Читать книгу We Are Not Such Things: A Murder in a South African Township and the Search for Truth and Reconciliation - Литагент HarperCollins USD, F. M. L. Thompson - Страница 12

When I went to live in South Africa in November 2011, I didn’t know what to expect, and I didn’t reflect on it. My husband, Sam, then my fiancé, wanted to return on sabbatical to the country he had left at age eighteen, so I followed. Career-wise, I was untethered. Years earlier, I had published a light travel memoir to nobody’s notice, and since then I had no real writing prospects as far as I could tell. Every single article I pitched to magazines was rejected. I kept submitting short stories set in Montana to literary journal contests, in the hopes of winning $500, but I only came in as runner-up twice, so I actually lost money, since it usually cost $20 to enter. To make ends meet, I had taken to editing a celebrity doctor’s website, despite having no medical knowledge. If Sam wanted to move across the world, I had no argument against it.

Soon after Sam took off to find us a place in Cape Town, I sold the old SUV I’d had for years, moved my boxes to a storage locker in New Jersey, packed an oversized duffel bag full of clothes, forced my flailing dog into a travel-safe crate at the JFK cargo terminal, and hurtled fourteen hours across the ocean to Johannesburg. Sam met me at Arrivals. We planned to drive the nine hundred miles to Cape Town rather than put the dog on another connecting flight, so we rented a car and cut through the Karoo desert.

Karoo, which means “land of thirst” in the indigenous Khoikhoi language, is a vast, bleak scrubland that stretches through the country, searingly hot in the afternoon and cold as steel at night. Sheep roam across its inhospitable terrain, dotted with rugged little shepherds’ dwellings where young boys with hard feet spend months alone. I sat in the passenger seat and gazed out the window at the monotonous landscape. It looked like a place picked over, as if anything of value, anything lush or desirable or even a little bit sweet or pretty, had been collected by a determined band of looters sweeping across the plain, leaving behind only dry bush and dust. The N1 highway slices through that rugged expanse, wide and smooth and lonely.

Only a few hours from Johannesburg, we came upon a gruesome car accident. The remains of a car sat diagonally across two lanes, its mangled hood smashed into its windshield, its roof sliced clean off. The pavement was strewn with glass, sparkling like crystals in the high spring sun, and a couple of truckers had pulled to the side to call for help and to snap cellphone photos. Some merciful soul had rolled a heavy woolen blanket across the top of the car to try to conceal three bodies sitting upright.

The image lingers bright and precise in my mind: two men flank a woman in the back of the ruined car, which was slammed—by what? a tractor trailer?—with such force that the passengers must have died on impact but were not ejected from their seats, perhaps because they were packed so tight in there. All three are slender with dark brown skin, and young, judging by their builds. The woman wears a pink T-shirt. Her hair is jet black and plaited into stiff shoulder-length braids that stick out in all different directions—like Pippi Longstocking, I remember thinking.

From then on, we drove slowly and anxiously to the guesthouse where we planned to stay the night. It was situated in the stark Northern Cape desert town of Colesburg, the halfway point between Johannesburg and Cape Town, where it seemed every other home offered a bed for weary travelers. The owner, an elderly man of British ancestry, led us to our room, a white square filled with pink floral pillows, a pink comforter marred by a tiny blood spot, and a knitted woolen throw so rough that the dog used it to scratch her back. The decoration was minimal: a single straw hat, pinned with a fake rose, nailed to the wall.

That night, we drove through the town, which gave the impression of overwhelming flatness—flat roads, flat land, flat houses—and ate tasteless, mushy vegetables at a pub patronized only by white people. After, we stopped for snacks at a local twenty-four-hour shop. As I stood in line to pay for chips and a drink, a tired-looking light-brown-skinned woman at the register spoke to me in a heavy Germanic-sounding language I couldn’t understand. She was, Sam explained, a colored woman, a term that sounds offensively retrograde to Americans but is in fact the designation for the population of mixed-race South Africans. The language she had directed at me was Afrikaans, a derivation of Old Dutch spoken mainly by South Africa’s colored people and white Afrikaners, the descendants of early European settlers.

