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 16

In 1652, the Dutch, in their colonial trading heyday, established an outpost of the Dutch East India Company on the Cape, the purpose of which was to replenish passing ships with vegetables, meat, and water. To get the enterprise started, three boats of Dutch men (and a smattering of women) were sent to Africa. Several months after embarking, the crew docked in a natural bay that sat below an enormous mountain, dotted with knotty bushes and flowers. The broad black mountain was unique: it seemed as though it had been sliced in half with an enormous knife, and instead of a peak, it sported a long, flat top. The Dutch called it Tafelberg, or Table Mountain. They named the chilly water beneath it Tafelbaai, or Table Bay. Today the dense clouds that spread across are called “the tablecloth.”

The group, having heard rumors of aggressive locals, arrived armed and determined. They immediately fashioned a large fort of mud, clay, and timber just inland, and dubbed it Fort de Goede Hoop, or Fort of Good Hope. They began to farm the surrounding area, and in their spare time they dressed in pinafores and suits and performed swooping Dutch folk dances on the African vista.

They swiftly took over increasing swaths of land. Threatened Khoikhoi mounted various small wars over the next decades, but they were almost always defeated by modern weapons. Resistant Khoikhoi were branded with irons, assaulted, and imprisoned—some on Robben Island, just off the coast, where, around three hundred years later, Nelson Mandela would toil as a political prisoner. Bit by bit, day by day, the Khoikhoi lost the land they had once used to graze their cattle. The cattle were then sold to or stolen by Europeans until the tribespeople were shattered. Lacking their traditional means of survival, many Khoikhoi took to working in poor conditions on Dutch farms.

But there were not enough Khoikhoi to work the land; their numbers were small anyway, and in 1713 they would be nearly wiped out by a wave of imported smallpox. While the initial goal of the Dutch East India Company had been only to act as a rest stop for sailors, the European newcomers now decided to construct the basic infrastructure of a colony, growing fruit and grain and raising livestock. The powerful trading company set up its own governmental structure: it made laws, appointed governors, and granted land, with no regard for the indigenous people except as they related to the use or nuisance of the colonists.

Europeans, mostly from the lower rungs of Dutch society, drizzled in, including a small group of persecuted French Huguenots and a smattering of German, Swedish, and British scientists, naturalists, and missionaries. Schools were not a priority, and generations lacked much more than basic elementary educations. As the white population grew, the colonists decided they needed more free labor to build up their fledgling community, and sent word back home. In 1658, the first batch of slaves was led ashore, followed by a flood of ships filled with captives from Mozambique, Madagascar, Indonesia, India, and Sri Lanka.

Slaves labored as artisans and fishermen and gardeners. They served in homes as maids and nannies. They constructed roads, hospitals, and bridges, tilled fields, and picked produce. By the 1770s, white Cape Town residents were referred to widely as “baas,” from the Dutch word for boss.

The relationship between slave and owner, especially in a contained area with a small population, was not clear-cut. Depending on their masters and positions, the slaves were treated alternately as lowly but beloved members of a family or as animals that deserved to be whipped into submission. Masters took to baptizing their slaves, but those who committed crimes were executed with deliberate brutality in the center of town: one slave who killed his owner was tied to a cross, his skin burned with smoldering metal, his limbs broken, and his head cut off and fastened to a pole. Some escaped, but those who were caught were punished. The members of one captured group, who sought to found a “free village,” had their Achilles tendons sliced or their feet broken; their leader, sentenced to “death by impalement,” committed suicide. Here was the early relationship between master and servant, white and brown, set between the mountain and the sea: one of use and abuse, where violence or its threat was the universal mode of communication.

As time progressed, the relationships blurred further. White farmers took female slaves as their mistresses. The male settlers, who greatly outnumbered female settlers, also had sex—both forced and voluntary—with local Khoikhoi women who worked their farms, and several settlers married freed female slaves. Many female slaves were forced into prostitution, the market for which was robust, as sailors docked in the Cape for replenishments. Some escaped slaves formed their own communities, while others ran north and were integrated into indigenous tribes—which also, evidence suggests, accepted white members, often criminals who had absconded from the colony to escape punishment.

