We Are Not Such Things (56 page)

“How do you feel about the TRC?” I asked.

“I’m happy because I don’t like my child in jail, but I’m sad for his name. Easy say he kill at TRC, and so I’m sad, yho!”

“Yes, Easy says he did kill Amy. He tells—”

“—other story,” Kiki cut in.

“Why is that?”

“He tell me it’s for the commission. But I never understand.”

I nodded and Kiki turned back to her dishwashing. “I know Easy,” she said softly. “My child is not kill Amy Biehl.”

Did Kiki’s child kill Amy Biehl? If so, which child? According to everyone I’d asked, except for Terry the thief and Pinky the ex, Easy was, at some point, present during Amy’s attack and subsequent death. I had searched the area for other witnesses and most, if they saw Easy at the scene of the crime at all, remembered him holding a stone in the vicinity of Amy’s car near the end of the incident. Easy confirmed this. Nobody, except for Miss A in her statement and the supportive Misses B and C, remembered him standing over Amy, stabbing her. And in any case, Amy received only one wound, by all accounts delivered by Mongezi Manqina. Why, then, had Easy told the commissioners that he had “stabbed at her”? Why would he have said, “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.”

Neither Vusumzi nor Ntobeko admitted to a stabbing, and they were given amnesty, so having thrust a knife in Amy’s direction was not a prerequisite for release. Moreover, whether or not Easy had a knife didn’t affect his ability to shield his brother from prosecution, if he was indeed protecting Monks, who claimed that neither of them had joined in on Amy’s assault. Plus, the contention that Easy had thrust a knife at Amy only confused matters, since the medical examiner’s report proved that Amy had been stabbed just once.

For the longest time, I couldn’t figure out this detail, threaded through so many stories. In the course of my work, still confused, I reread Miss A’s account of August 25, 1993, as well as Judge Friedman’s final judgment in October 1994, in which he found the defendants, who were maintaining innocence, guilty of Amy’s murder.

“Ntobeko repeatedly jumped on her and hit her with a stone on her head. Mr. Manqina and Mr. Nofemela approached the deceased while she was lying on the ground and both of them were on her left-hand side with knives, stabbing her,” Miss A told the court, hours after breaking down on the stand, explaining that testifying “made the whole picture of what happened that day come to my mind…as if I am presently experiencing the events of the day.” The lesser witnesses, Misses B and C, knew Miss A socially and were rumored to be fellow ANC members. They corroborated Miss A’s testimony, each mentioning Easy’s role in stabbing Amy.

The confessions of Mongezi, Easy, and Vusumzi were weak, and only placed them near the scene. They had also all retracted their confessions, though only Mongezi’s confession was thrown out. Nine months of the eleven-month trial were spent arguing whether the accused had been coerced or abused into confessing. Also, there were no photos or videos of that day. After potential witnesses got scared and pulled out, six people remained: Amy’s passengers and the three Misses. Unfortunately for the prosecution, most of them were of little use. Amy’s friends either hadn’t seen anything because they were too busy defending themselves against assault, or did see the perpetrators in the chaos, but then could not definitively point them out in a lineup. Judge Friedman liked Miss B, but found Miss C to be unreliable. Miss A, however, was his favorite witness, and she claimed to have seen the entire attack play out before her eyes. She stood up beautifully to cross-examination, explained what she had seen eloquently, and was impossible to intimidate.

“She made a very favorable impression on the Court,” Friedman announced soon before handing down his verdict. “She struck the Court as an entirely honest witness, upon whose testimony the Court could rely.”

Without Miss A, there were neither trustworthy witnesses nor adequate evidence linking the defendants to the crime. Friedman would have had no choice but to acquit. In his judgment, Friedman then adhered most closely to Miss A’s clear, well-told version of events. It occurred to me that Miss A had therefore essentially decided what had happened on August 25, 1993. She had made the first move in pointing out who was guilty. Of the four defendants who were imprisoned, three names—Easy, Ntobeko, and Mongezi—were on the original slip of paper that she had handed to Officer Leon Rhodes; Vusumzi had been hauled in after somebody, most likely Mongezi, gave him up to investigators. Miss A may indeed have seen the men attack Amy. Or she may have been convinced that she had seen them, but she may have made a mistake. And she was not aware that Easy had a lookalike brother.

Or Miss A may have had her own agenda: to rid the streets of troublemakers and to stick it to the militant PAC. She was receiving compensation in return for her testimony. Despite her claims that she was apolitical, rumor had it that her mother’s house often functioned as an ANC salon, and Miss A herself was known to be active in ANC-aligned women’s groups. In her short life, she had seen enough violence to make anyone sufficiently angry. Most of this violence was committed by young gangsters, and perhaps she had nurtured a burning hatred for such young men, the kind of hatred that would motivate her to seek out a little well-intentioned revenge. Maybe she was telling the truth. Or maybe she was just telling her truth.

Friedman dismissed inconsistencies and deficiencies in Miss A’s testimonies as reasonable, considering the chaotic scene she was describing. He noted that there was indeed one stab wound despite claims of multiple assailants with knives, but deemed this irrelevant. “Having regard to the number of people who were surrounding the deceased and attempting to attack her at the same time, the fact that the deceased had only one serious stab wound is understandable and does not detract from the reliability of the eyewitnesses’ testimony,” he announced.