The next day, as we were leaving, we chatted with our host, a former school principal who said he had taken a buyout package for state employees when the black majority came to power in 1994. He had retired early to run this unique interpretation of an inn.

“So, what’s the population of Colesburg?” Sam asked.

“Two thousand whites, five thousand coloreds, and fifteen thousand blacks,” the man answered. That was how he automatically understood his hometown—as a collection of people broken into racial categories. We herded the dog into the car and headed toward our final destination: Cape Town.

The Western Cape contains the southernmost tip of the African continent. European explorers and kings and queens had long agreed that if they could only round the Cape, they would be able to sail northeast to India and open a sea route to Asia, with its silks and spices and gemstones and teas. Such a route would prove lucrative to European powers, which had so far only managed to arrange an arduous and dangerous trade trek through the Middle East, which was teeming with bandits and costly middlemen. The only problem, as the Europeans saw it, was the Cape’s habit of swallowing ships.

On February 3, 1488, the square-jawed Portuguese voyager Bartolomeu Dias and his crew anchored near a freshwater spring in a fishing village known today as Mossel Bay. Dias had departed Lisbon seven months earlier in an attempt to chart a new southern route to Asia, and he and his haggard crew had just survived a harrowing storm. Above, watching from a bluff, stood a group of Khoikhoi tribesmen, indigenous cattle farmers with yellow-brown skin, standing around five feet tall.

The Khoikhoi, grazing their animals by the sea on that day in the fifteenth century, watched as a vessel full of ashen humans docked in their watering hole and started taking water. The Khoikhoi were not a particularly warmongering group, but, angry and frightened, they pelted the explorers with rocks. The whites responded with gunshots, killing a Khoikhoi before sailing away.

Though Dias wished to continue charting the eastbound journey, his bedraggled crew threatened mutiny, and so the ship stopped at what is now known as Bushman’s River, where Dias planted a Portuguese flag and then turned homeward. One cold comfort for Dias was that he had at least laid eyes on the meridional tip of Africa, a rocky point of land where waves crashed relentlessly against the shore and heavy winds blew through tough grasses and low, hardy scrubs. The balmy currents of the Indian Ocean here meet the arctic currents of the Atlantic. From a height, one can see the two bodies of water tangle together in a shaky line of wild white foam that stretches past the horizon.

These waters had pushed Dias blindly out to sea, and Dias, returning home after seventeen months with his men, named the area Cabo das Tormentas, or Cape of Storms. King John II of Portugal, who saw the Cape as a stop on the profitable opening to the East, rebranded it Cabo da Boa Esperança, or Cape of Good Hope. But Dias had been prescient: twelve years later, on another journey, he and his crew were swallowed whole by the Cabo das Tormentas, their sunken ship never found.

Dias’s bearded compatriot Vasco da Gama was more successful. In 1497, he was the first to navigate an all-water eastern passage. Da Gama rode the winds down the African coast, then arced into the Atlantic and swept back toward land, docking for supplies and water in an inlet on the Western Cape today known as St. Helena Bay. There, the threatened Khoikhoi again attacked, spearing da Gama in the thigh. Undeterred, da Gama and his crew continued down the coast and rounded its tip. Again, they came upon a tribe of Khoikhoi, but this time they enjoyed better relations, offering gifts. Da Gama even danced with some locals.

The good vibes were short lived. As was the Portuguese habit, da Gama took water supplies without asking the chief for permission. The Khoikhoi, aghast at da Gama’s slight, readied themselves to attack, and da Gama quickly sailed off to the western coast of India, which he would reach in 1498 with the help of an Arab navigator he picked up in East Africa. In 1510, the Khoikhoi slaughtered sixty-five Europeans, including a Portuguese viceroy heading home after his term in the East—a massacre that resulted in a century during which ships gave the Cape a wide berth.