The outcome of all such interbreeding, intermingling, and time away from Europe was a growing population and a new language. The children of slaves and slave owners, of prostitutes and sailors, of illicit interracial love affairs, were a population of people who were neither white nor black. The language that emerged from all this mixing was the forefather of today’s Afrikaans: a gruff version of Dutch that evolved as the early settlers simplified their mother tongue to communicate with Khoikhoi employees and foreign slaves. Khoi, Xhosa, Zulu, and Indonesian words made their way into the language.

Meanwhile, settlers began encroaching on new tracts of land. A hardy offshoot of pioneers dubbed themselves trekboers (“semi-nomadic pastoral farmers”) and headed north and east in ox wagons, searching to claim better land, cutting through the Karoo, camping and setting up bare-bones dwellings described by one visitor as “tumble-down barns.” The nights were bitterly cold and arid, and the days were so hot that dogs had to be transported in wagons, for their paws would burn if they touched the ground. The dusty nomads burrowed into the interior of the country, alternately employing, warring against, and trading with those whose paths they crossed. They sold butter, sheep, cattle, elephant ivory, and animal hides. They bought tobacco, coffee, and sugar.

Their most valued possessions were their guns and packets of gunpowder. Remote groups of indigenous people still lived within the Karoo, usually near water holes, and so to gain access to that water, trekboers often killed adult members of the Khoikhoi and San (a tribe of bushmen scattered throughout Southern Africa). They spared their children, whom they sold, traded, or raised as slaves. The trekboers also interacted with the Xhosa people who lived in the eastern Cape: tight-knit clans of farmers who kept livestock, tilled subsistence crops, and organized themselves loosely around local chiefs.

The Xhosa people, as the first settlers noted, were a healthy, friendly group. They were not averse to fighting to defend what was theirs, but they weren’t warriors. They preferred to farm their fields of tobacco, grain, and produce, and to graze their livestock. They slaughtered animals for frequent ceremonies, drank rich homemade beer, and smoked pipes and cigarettes. Above all, the Xhosa people nurtured their families. An early Dutch explorer noted, in 1689, the strength of the Xhosa bonds: “It would be impossible to buy slaves there, for they would not part with their children, or any of their connections for anything in the world, loving one another with a most remarkable strength of affection.”

In the 1790s, as Europe was plunged into crisis by the French Revolution, the British temporarily turned the nearly bankrupt Dutch trading outpost into a naval base. The British hoped to protect the Cape colony, their valuable midway point on the Europe–Asia trade route, from being overtaken by the French. While the Cape held no grand financial promise in and of itself (it exported a little wool, some animal hides, and elephant tusks), the British soon found another use for the growing outpost: as a source of job creation for Brits struggling in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars. British citizens, mostly those of the desperate lower classes, could be resettled on Xhosa farmland, thereby quelling potential social unrest in England.

The British knew that for the Xhosa, cattle had been, from time immemorial, the main marker of wealth. According to a Dutch colonial employee, cattle were, to the Xhosa patriarch, “practically the only subject of his care and occupation, in the possession of which he finds complete happiness.”

British Parliament therefore sent over orders for their people to execute homicidal commando raids of “kaffir” villages (“kaffir” was initially used to refer to non-Christians, but eventually became a derogatory term for a black person), during which women and children were slaughtered and cattle stolen. Desperate Xhosa guerrillas nearly won a battle to reclaim land, but were ultimately dispossessed of even more territory and lost 23,000 cattle. After leading conquests in 1811 and 1812, the Cape’s governor, Sir John Cradock, cheerily reported back to London on the success of these attacks: “I am happy to add that in the course of this service, there has not been shed more Kaffir blood than would seem necessary to impress on the minds of these savages a proper degree of terror and respect.”

In 1820, four thousand British citizens—poor artisans, mostly, unaware of the battles being fought in South Africa and hoping for their own property allotment—were shipped over and handed one hundred acres each of the rough and wild eastern Cape. These inexperienced farmers found themselves out of luck: they were stranded in the middle of a simmering series of frontier wars, about which they had not been informed when they applied to go to Africa. To add insult to injury, the grasslands were difficult to cultivate without the generational wisdom the Xhosas possessed. Within a few years, many of the sour-grass plots were abandoned as the British took refuge in the settlements of Grahamstown, Port Elizabeth, and East London.

