We Are Not Such Things (69 page)

A man approached me. “We want to know if you are Coetzee,” he said. He was not familiar with the bearded, male, septuagenarian Nobel Prize winner, and Coetzee is a common Afrikaans surname. Here I stood: a white writer, holding a book. Could be.

“No, I wish,” I said. “Anyway, I’m not Afrikaans. I’m American.”

“Serious? Please take me there in your suitcase!”

After lunch and chatter and warm goodbyes, we drove farther up the mountain to another cousin’s house. This house, despite also lacking electricity and running water, was a sleek, fresh little number, a new white three-bedroom with shining peach-tiled floors, an expensive sofa set, and gauzy curtains. Its owner was originally from this village, though he now worked and lived in Durban—apparently doing well, if his late-model Mercedes and house back in the city were any indication. But his dream had always been to build a place of his own in his native village, and this house was the realization of the dream.

The man was surrounded by his rural relatives, and he was simultaneously treating them to a braai and displaying his good fortune. Now, with us there, he had even more people to spoil and to strut before. He laughingly challenged Taku to a push-up contest, which Taku won. Easy, meanwhile, had become obsessed with a lilliputian fellow who was hanging around. The man was just over five feet and small-boned, and this delighted Easy, who never got the opportunity to tower over another man. He demanded that I take multiple pictures of him with his arm slung over the agreeable man, and later ran around Gugulethu showing off the prints I had made at his request.

We stood outside as the sun began to set, congregating around the grill, as the relative turned the meat. He was at least six-foot-three, and I couldn’t see how the diminutive Nofemelas and this towering fellow shared any DNA. Somebody had brought a bottle of whiskey, which was summarily shared—though Taku and Wowo, teetotalers, refused. Once the cousin had cooked the first batch of meat, he put another batch over the fire, to be tended by a friend, and everyone filed inside. The sausage and pork chops were set out on a communal silver platter and the six men gathered around, their faces grave. This was serious business, the business of sharing the fruit of the braai. Each pulled from his pocket a switchblade and helped himself. A lady entered, took her own piece, and settled to the side, on an overturned bucket. Once the first helping had been polished off, another platter was brought in. The men, who had been steadily eating for twenty minutes, looked tired, but then the cousin flipped open his knife and started at it again, and everyone followed suit.

The sun was now a flame across the horizon. A larger group of men had gathered outside, and they were deep into their drink. They held cigarettes between their thumbs and forefingers. Dusk fell, and with only candles lighting the earth for miles, everything was bathed in navy. For my benefit, this group, which I had joined in the open air, was speaking to each other in halting English. Then suddenly, one young man, who had been particularly enthusiastic about the whiskey, stopped mid-sentence. He stared at me and then spit out some words in Xhosa. I shrugged innocently and the group waited for him to break the silence.

“You must speak Xhosa here,” he said harshly, in English.

I looked at Easy and considered the situation. He returned my gaze, steady. Everyone else fixed me in their sights.

“Ndisafunda ukuthetha isiXhosa,”
I said slowly, like a schoolchild.
I am still learning to speak Xhosa.
They had taught me this in my class, and it was among the few sentences I could remember.

Everyone continued to stare, and I shifted in place.

Then, just like that, my accuser broke into a smile. Everyone else smiled, too. They started talking again. I stepped away.

“It’s time to go,” I whispered to Easy, and we made our way back to the house, where we said our goodbyes.

Once in the car, Easy took the wheel, with Wowo and Taku in back. A dark blanket was slowly pulled across the plains. Wowo and Taku, bellies full of meat, let out burps. The hatchback lurched down the hill.

“Wowo, tell me about Easy, as a son,” I said.

Wowo shifted in place. “What I like, he respect even my brothers. I like that. All my sons. And if someone fighting, they were not scared to fight. Especially if they not started the fight.”

“I can’t imagine you angry,” I said to Easy.

“Is like Truth Commission here!” he exclaimed.

“What I like with Easy, he was not a skollie,” Wowo explained. “But if you provoke him, want fight, you get it. Is like me. Like me, yho, I fight, don’t worry. Other day, we were there in Langa, me and my brother—”

“Was 1965, and they want to check Wowo’s strength so they come to me and take my money,” Taku interrupted. “So we go together to them.”

“We fighting straightaway, they run away. Yho!”

“Now is terrible. They have words like bullying, but was playing to us,” Taku said.

“Fighting is part of playing,” Wowo said.

“Then in 1976, there were people staying in Gugulethu,” Taku said. “They were trying to help the government to stop us from stoning the property. Those people were having weapons but we are not scared of them. We fight with them. We won the battle! We won the battle!”

Now only our headlights guided the way down the hills, passing over the villages and, once in a while, a solitary pedestrian.

“When it was governed by the white people, it was a better town, it looked nicer then,” Taku said absently. “But when Africans took over, tsho…”

“Tell me, Wowo,” I said. “Do you remember when Easy was arrested for Amy Biehl?”

“He was sleeping on the back side, with Pinky. They go to the back and caught him. Arrest him. Then he gone. Tomorrow, the police come back. Again they check. I don’t know what. They see a lot of pictures, PAC pictures, the flag of PAC.”

“Did you think he was involved in Amy’s death?”

“I was not there. That day was a riot. He wasn’t there, or was there, I don’t know. I don’t know nothing about what he do outside. I was in house.”

“Ntobeko was also at the march? And Monks?”