This was the inauspicious beginning of the relationship between blacks and whites in South Africa, a relationship that began with whites taking natural resources that both groups assumed were rightfully theirs. In a foretelling of events to be replayed in centuries to come, the blacks threw stones, and the whites responded with bullets.

A year before landing in Cape Town, I’d been to South Africa on holiday. Those days in the Karoo had offered me a hint that living in the country would be nothing like that three-week vacation, when we took a safari just outside of Kruger Park and saw a pride of lions, dozens of elephants, the far-off silhouette of a leopard, and a pack of endangered spotted African wild dogs chilling out in the bush, licking their balls and nuzzling each other like regular pets, except that they could run at forty miles an hour to gut and devour a gazelle. In Cape Town, we lay about on palm-tree-lined beaches, which were too sunny for my New England tastes. The white people on the beaches—and there were mostly white people on the wealthy stretch of beachside suburbs known as the Atlantic Seaboard—looked like descendants of Russian oligarchs, Baywatch actors, and/or the cast of your average reality television program: lots of enhanced breasts and chiseled six-packs, displayed with unabashed vanity.

But when I settled in Cape Town for two years, I found the city disconcerting. I landed in a white enclave by the seaside, where my husband’s Jewish family and their insular, tight-knit community lived in the houses typical of well-off South Africans: pale-colored cement rectangles surrounded by high walls lined with barbed coils, electric shock wire, or shards of broken glass.

The white Capetonians I met at first had been raised in a country steeped in racist policy and educated according to a racist curriculum. History books reinvented colonial commandos who slaughtered indigenous people as heroes. During apartheid most whites had never seen the living conditions of blacks. Opposition groups were banned, their leaders in exile or prison. The media was heavily censored. In 1977, for example, 1,246 publications, 41 periodicals, and 41 films were banned in South Africa—most of them putting forth an anti-apartheid view. The government also controlled TV, radio, and, to some extent, newspapers. After apartheid, most whites still turned away from the reality of daily life for their black compatriots, never visiting townships, denying or justifying the continued inequities between the races. Therefore, most white South Africans of a certain age, and accordingly their children, had become—through grand design, through osmosis, and through their own choice to accept the status quo—entrenched in racism.

A friend of mine once suggested that an anthropologist would do well to study the ways of the white tribes of South Africa. The white Capetonians I met liked working out, getting their hair done, shopping, displaying large diamonds, driving flashy cars, eating sushi, and cooing at their dogs, both pedigreed and rescued. They referred to things that tickled their fancies as “stunning,” “spectacular,” “unreal,” and “out of this world.” They dished local gossip and talked about money and business. They discussed families who had been lucky enough to emigrate to the major white South African resettlement destinations: the States, the U.K., Israel, Australia, Canada. No matter how many assets a person possessed in South Africa, he was guaranteed to moan about the country going to pot, and how a trailer in Sydney was better than a mansion in the most beautiful city of the most advanced country on this doomed continent.

They peppered mundane conversation topics with casual mentions of the black majority, most of whom they feared and few of whom they knew on a personal level. South Africa has no ingrained culture of “political correctness,” and so, on the subject of race, many people are generally far more forthright, nonchalant, and openly offensive than Americans. The white South Africans I met casually attributed to black people a number of negative characteristics: laziness, dishonesty, savagery, stupidity, ungratefulness, ugliness. They were puzzled by my sputtering protests, and regarded me as a naive foreigner (which I was, but for other reasons). They blamed all the problems in modern-day South Africa not on an intricate and complex set of political and socioeconomic issues running back centuries, but rather on the intrinsically hideous qualities of blacks. If the country was going to pot, this was because black people were fundamentally incapable of leadership. Presenting them with an endless list of horrible white leaders throughout history did nothing to change their minds.

“Blacks are lazy, and you’d know that if you worked at a corporate. I’m not being racist, I’m just stating the facts.”