For their part, the Xhosas were fractured, grief-stricken, plunged into poverty: over the years, they had lost their land, many of their animals, and their communities to settlers. Unable to come to terms with their sudden reversal of fortune, they became convinced that this onslaught of misery had been brought on by furious ancestors. A young female prophet reported that if the tribe slaughtered their remaining livestock and stopped planting crops, they would be forgiven and rise again, and so the desperate people abided by her word. By 1857, the population was starving. The Xhosa people would mount various offenses to secure the return of their land, but ultimately the majority of them realized that their only survival option was to work at a pittance for the white farmers who now tilled their former land.

Amy Elizabeth Biehl came into the world 315 years after the Dutch landed on the Cape and 110 years after the Xhosa people faced what then seemed to be their darkest hour. She was born on April 26, 1967, in Chicago, Illinois, to loving, upper-middle-class parents. It was a cool and hazy spring Wednesday, and a light rain drizzled down on the lakeside city. She died on August 25, 1993, in Gugulethu, Cape Town, at the hands of a violent mob of students, gangsters, and unemployed young people. It was a clear winter Wednesday, 78 degrees and unseasonably sunny.

Journalists often misidentified Amy as a “volunteer,” an “aid worker,” or an “exchange student.” Some referred to her as an “angel” or a “golden girl.” When she died, the headlines were melodramatic and simplistic:

A WOMAN WHO GAVE HER LIFE TO AFRICA

PRAISES SUNG BY ALL

DEATH OF AN IDEALIST

POOR AMY

In fact, Amy was a serious academic and an activist, but she didn’t present as the widely held caricature of the intellectual, at least not in photos. Amy was female, first of all, and she was conventionally pretty. She had long dirty-blond hair, straight teeth, and a spray of freckles across her delicate nose. She had fashionable clothes bought by her father and a sense of style inherited from her mother, who in her later years became a couture saleswoman at Neiman Marcus in well-heeled Newport Beach. She was slender from years of competitive sports. She was confident in her opinions but modest and allergic to causing offense. She had good posture and a decent handshake. She was not above telling a bad joke.

Amy had not wandered blindly into Gugulethu that August day, some ignorant missionary who thought her smile could cut through the fury of a disenchanted and dispossessed generation of blacks. She knew there was a storm brewing in South Africa. She’d majored in African Studies at Stanford, and at graduation she had plastered the words FREE MANDELA in masking tape across her cap, which her grandmother, a Midwestern Republican, kept trying to pick off. After Stanford, as an employee of the nonprofit National Democratic Institute, Amy had traveled to South Africa, Zambia, the Ivory Coast, Ethiopia, Burundi, and what is today the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In 1989, she spent time in Namibia, which was holding free elections as it transitioned to independence from South African rule. She traveled there again in 1991 to study the early workings of a new parliamentary democracy. She even went on a jog through Lusaka, Zambia’s capital, with Jimmy Carter.

By the time Amy landed in South Africa in September 1992, she was well versed in the long-standing issues of liberty, race, and rights that had shaped postcolonial African discourse. She was especially interested in the country as apartheid began to crumble and Nelson Mandela’s rise to the presidency became increasingly inevitable. She wanted to be in the middle of the action. So when Amy landed her Fulbright, she packed her bags and Linda drove her to Los Angeles International. In the waiting area, Amy fell into an engrossing conversation with another passenger, who was also up-to-date on South African politics. Distracted, she hugged Linda goodbye. Though they spoke on the phone during Amy’s ten months in South Africa, the last words Amy delivered to Linda in person were a parting command as she boarded the plane: “Don’t cry, Mom.”