Three years later, Nona Goso and Norman Arendse, representing the men at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, were in a bind. Their job was to obtain amnesty for their clients by allowing them to present a consistent, sincere rundown of August 25, 1993. But first, they had to come up with a single set of events to explain the chronology of the day. The “Truth” in the commission’s title (along with proving that the crime was political) was the main prerequisite for obtaining freedom. I knew that learning the perfect truth about Amy’s murder was impossible. Goso and Arendse probably chose to follow Miss A’s version of events because this version constituted the recorded, accepted, official truth of the circumstances surrounding Amy’s murder.

And besides, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was an institution with an overwhelming mandate—to bring the atrocities of the past to light. The commission required that applicants admit to their crimes, not deny them. If a person had been falsely imprisoned, he would have to appeal the case in the criminal courts, not before the TRC. But the criminal courts had already found the men guilty once; and if in fact Easy was wrongly identified, he could hardly explain the case of mistaken identity to a judge without implicating his brother in the crime. Nor was he likely to successfully argue that while he had been involved in Amy’s death, he had not been sufficiently involved to warrant a murder conviction. Moreover, where would Easy find a pro bono lawyer?

In contrast, the TRC was a ready-made forum in which applicants were supported by a political party and provided with attorneys. The TRC dangled before the prisoners the possibility of liberation and a clean slate. Possibly better, a hearing at the TRC allowed them to solidify their reputations as righteous freedom fighters, not as street gangsters or hooligans. The TRC could potentially provide the men with new, appealing, official identities. In this way, the TRC had an awesome power: It could create, rather than expose, history.

At the TRC, each man admitted to a version of what Miss A said happened. Miss A said Mongezi had stabbed Amy, and Mongezi admitted to stabbing Amy, and took the blame for the fatal wound. Miss A said Ntobeko had hit Amy with a rock, and Ntobeko said he had thrown rocks. Miss A said Easy had stoned and stabbed Amy. Easy agreed, but used the term “stab at”; this technicality could help him hedge if questioned as to why his supposed victim had only one puncture between her ribs. Miss A didn’t mention Vusumzi, so Vusumzi echoed his own confession at the criminal trial, in which he admitted to throwing rocks. It’s possible that in a perverse twist to the standard justice system, the men, or at least some among them, had been found guilty for a murder they didn’t commit, and the only way to freedom was to officially accept the blame.

But this brings up another question: what is guilt in the context of mob violence? If we are to believe that Easy was at the scene of the crime but did no more than stone Amy’s car, does that mean he is guilty nonetheless? He says he hopped off the bakkie, saw the throbbing crowd, and joined in pelting the Mazda with rocks as others pummeled a woman on the ground a few yards away. Can he be innocent if he was there but did not personally harm Amy? What about Ntobeko and Vusumzi, who always maintained that they only threw stones?

If they are guilty for simply being part of a mob, then every member is guilty. They all contributed, by sheer mass and intention, to Amy’s needless death. If this is the case, then Ilmar Pikker was right when he said, “There was thirty people there that day, and I would have liked to see them all in prison….The four we got are just a weak consolation prize.”

Or were the men who actually attacked Amy the real killers, and those who pelted her car merely vandals? In this case, some might consider Mongezi Manqina the real murderer, since he admitted to Amy’s stabbing. However, the medical examiner believed that the first stone to the head may well have been the crowning blow.

Then the question is: who threw that particular stone? Vusumzi broke the windshield, but he was certain he had not made contact with Amy. Evaron Orange, sitting next to Amy in the passenger seat, remembered a pop of glass, and then stones pouring in, cracking Amy’s skull. So then the real murderer is a person who stood on NY1, hurling rocks and bricks at Amy with devastating aim. After twenty years, or even after twenty seconds, would anyone in a throbbing, adrenaline-laced throng be able to tell who cast that deadly stone?

And if they could, would that exonerate those who stood by as an innocent woman was beaten to death? Would it exonerate those who cheered as she was stabbed? Would it condemn a system that sought swift, inexact justice? Would it condemn those who told a false story as if it were true?

On the day that he told me of the white man killed by the train station, I left Easy propped up and sleeping on a couch at Aunt Princess’s house. I drove out of the township, over the bridge. On the way out, I called Pikker, who was again in South Africa from Abu Dhabi, this time for some operation on his legs that never took place, as the doctor decided he was too likely to perish while under anesthesia. Did he know of this white man, attacked the same day as Amy? No, no, Pikker said. He had never heard of such a thing. I called Niehaus, the old prosecutor. Did he recall a second attack? Oh my, he said. It was a long time ago, but he certainly did not. Maybe the cops would have a record, but he probably would have gotten wind of it had another white been killed.

I called Mzi. “No, Justini, I don’t remember this,” he said.

I figured that Easy had been mistaken, or confused. His mind was scrambled from a long night drinking crummy brandy. There had been no white man, no worker. Certainly Amy Elizabeth Biehl was the only white person attacked in Gugulethu on August 25, 1993. If she hadn’t been, the police would have investigated the other murder, would have connected the two crimes. I knew the killing of a middle-aged white male South African municipal worker wasn’t as intriguing as the killing of a young white female American activist, but surely the papers and news programs would have reported on them together, at least a bit. According to Easy’s telling, the attack occurred less than a half mile from where Amy was killed.