“Sponsor a black child to go to school? Oh, right, because they end up being such model citizens.”

“I sure as hell am racist. The difference for you liberal Americans is your population is fifteen percent of them, but ours is nearly ninety percent.”

“It’s about the trees. They came down from the damn trees.”

“It’s not racist to be scared of black people. It’s realistic.”

The people who said such things were not dropouts from the boonies. Rather, they were well educated and widely traveled: a lawyer, a businessman, a designer, a farmer, a small business owner. And they were decent people, too. The racists of South Africa are a kindly lot, who are helpful and resourceful, community-minded and polite. They’re a good laugh, fine company, and fantastic to have by your side if you’re in a pickle. These very bigots, many of whom I hardly knew, have driven me across the country, saved my dog’s life, provided me top-notch medical care, given me free room and board when I needed it most, generously hosted me in their homes, and cooked me meals. And they don’t just help other white people. I have seen them feed the poor colored beggars, even as they roll their eyes; offer free and compassionate legal advice to the very black people for whom they have previously expressed disdain; put their gardener’s children through school; and buy beautiful houses for their maids, complete with furniture.

Usually, when the racists know black people personally, they are capable of seeing them as individuals. But on a larger level, to them black South Africans seem to meld together with their inept, corrupt black leaders, into an indiscernible mass, a majority that is steering the country toward mayhem: economic free fall, widespread violent crime, a crumbling public healthcare system, a broken government peopled with cronies. It is this mass—not specific members of it—that is the enemy. Before the mass existed (or more accurately, when it was disempowered and hidden), white South Africans lived in a kind of utopia: agreeable dirt-cheap labor, all the fruits of a gifted land, beauty everywhere for the taking, lovely neighborhoods with open doors, and all the suffering contained behind borders at a good distance.

Once I asked Easy about a friend of his whose actions were inconsistent. What he said makes as much sense as anything: “He’s a human being. Sometimes he’s good, sometimes he’s evil. Sometimes he is comme ci. Sometimes he is comme ça.”

I met plenty of exceptional white South Africans, of course. I came to know a yoga teacher whose many boyfriends spanned the racial spectrum, and a corporate mom born into a conservative Afrikaner family who married a Congolese basketball player. I spent time with some of the old white freedom fighters, who remained as committed to racial equality and justice as ever. I hung around a bunch of my husband’s high school friends, well-off thirty-something men who were focused on their various apolitical endeavors, like creating a Burning Man–type festival in Africa or bringing Cape Town its first New York–style Jewish deli or attending ayahuasca ceremonies for spiritual healing. And I knew plenty of young white activists who worked with the country’s most disadvantaged, including a man fluent in the Zimbabwean tongue of Shona who had devoted his life to helping African refugees gain footing in a new land.

However, according to the wealthy white citizens I met at first, townships—the impoverished zones created by the apartheid government to segregate black South Africans—were the epicenters of the crime epidemic sweeping the country, the places out of which black badness oozed. During apartheid, people of color had little access to white areas, generally allowed in during the day to work but banned after close of business. Once the laws that controlled people’s movement had been dismantled, that violence spilled out, affecting whites as well as everyone else (though whites complained most vigorously, crime actually affected them far less than it did their dark-skinned compatriots). South Africa, with its soaring crime rate, was now among the world’s most violent countries, with a murder rate five times that of the global average. Every day across the country there were 502 assaults, 475 robberies, 172 sexual offenses, 47 murders, and 31 carjackings. Every day, 714 houses were burgled, 202 businesses were robbed, and 349 cars were broken into.

Instead of seeing these daily terrors as the result of tyranny, many South African whites came to associate them with the enduring swaart gevaar, or black danger. The threat of the swaart gevaar—the concept of an overwhelming and inherently bloodthirsty black majority that needed to be contained lest it consume everything in its path—had been used to persuade a white electorate to vote into power in 1948 the National Party, whose platform came to be known as apartheid.