In Cape Town, Amy immersed herself in her research topic: the rights and roles of women, primarily black and colored women, in an emerging democracy. She traveled into the depths of the townships and witnessed firsthand the squalor in which black people were forced to live under apartheid law. Diplomatically inclined and tactful, Amy rarely expressed, verbally, the effect this inequality and racism had on her. Perhaps she knew it was not her place to complain, that the emotions of a white American on the subject of state-sanctioned racism were hardly relevant. But sometimes she let it rip. Once Amy and her boyfriend, Scott Meinert, who was visiting from the States for a couple of weeks, wandered into an all-white bar wearing T-shirts emblazoned with Mandela’s face. The patrons unhappily received two white kids with a black opposition leader plastered across their chests, and some spit a few under-the-breath comments at the pair: “Like the darkies, do you?” Amy ignored them, drank her beer, and strode back to the parking lot, where she got in her car and started hitting the dashboard with all her might and letting fly a stream of profanities. She was furious at herself for taking the high road.

While in Namibia, Amy met some rising ANC dignitaries, including Brigitte Mabandla, who would become minister of justice and constitutional development in post-apartheid South Africa. The late 1980s and 1990s were prime periods in the history of what is referred to as the Struggle, or the long fight for freedom. Back then, high-ranking ANC members were often also professors, and Mabandla headed up the Community Law Center at the University of the Western Cape. Inspired, Amy chose to conduct her South African Fulbright-funded research at the University of the Western Cape instead of the more prestigious and whiter University of Cape Town. At UWC, a university historically designated for students of color, she drafted memos for Dullah Omar, Mandela’s lawyer who would become the president’s minister of justice, and for Rhoda Kadalie, an intellectual and activist who would become Mandela’s commissioner of human rights. Rhoda was then a single mother in her late thirties, and she and Amy grew especially close over the months, discussing politics, feminism, policy—and boyfriends, sex, and gossip. On the day of her death, Amy was clearing out her workspace at UWC, organizing her papers, and packing up any spare notes as she prepared to head back to America. She used a university phone to call Rhoda, who was working from home that day, and they spoke for nearly two hours.

“Rhoda, I’m so sentimental for this place,” Amy said as their conversation finally neared an end. She had filled her suitcases with patterned cloths for friends at home and CDs of local musicians. She had sold her car, which she planned to deliver to the buyer the next day. Rhoda and Amy agreed to meet up for lunch one last time before Amy flew out. As they hung up, Rhoda told Amy to stay away from the townships. The radio was abuzz with news of protests, rallies, and stonings. Marching kids were smashing up government property and attacking government-employed health workers. Amy knew all this. She was lucky, she remarked, that she’d made it all this time without anything ever happening to her.

“There’s a lot of unrest,” Rhoda ordered in her clipped voice. “You will not go in today. Do you understand?”

Amy said she understood. She was well aware of the thousands of lives lost, most of them black, in the fireballing political strife of the last several years—the early 1990s, after Mandela was released from prison and negotiations for the first inclusive democratic elections began, saw the country on the brink of a civil war. Anyway, she didn’t have time to go to the townships. She had been renting a room from a friend and colleague named Melanie Jacobs, and lived with Melanie and Melanie’s teenage daughter in a small flat in the relatively diverse suburb of Mowbray, about eight miles from the townships. Amy needed to go back to Mowbray to see her friends; she had less than forty-eight hours before she hurtled toward California, where she planned to go with her family to consume margaritas at her favorite Mexican restaurant, Mi Casa. You can’t get a proper margarita in South Africa.

Amy didn’t know that Scott planned to propose to her when she arrived. On the evening of August 25, on the west coast of America, Scott had a dinner date planned with Peter Biehl, to ask for his blessing. Amy was a liberal feminist, but Scott suspected she wanted a traditional engagement: Dad’s permission, one knee, Champagne. If life had taken a different turn, would Amy have said yes?

“We don’t know that,” Linda told me.

“Oh yeah,” her college friend Miruni Soosaipillai countered. “I have a memory of her saying that she felt like she was ready. They had been together for something like six or seven years.”

But no matter what, Amy would only be home for a few days, just enough time to see some friends, her mom and dad and sisters and brother, and pack her bags again. She was heading for Rutgers University in New Jersey. She had recently been awarded a fellowship to pursue a PhD in international women’s studies. After that, she would become an academic—or perhaps a policy adviser in government. In her dreams, she would launch her own NGO, a serious, research-based organization that would help protect the rights of women and children in African countries that were transitioning from colonial oppression to free democracy.