“Rumors saying, but we don’t know,” Taku said. “It’s hearsay. All of them were mentioned, but Monks wasn’t caught.”

“People say Monks hurt Amy,” I said.

“I think they are confused,” Wowo said.

“I can’t say,” Taku said. “We didn’t see them. But the information that we are getting, some people are saying some things. I don’t say if we will ever know.”

“Monks was there,” Easy said. “We see this white lady running towards the garage. She was already outside the car, already stoned. I think from there, people say they saw Monks.”

“Did he and Monks look alike?” I asked Taku and Wowo.

“But not exactly,” Taku said.

“One theory is that Monks was the one at Amy Biehl,” I said. “Easy came after and they pointed him out because he was well known in the area. I talked to the main witness. She doesn’t even know who Monks is, but she knows Easy. Maybe she saw Monks and thought he was Easy. But nobody will confirm.”

“I never heard this story,” Wowo said.

“What we heard, we heard Easy is the one,” Taku said. “But maybe the witness was scared of the mob. She might never notice exactly who did what.”

“And Monks, he didn’t tell us they make mistake,” Wowo said. “If he is scared to go to prison, Monks can tell us, and Easy also can tell us, ‘Was not me, was Monks.’ We don’t know nothing. We only know Monks and Easy was there in riot. We can say is possible or not possible, we don’t know. I don’t know nothing.”

“What happened that day was beyond our expectations,” Taku said. “Maybe was Easy, maybe was Monks. He knows, Easy does.”

“The one who was there must know everything,” Wowo said.

“And I told you, Justine,” Easy said.

I will never know for certain who killed Amy Biehl on August 25, 1993: who cast the fatal stone, who stabbed her in the chest, who stood above her as she begged for her life, and who snuffed that life out. Was it Easy, his little brother Monks, or neither? Did Ntobeko hit her with a rock, or did he watch from afar? Did Mongezi Manqina, gangster-cum-freedom-fighter-cum-rapist, pierce Amy’s heart and her lungs with a blade, or did he take the credit because he was hungry for some taste of glory in his decidedly inglorious life? Was Vusumzi Ntamo—impoverished, easily manipulated—a guilty part of the frothing mob or just an easy-to-arrest black man? How many others surrounded Amy, and how many of them slipped back into the township forever, to be swallowed by the place? Was Amy a naive student who made a bad choice? Was she a rights fighter who died as she made a stand for equality? Were her friends, who wanted a ride home so badly, victims as well, or had they acted irresponsibly when they brought her into the volatile township?

Linda, it occurred to me, knew about the uncertainty of the South African narrative. She had said as much to that radio interviewer in St. Louis, months after she cut contact with me. The interviewer had called Ntobeko a killer, and Linda had intercepted.

“He was not maybe a perpetrator that actually committed the crime,” she said. “So you use the word killer, but I don’t use the word killer….You know, as much as we tell the story cut and dry, there are all these little sidebars and things that say many of them could have wielded a knife or thrown a stone, but eyewitnesses came forward and kind of picked out some. Ntobeko ran away, was not tried with the other three. But it’s more complicated than just—”

The interviewer, apologizing, cut her off. “These stories always are,” he said, and the conversation veered away.

People, myself included, have a blind spot just here. When Easy, questioned before the TRC in 1997, insisted he had “stabbed at” Amy, but could not be sure if he had really stabbed her, one commissioner had tried to clarify Easy’s actual role in the crime, but Easy’s lawyer led the hearing away from that suspicious detail. I had read the term “stabbed at” many times, and regarded it curiously, but for at least the first year of my research, I simply justified it to myself as the verbal quirk of a court interpreter. White detectives, followed by a white prosecutor and a white judge, had decided Easy’s role in the crime and convicted and imprisoned him; later he admitted to that crime before a diverse group of sympathetic commissioners. And after that, he and Ntobeko had built lives upon this version of the past. They were reformed killers and ex-radicals making good with their victim’s parents; this was recorded for posterity. How could it be otherwise?

Linda also knew that the old records weren’t the whole truth. She had told me this when I was haranguing her for them over the phone. “Nobody wants the truth,” she had said. “Those TRC records aren’t the truth. They are graphic and ugly. The truth is that the country was still in turmoil. She represented the oppressor, and her white face was all that was wrong with the country, and she was killed.”

Newspaper articles and official papers did their part in shaping the story. But they never told of Daniel down the street, his head stomped in. They never mentioned Monks, the lookalike brother. Miss A didn’t figure in as a multidimensional person—a feminist with ANC proclivities, sick of the gangsters in her community, in contact with the police. Nonetheless, the written word—by the court, by journalists—became the mold, and history was solidified within it.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission also created history, a reality for the new schoolbooks. The ANC-aligned progenitors of the TRC wanted to reclaim the past from the National Party, to wipe clean decades of propaganda. Men and women who had once been categorized terrorists were rebranded freedom fighters, and hidden atrocities were brought to light, all captured on color TV and in multivolume reports. But the TRC, despite its name and its marketing campaign, was not purely an exercise in truth telling, nor was it a vehicle for exposure. The TRC, the result of a negotiation between former enemies, was actually designed to circumvent a civil war and help build a nation. Nearly a quarter century has passed since the events took place, and as Easy told me long ago at the Hungry Lion franchise in the mall in downtown Cape Town: “The truth is not anymore existing for years and years.”