I could see these townships, Gugulethu in particular, from the highway leading away from the airport: a glimmering sea of corrugated tin shacks separated from the road by only a strip of grass, upon which I once saw a man squatting for a shit while casually flipping through a magazine. This accounted for the faint fecal stink that wafted out from the slums, especially on hot days. I was eager to see inside, but I was informed, repeatedly, of the dangers of those ghettos, which teemed with ruthless gangs high on a type of rough local crystal meth called tik.

In an old Lonely Planet guidebook I found, nestled between reviews for the extravagant high tea at the pink Mount Nelson Hotel and a most pleasant ride up the aerial cableway to Table Mountain, I read a quick note on the townships, which were situated in the Cape Flats, a depressed belt of sand and bedrock southeast of the city known as “apartheid’s dumping ground”:

For the majority of Cape Town’s inhabitants, home is one of the grim townships of the Cape Flats: Gugulethu, Nyanga, Philippi, Mitchell’s Plain, Crossroads, or Khayelitsha. Visiting without a companion who has local knowledge would be foolish. If a black friend is happy to escort you, you should have no problems.

Lacking an amenable black escort at the time, I waited until one day, less than a month into my stay, an opportunity to pass over those allegedly dangerous borders presented itself. Sam was setting up a project aimed at improving the delivery of basic social services for the poor, and he had been invited by an NGO to see the conditions in Khayelitsha, a sprawling township of nearly 400,000 people just north of Gugulethu. He asked me if I’d like to come along.

On that hot day in November, we met two women at the organization’s headquarters off a main road, a chilly refurbished municipal building surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by a groundskeeper and his two sooty dogs. The lead guide was a fat and pretty black lady, with a flawless complexion and a short ponytail. Her assistant, also black, was a grave, slender woman with cropped hair and glasses; the left side of her body, running from her chin to her hand, had been consumed by fire long ago, and the skin was knotted with scar tissue.

Townships are divided, roughly, into formal and informal areas. The formal areas are generally those built up with simple cement houses along paved streets. Most were constructed years ago by the apartheid government, and have been, over time, expanded by their inhabitants, repainted various colors, remodeled and tricked out or neglected and allowed to fester. Some were constructed more recently by the new black-led government under the Reconstruction and Development Programme, which aimed to help close the massive gap between the rich and poor, and white and brown. These are known as “RDP houses,” and tend to be small, relatively new, identical matchbox homes clustered together. The key to such a house is obtained by languishing on a waiting list. Woven between, behind, and among the legal homes is a web of backyard shacks, built by homeowners and rented out in an underground township economy.

The formal areas also contain hostels taken over by squatters. During apartheid, companies housed black migrant laborers in single-sex dormitory-like structures, carting them to and from manual jobs each day and allowing them one month a year to visit their families in the rural areas designated for most blacks. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, as apartheid edged toward its demise and the townships became increasingly ungovernable, the companies abandoned these buildings and the workers and their families took over. Twenty years later, they still live in cramped, deteriorating quarters under faded signs bearing the names of the original owners: WJM CONSTRUCTION CORP, UME STEEL LTD, DAIRY-BELLE PTY. Pigeons roost in the broken shower stalls. Once in a while, a police tow truck pulls out from a hostel’s courtyard, dragging a stolen car behind it.

Informal settlements are plots of previously barren urban land upon which people squat, usually in haphazard tin shacks. They are meant to be temporary, but often become permanent as their inhabitants, mired in poverty, fail to either score an RDP house or rent a better spot. The settlements rise up on township borders and on undesirable land within. They contain a mixture of city-born locals, migrants from the underdeveloped South African countryside, and refugees, asylum seekers, and undocumented aliens from repressive Zimbabwe, impoverished Ethiopia, war-torn Somalia, war-torn Democratic Republic of the Congo, and war-torn Burundi. Since the settlements are not government-approved, they receive little in terms of services and once in a while are unceremoniously torn down.