A half mile from Amy’s office, two UWC students, Sindiswa Bevu and Maletsatsi Maceba, stood on the main road, trying to hitch a ride. A friend had promised to drive them home, but had forgotten about them, and now they were a pair of young black women, arms out, looking to be dropped near an area deemed unsafe by most locals. For the past week, the radio had been reporting that the townships were burning and high school kids were trying to kill cops and overturn government vehicles.

There was also the quotidian township violence, stoked by the political situation. The day before Amy’s death, somebody was stoned and two people were attacked in Gugulethu. Two hours before Amy entered the township, a homeless man was robbed by an unknown assailant. A half hour before Amy drove in, several more people were stoned. At various points throughout the day, three men were separately attacked. That afternoon, two residents were robbed, two homes were burglarized, and somebody was arrested for “possession of ammunition.” There were two separate reports of “public violence” and one report of “grievous bodily harm.” Of all the other crimes that were committed in Gugulethu on August 25, only one man was arrested: according to police records, a “non-white” squatter camp resident had stabbed another “non-white” squatter camp resident to death, for which he was sentenced to just five years in prison.

For the most part, the victims and perpetrators were black and colored residents of various townships and their misfortunes warranted minimal attention. One exception to the rule occurred at around eleven that morning, five hours before Amy was attacked. A white man employed by the city had been helping to fix a buzzing light out by Heideveld train station. Heideveld station straddles the colored area of Heideveld and Gugulethu, the tracks connected by an overhead footbridge. The white man, working on the Gugulethu side, was pulled from his truck by a mob of young black locals, stomped, stabbed, and left for dead. Despite the race of the victim, that crime, too, escaped the attention of law enforcement or media. There was neither an investigation nor a single arrest. Later, I was to find out a heretofore unreported and improbable link between that obscure, forgotten crime, with its two decades of pain and suffering that followed, and what happened to Amy that day.

Sindiswa and Maletsatsi waited forty-five minutes, but nobody would pick them up, so the women trudged back to campus. There they found Amy clearing out her office. They asked her for a lift. Despite her promise to Rhoda to stay away from the townships, Amy agreed to drive Sindiswa and Maletsatsi home.

“I always say she went because she forgot she was white,” Rhoda told me. As a white person who has spent years doing research and interviews in Gugulethu, I find this alleged slip of memory to be nearly impossible. I am never quite so searingly aware of the color of my skin as when I am in the township.

In the parking lot, Amy passed by Evaron Orange, a nineteen-year-old cousin of Amy’s roommate, Melanie. He was a baby-faced colored kid with a caterpillar mustache and oiled black hair. He also needed a lift, and so Amy agreed to take Evaron to Athlone, the nearby colored neighborhood where he lived.

The four loaded into Amy’s dinged-up beige Mazda. Evaron sat in the passenger seat and the two women slipped into the back. The Mazda was all muddy tones: tan fabric seats, dull brown carpeting, a dark brown dashboard. Its only pop of color was a bright yellow Cape Town license plate, its only adornment a squat rectangular sticker plastered on the back right bumper, just below the taillight, printed with unadorned black capital letters: OUR LAND NEEDS PEACE.

Amy drove her friends southwest on Modderdam Road, passing the bleak industrial yards of Parow and the Bishop Lavis ganglands. She drove by the flat, crumbling pastel houses that lined the broad thoroughfare, and at the four-way intersection that separates the black townships of Gugulethu, KTC, and Crossroads from the colored townships of Bonteheuwel and Valhalla Park, she turned left onto NY1. NY stands for Native Yard, the lingering apartheid designation for streets in black townships, all of which were simply initialed and numbered: Native Yard 32, Native Yard 58, Native Yard 79, Native Yard 111.

Amy had been to the townships dozens of times, to drink and dance at the clubs and shebeens, the taverns that provided relief from the daily grind of apartheid and poverty, and to visit friends and conduct research. Driving along NY1, she passed the brown-brick Shoprite Center. She continued over a small overpass that stretches above the N2 highway and connects the northern corners of Gugulethu to the rest of the world. On that day, as rush hour neared, traffic was congested on NY1, which offers only a single slender northbound lane and a single slender southbound lane, hemmed in between sidewalks. After the turnoff, Amy followed a small truck down NY1.

