunt began the intricate Xhosa way of greeting me and Mzi, that long and tender conversation that has the capacity to quickly turn strangers into friends. Then they reminisced about their meetings with the Biehls—the handshakes and murmurings of solidarity at the TRC, and that time in 1994 that Linda took them to lunch and asked them not to cry. They were crying because she had lost her daughter, and
she
comforted
them
.

“We are happy you are allowing Vusumzi to finally tell his story,” the aunt said. “The new generation can learn not to repeat these old mistake.”

Somebody started banging at an interior door, and the mother got up to let a six-foot-tall teenage girl out of the bathroom—it seemed that the door could only be opened from the outside. The girl ambled into the room and sat on the floor. Vusumzi began to run through his memory.

Vusumzi had never been involved in politics. Rather, he had known Mongezi Manqina since he was a child, and had followed Mongezi’s lead. The two were friends, then, and Vusumzi didn’t have many of those on account of him being different, and slow. Still, he recognized a dark and wicked side to Mongezi. When they were teenagers, one day, after smoking no small amount of dagga, the two had wandered by an old lady selling meat.

“She was working only to survive, and Mongezi stole the meat from her. We argued but the meat fell to the ground. Mongezi, he was born that way.”

Mongezi, deep into petty crime, was also involved in radical student politics and he had invited Vusumzi once before to a PAC youth gathering. The politics of the PAC appealed to Vusumzi, he claimed. “I was just learning the PAC then, but I still believe,” he said. But the rally that resulted in Amy’s death was only his second march. It was a convenient one for him to attend—after all, he lived in Langa then, less than a mile from Langa Secondary School—and Mongezi invited him along.

Vusumzi was following Mongezi, singing freedom songs and toyi-toyi-ing, when somebody yelled that a settler was in their midst. Vusumzi saw the white lady and, spurred on by the group, picked up a stone and hurled it toward her car. Her windshield shattered, but she was not hit. She drove a bit more, until the group descended upon her. Vusumzi stood watching as she ran, and as his friend Mongezi tripped her and stabbed her. Others had begun to step back, but Mongezi was committed.

“Who else was there?” I asked.

Vusumzi didn’t know Easy or Ntobeko then. The first time he saw Ntobeko was at the Langa Secondary School rally, but he didn’t recall seeing him at the scene of the crime. The first time he saw Easy, he said, was when Easy was trying to burn Amy’s car.

“How did you recognize Easy if you’d never seen him before?”

“I saw that he was small and had a light complexion. Later, in prison, the guy I met looked the same as the guy I saw when Amy was attacked.”

After Amy’s death, Vusumzi, like dozens of others in the mob, hid at his family home in Langa, hoping that nobody would come for him. But Mongezi had been picked up, and had given Vusumzi’s name. Mongezi had reason to be frightened of retribution from others—you could not safely be an impimpi on the local gangsters or the militants—but he knew Vusumzi couldn’t hurt him. Vusumzi didn’t belong to a gang or, officially, to any political group, and he wasn’t capable of enacting revenge.

“Mongezi directed them,” Vusumzi said. “He is the reason I went to prison.”

“How do you feel about Mongezi now?”

“There’s no friendship,” he said, and set his mouth.

“Why?”

“I have
got
a reason. My own reason.”

“Tell me more about Mongezi.”

“Mongezi has no values, no respect. He is bad company. I remember very well that in prison, Mongezi said to me, ‘I’ve been longing to be alone with you.’ He planned it all. He wanted to destroy me. In prison, he wanted me to be a 28 with him, a gangster, but I didn’t become a gangster. I stuck to my guns. Only me. Mongezi was a 28. Then Easy had convinced Ntobeko to join.”

“What happened in prison?”

“I share this secret for the first time…” Vusumzi said. Then he stopped. He shook his head back and forth and began to mutter: “Mongezi, uwrongo, uwrongo, uwrongo.”
Mongezi, he’s not right, he’s not right, he’s not right.