Our guides lived in one such settlement, a maze of makeshift matchbox houses set on gray sand. The plumper woman lived in a tidy single room with her husband, a few children, and the inevitable rat or two. She called her young son, a shirtless ten-year-old with a mischievous smile, and instructed him to watch our car, which we parked in a dirt yard. We would conduct the tour on foot, since the pathways far into the shantytowns—tiny, potholed roads that passed through insecure territories—weren’t built for vehicles. We were deep inside Khayelitsha now, invisible to the outside world.

“See how we are living,” a woman called from behind a low wire fence as we trudged through the sand. In her shack, a flat-screen TV played a daytime soap, and a bunch of people sat on stools, drinking brandy, waving at us. “Come in, come see how we live.”

Trash piled up in a stagnant, water-filled ditch beside the houses. Children with crusty faces played by a pile of refuse, where a herd of goats feasted. The garbage was laced with rat poison. During the rainy season, when water seeped into the shacks and sewage spilled into the streets, kids came down with diarrhea. A pack of dogs slunk by, all grown in the township canine mold: of medium size, sporting short pale-brown fur, with pointy ears pressed low against the head. A few weeks earlier, a different rogue pack of mutts had broken into a shack and mauled a child to death, so the people were in the mood to stone them. A barefoot white man with dreadlocks and a long beard lay in the lap of a black woman, her hair tied back with a violet scarf. They wore stained pajamas and faced the sun.

We passed a low swampland on the border of the highway, shacks built among the reeds; in the rain, pungent murky water rose up through the floors of each house, whose lightbulbs were powered by a spaghetti of ragged lines jury-rigged from the power poles. The shack dwellers were unmoved by posters urging South Africans to KEEP OUR COUNTRY POWER-FUL, part of a nationwide campaign to curb electricity theft.

Toilets were often buckets or the fetid fields by the highway, where people squatted in the open as cars whizzed by, the worlds so separate that neither the drivers nor the defecators seemed concerned by each other’s humanity. Some portable toilets had been provided by companies that had won city contracts, but they were rarely cleaned or emptied, and the resulting indignities had led, in part, to the Poo Wars. Worse, such toilets could easily be toppled, as the installers sometimes skimped on cash by failing to secure them to the ground. Local criminals pushed the unstable toilets over while people were inside, reached in, grabbed cellphones or cash, and left their victims scrambling amid a soup of age-old human waste and neon-blue chemical sludge. Kids on their way to pee in the pitch-black night were hit by cars or snatched off a path and molested. Adults who needed to expel before a morning shift at work were mugged for their cellphones as they hiked in the dim predawn light. The whole area shared a dozen or so communal taps. I tried to figure out how a person could bathe, the dwellings pressed so close together.

“What about privacy?” I asked the assistant.

“Privacy?” She let out a bitter laugh. “There is no privacy.”

The women led us past a row of yellow three-room houses built by an Irish charity. I admired the houses, popping out cheerfully from the mass of gray corrugated tin and old timber, the address numbers painted in pastels by the front doors, accented by a little cartoon flower. The assistant pointed to a ramshackle two-story gray manor at the path’s corner, its roof supported by uneven columns. At the base of the manor was an austere grocery shop manned by an aging grocer in a white hat.

Teenage boys laughed and shared cigarettes by a little spaza shop, a bodega that sells soda, candy, chips, phone cards. A man shaved his friend’s head on a stoop, dipping his razor and soap in and out of a bucket. Children brightened as we passed, reached for our hands. Finally, we came upon the tour’s ultimate destination: a square of sand, smoke rising from its edges. People were bringing buckets of water and pieces of wood and iron back and forth.