She drove past the shoulder-high grass on the outskirts of Gugulethu. She slowed down as she went by the police barracks contained behind razor wire, past the long municipal buildings that comprised the elementary school. Now there was traffic. She edged nearer to the Caltex service station laid out on the corner of NY1 and NY123. The station was positioned just off the road, its six pumps sheltered by a red cement overhang and set next to a low gray-brick building where the cashiers worked behind bulletproof glass.

A quarter mile past the Caltex sat the Gugulethu police station. Amy planned to drop the women near the police station, where she could safely turn around and go off to Athlone with Evaron. But just before Amy reached the Caltex, the truck in front of her stopped short. She pressed the brake.

“Ride, ride,” Evaron said.

“I can’t.” Amy gestured before her at the truck, which was shaking. In South Africa, as in the U.K., people drive on the left, so to Amy’s left was a sidewalk, and to her right was a line of bumper-to-bumper cars traveling in the opposite direction. Ahead, they could make out a group of young people, some of whom seemed to be pressing against the truck.

A man from that group turned and zeroed in on Amy, her pale face shining. The man yelled out and the other young men swiveled around. There is a word in Xhosa, iqungu. It’s similar to the English term bloodlust. It means “the joy in killing.”

The men and boys were speaking Xhosa, yelling to each other. Amy and her friends sat, paralyzed and uncomprehending. One man held in his hand a cracked brick, tan in color, plucked from construction refuse on the side of the road. No, many of them had bricks, almost all of them had bricks or stones clutched in their hands. Now Amy and her friends could see that up the road, ahead of the truck, the crowd was moving, chanting. That first man raised his brick and hurled it toward Amy, fast and straight. The force shattered the windshield, which exploded with a loud cartoon pop. Droplets of glass flew across the car’s interior, coating the seats, the floor, wedging in the clutch, getting stuck in clothes and hair and shoes. Later that night, when Evaron took a bath, he found shards of glass nestled in the seams of his underwear.

Unthinking, disoriented, Amy drove onward. Another brick came, this one on a perfect trajectory, with no windshield to break its flight. It connected with Amy’s face, hitting her square above her right eyebrow. Her head snapped back and then forward. The brick cracked her skull easily, like an eggshell. It left a three-centimeter-long piece of bone, shaped like an arrowhead, hanging loose. The arrowhead bone briefly pressed against her soft pink brain, now exposed.

Blood poured from Amy’s forehead, drenching her hair. She drove a few more yards down NY1, her right arm dangling from the window, before she stopped. A skinny young boy popped up near her. He looked at the four of them sitting there, slipped the watch off Amy’s limp wrist, and melted back into the crowd.

From inside the car, it seemed that the sun had disappeared and the sky had gone black. The stones hailed down. In the backseat, Sindiswa and Maletsatsi began to scream. Evaron pulled Amy onto his lap.

“Oh dear Lord, help me,” he whispered.

There were people all around, shouting. Now you could make out the words, if you listened.

“One settler, one bullet,” the people chanted.

“Africa for Africans.”

“Kill the farmer, kill the boer.”

“Boer” is the Dutch word for farmer. In South Africa, farmers, primarily Afrikaners, grabbed swaths of land that previously belonged to indigenous people and then employed blacks as sharecroppers or low-paid laborers and kept the profits.

A woman stood on the sidewalk across the way. She yelled at Amy and her friends over the slogans.

“Get out!” she implored. “Run, run, run!”

“Run,” urged other disembodied voices, locals standing at a distance who had seen this grisly show before, though never starring a white woman. If a mob surrounds you, you only have one sorry choice: Run, run, run.

More young people were pouring in from NY109, where a path from the train station met NY1. Others were already ahead, blocking traffic. There seemed to be more than a hundred of them, or perhaps it was just eighty. They were engaged in a toyi-toyi, a beautiful, terrifying march-dance originally from Zimbabwe, in which a coordinated group of people lift their knees up high and wave their arms above their heads as they chant and move in protest. As Amy lay on Evaron’s lap, the chants grew louder and clearer and some kids began to lift the car up, hoping to roll it.

“One settler, one bullet.”

Amy, bewildered, her blood-soaked shirt sequined with glass shards, opened the car door and stepped out onto the street.

“Settler, settler!” the mob erupted.

Evaron, Maletsatsi, and Sindiswa toppled out of the car now, too, yelling frantically. The two women appealed to the crowd in Xhosa, insisting that Amy was a student, a comrade, a member of their ANC-aligned National Women’s Coalition. They were waving around their membership cards like tiny laminated shields. A handsome, broad-faced man tried to grab Maletsatsi’s purse, but she shoved him away. A few days later, her back sore, she went for an X-ray and found that her rib had been fractured.

Like most colored South Africans, Evaron spoke English and Afrikaans but did not understand Xhosa. He had never even been to Gugulethu before; he didn’t know these streets. He turned to a man standing nearby.

“What do I do?” he pleaded.

“They just want the settler,” the man explained. Not Evaron, a colored boy—only that fleeing white woman. It didn’t matter that Amy wasn’t a settler, wasn’t even South African.

Evaron was too scared to go to Amy, surrounded as she was by the mob. It would have been futile, and he would likely have been attacked, and so he stood back, edging toward the Caltex as Amy began to run. First she ran west, away from the gas station and across the dotted line separating the lanes in the road. She pressed her hand above her eye, felt the warm blood, the way her skull gave way, and she let out a scream.

Above NY1 at the Caltex is a barren field, strewn with trash and dotted with tufts of dry grass. A team of twelve-year-old boys had been practicing soccer there when they heard a commotion. They sprinted over to the Caltex and stood by the gas tanks, some on their tiptoes, craning their necks. They had grown up in a world steeped in violence, perpetrated by the white government, their black relatives, their black neighbors, the colored gangsters across the way, their parents’ white employers, white strangers, the white and black and colored and Indian cops, white soldiers, bands of black vigilantes, and political leaders of all colors. This pale, wounded lady was certainly a curious display, worth witnessing, but she was not the first person these kids had seen attacked, perhaps not even that day, and she would not be the last. The fact that she was white, however, made the scene particularly memorable; nobody could name the last time a white person had been taken down like this. Not here, in the middle of Gugulethu.

“There was blood, people throwing stones,” remembered one of the soccer-playing boys, now a grown man. “I can’t say I was happy. I can’t say I was angry.”

Over at the elementary school, children had just been released from the nursery, and their parents and guardians had arrived to pick them up. Now they stood on the corner, holding babies and toddlers in their arms or by the hands, and they, too, stopped to watch.

One man, a three-year-old child propped on his hip, briefly surveyed the scene, in which two black women pleaded with a crowd as a mob attacked a young white woman. The crowd was shouting, “Down with white sympathizers!” He watched as if in a dream, until the child cried, pulling him back to reality. He turned and hurried away with the child in his arms. He didn’t feel too cut up about the whole thing.

“Black people were being murdered by white people, so we weren’t sorry,” he told me years later. He wondered about Amy’s friends, though: “Why would these black people bring a white person here? They knew what was happening in our location.”

As the mob surrounded Amy, an old man stormed out of his house, shouting at the attackers, demanding that they leave her be. The mob pushed him away, and he stumbled to the sidewalk. A grandmother ordered her children inside and locked the door. Her grandson, then seven, pressed his hands and nose to the plate glass window.

“She wasn’t really running fast, she was confused,” the grandson remembered twenty years later, sitting in that same living room. “Her hair was not tied. It was loose.”

Evaron and the two women started to pound on the doors of the Caltex, where the station employees had barricaded themselves. The employees shook their heads. Eventually, with no place to run, Evaron, Sindiswa, and Maletsatsi returned to the gas pumps, where they stood next to the soccer team and watched as their friend was hunted.

At first, Amy was heading toward the mob, as though they might save her. Then, perhaps realizing her error, she swerved away. The mob broke into spontaneous groups. Some were upon her abandoned car, trying to pour out the petrol and burn the thing. A young boy yanked open the door and grabbed some of Amy’s books, Evaron’s backpack and sweater, Amy’s bag, and a camera. He took off in a sprint for his mom’s house on NY111. Others stopped and held their stones limply as the scene unfolded, having lost their taste for murder. The majority of young people stood back on the sidewalk by the houses, spectators now, chanting still: “One settler, one bullet.”