“It burned last night,” the guide explained, ushering us into the smoldering lot. Of the three shacks that previously stood here, only outlines on the ground remained, debris all around. Nobody knew how the fire had started—a cigarette in bed? An electrical outage? A gas stove? Or maybe somebody had a grudge; it was not unheard of to lock an enemy in his shack and set it alight, leaving him to pound at the door as he burned. Once a spark caught, all nearby shacks could be consumed by flames; in these tight quarters, built of thin flammable materials, fire spread fast, and sometimes it took out hundreds of shacks before a fire truck could arrive and control the blaze. Whole neighborhoods were flattened and rebuilt on the regular. Our guide had twice lost her home to fire and once lost her shack when the city council resettled her whole block to make room for a new power plant. She had come home to find a slash of red spray paint across her door, marking her place as one to be removed.

“They just painted my door,” she said, shaking her head. I imagined the municipal worker, living in some nicer part of town, brandishing his red can of paint as he strode down these sandy paths, past shelter after shelter patched together, he assumed, with garbage. What’s the difference if you slash a red mark across a mound of trash?

At the empty lot, a group of women stood at an incline. One was tall and busty, in her fifties, wearing a long skirt and a T-shirt that displayed her pendulous breasts. Her arm was wrapped around a smaller, darker woman with thin shoulders and short hair. The guide explained to us: it was this smaller woman whose house had burned and whose father had died in the smoke and fire. She was silent, standing among the remains of her home, staring at us with red-rimmed eyes.

We had been joined on the tour by a gangly ginger-haired American research fellow who, within three minutes of meeting a person, compulsively conveyed that his wife was a black South African.

“Can I give money?” he asked awkwardly, his face reddening. The guide grew equally uncomfortable and shrugged.

We passed the assistant’s shack on the way out. She called her six-year-old daughter to come meet us. The girl had a heart-shaped face, a missing front tooth, and short hair in little twists.

“Hello,” I said. “What is your name?”

“Yes, teacher, thank you, teacher,” she said, batting her eyelashes.

Later, as Sam and I drove away, the streets grew wide and smooth as the township receded. Heavy-bottomed palm trees lined the road. The people were soon lighter and taller, as if to match the ivory buildings that rose along the crashing sea. The restaurants were full of diners ordering calamari and chicken caesar salads. In the distance, along the promenade, the iconic red-and-white-striped Mouille Point lighthouse sparkled, and silky dogs ran after tennis balls in its shadow.

At the time, we were living in a dull, cold rental apartment, which was angled so that not even the smallest beam of sun could enter, ever. On one side, shaded windows overlooked a golf course, and on the other side, small, high windows overlooked an open hallway that circled an interior courtyard. These windows above the courtyard presented an acoustic nightmare that sent the din of a radio in another apartment or the low pitch of a conversation in the common area directly into our living room at top volume. I hated the place, with its walls coated in mold in the winter and its unflattering fluorescent lights. In the basement, the storage areas used by residents had once been rooms where black and colored maids would sleep. A few communal bathrooms, which included toilets and showers, had been built in the hallways during apartheid so that the help did not use their boss’s private facilities.

But on that day, the flat took on new characteristics. It was luxury, pure and simple, with its sturdy walls, its two secure locks, windows to protect against the elements, plentiful electricity, and a bathroom and toilet of its own. I stood in a scalding hot shower and felt filthy rich. I never wanted to go back to the townships and I wanted to go back immediately.

But you couldn’t just wander aimlessly around there. It was too far from town for a pop-in, and there weren’t, for example, coffee shops with Wi-Fi where a person could hang out. So I started to research various NGOs that did work there. I asked around, again surveying the people I knew, but I was only met with gestures of concern. It seemed that I was a not uncommon species of foreigner who thinks a bleeding heart or a hankering for a taste of “real Africa” will keep her safe as she wanders, smiling dimly and handing out lollipops, through destitute black areas. So in my search for volunteer work, I was met, several times, with the same question, uttered with a mixture of irritation and concern:

“Haven’t you heard of Amy Biehl?” people said. “Better not come down with Amy Biehl Syndrome.”

I was twelve when Amy Biehl was killed, and not up on international news, so I had never heard of her. Now, with no friends in South Africa and only a bit of freelance work trickling in, I had plenty of time to burrow into that Internet rabbit hole. I began to look into the story of the young white scholar attacked by the black mob. The tale had been covered at length, with over 100,000 search results on Google. For days, I read articles and studied images. The murder had been so odd, the fury so misplaced, and the choice of victim so ironic. The story, as it rolled out before me in backlit print, conveniently followed along the country’s timeline for the past nearly two decades: oppression, inequality, activism, protest, race-based violence, imprisonment, freedom, amnesty, reconciliation. Over the years, the headlines themselves traced the arc of recent history:

A BRUTALIZED GENERATION TURNS ITS RAGE ON WHITES

(The New York Times, 1993)

THREE BLACKS FOUND GUILTY OF “RACIST” KILLING

(The Herald, Glasgow, 1994)

SOUTH AFRICANS APOLOGIZE TO FAMILY OF AMERICAN VICTIM

(The New York Times, 1997)

4 SOUTH AFRICAN KILLERS OF U.S. STUDENT GET AMNESTY

(Chicago Tribune, 1998)

BIEHL PARENT, APARTHEID FIGHTER BRIDGE GAP

(The Santa Fe New Mexican, 2004)

IN SOUTH AFRICA, AN IMPROBABLE TALE OF FORGIVENESS

(Los Angeles Times, 2008)

This was a microcosm of South Africa for twenty years, and it was the hopeful story people liked to tell and be told. The oppressed, once driven to wanton disorder, now displayed an unreal spirit of forgiveness. They were led by Mandela himself, who, after twenty-seven years in prison, forgave his oppressors. At his inauguration, his jailer was given VIP seating. The end result was white people and black people who had endured a terrible time locked in an embrace. As far as stories go, Amy Biehl’s was pretty perfect in terms of PR for South Africa, the rainbow nation. And America, with its generous ambassadors in the form of Linda and Peter and martyred activist Amy, didn’t come out too badly either. The whole thing was so peculiar that I couldn’t stop reading about it.

Over dinner, I reported my findings to Sam, who had been fourteen at the time of Amy’s death and eighteen during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings, and so remembered her name and the basics of the story, but not much more. I went over the murder, the particularly undeserving victim, the famed amnesty, the remarkable show of mercy, the close relationship between the mother and the men, who even called Linda Biehl “Grandmother” in Xhosa.

I mentioned it to my conservative in-laws, who didn’t understand why anyone would ever reward their daughter’s killers with a job. Their dinner guests were equally unimpressed by the tale—the general story they knew by heart but the details they only vaguely remembered. One posited that such a gesture might encourage other black folks to kill white girls in order to score jobs, and she could not be dissuaded by the fact that over the course of nearly twenty years, nobody had ever done such a thing. Later that week, as Sam and I sat in the park by the sea, I expounded upon the story again.

“You sound pretty interested in this,” he finally said. “Why don’t you write about it?”

In the following days, I tried to locate a book on the subject, convinced that surely somebody had already covered this singular story at length. Indeed, many journalists had filed reports in all forms of media. There had been documentaries and talk shows. A South African playwright, inspired by Linda Biehl’s act of compassion, had even written a fictionalized account, Mother to Mother, which she then adapted into a one-woman play that toured every few years. But nobody had ever written a book.

So I drafted a letter to Linda, and sent it to an email address at her Cape Town–based foundation. I explained myself: I would like to examine the story of Amy’s life, her death, and what happened after—including your and Mr. Biehl’s forgiveness of and relationship with Easy Nofemela and Ntobeko Peni, and the continued work of the foundation—and to write about it, possibly something book-length. I’d like to explore who Amy was and how she got here, as well as what her life and legacy means for South Africa today, nearly twenty years after her death and the end of apartheid.

Thirteen hours passed and then a little red circle appeared on my mail app: I would be happy to chat … almost 20 years has passed since the event occurred and the story like South Africa is very complicated. You are welcome to call.