A group of men and boys—some say it was eight, some say fifteen—pursued Amy. Residents of NY1, lured by the noise, walked out of their houses and stood now by their gates. Mostly, they were older women, and in the background, blaring from their TVs but muted by the frenzy on the street, was a dialogue of romance and scandal from the afternoon soap operas. The women were joined by people returning from the center of town, who had walked among the mob and had then stopped as an unexpected scene unfolded before them. With the exception of the old man, only one onlooker tried to save Amy.

Pamela was a pretty, curvy twenty-year-old with straight black hair in a short ponytail. She had been hanging out in her backyard, off the main street, when the mob marched by, full of boys and girls she recognized from the neighborhood. When Pamela heard music, something boiled inside her and she had to move, so she joined in the singing and toyi-toyi-ing. Sometimes a protest was just an excuse to do something, to escape the boredom and grind of township life. But when they hit NY1, Pamela realized that this was no normal, peaceful march; to the contrary, this group was in an electric, destructive mood. From a distance, she saw a white person driving toward them.

Pamela watched as the mob began throwing stones. She watched as Amy, bleeding, fell from her car, as the men chased her. Pamela had never before seen Amy, but as Amy ran, Pamela stepped out of the crowd and began, too, to run. Pamela still doesn’t know why she did it. When the cops came to her door days later, she denied all knowledge of the event, and even seasoned officers couldn’t break her resolve.

She ran toward Amy, reaching out her arms. Now Amy and Pamela were running to each other. Pamela touched Amy, she grabbed at her, their hands met, their eyes met, too. Pamela was holding Amy, feeling the blood on Amy’s hands. She and Amy were about the same size—small and athletic—but for a moment Pamela shielded Amy with her body.

But then the men and the boys were there, chanting and yelling and whooping, and bearing down on both of them, waving stones and knives. Pamela knew these boys, but they pushed her aside. Amy pulled away, and Pamela’s hand slipped from hers. Pamela stood on the gravel now, alone, as Amy and the boys ran on.

“It was a very cruel scene to watch,” she told me in 2013.

Amy crossed back over the street at a diagonal to avoid those behind her. She headed in the direction of the gas station. Now she was slower, less steady. The mob was trying to throw stones at her as they ran, and the combination of two efforts—running and pitching—made them less effective at both. She reached a patch of grass just before the white fence and turned around, her hands extended, as if to appeal to her attackers, to offer peace or surrender. Then the handsome, broad-faced man who had tried to steal Maletsatsi’s bag put his foot out to trip her.

Amy pitched backward, but a childhood of gymnastics classes ten thousand miles away had burned balance into her muscle memory, and she fell to the ground in a sitting position, her arms out. She looked up at the mob, her back pressed against the fence, and pushed her hair away from her eyes. The curtains parted; the men looked down at Amy’s face. Her blue eyes stared into theirs. For a moment, impossible to measure, the mob stepped away in one coordinated wave, their expressions registering something like fear.

“Why? I don’t know,” Easy later told me. “I try my entire life to understand why they are scared.”

Then they set upon her. Sindiswa, her cheeks slick with tears, broke away from the gas pumps and pushed up against the men, protesting, until one turned to her and sliced her hand with a knife, and she retreated again. Another boy, unable to muscle into the mob, turned to find Evaron quivering on the asphalt. He was colored, which meant he was enough of a target in a pinch. The boy ran at Evaron, stabbing in his direction. Evaron was neither a fighter nor an athlete, but he moved calmly away from each swoosh, some unknown instinct or force guiding him.

“When you see death in front of your face, you don’t care if you believe in God or not: you pray,” Evaron told me. “I prayed, and I think my prayers were answered.”

After a few seconds, the eyes of Evaron’s assailant widened with shock and he ran away without explanation. Evaron turned again toward Amy. “She was being butchered to death.”

A scrawny slip of a teenager with dark skin had grabbed a bunch of Amy’s hair to steady her, and, balancing himself upon her legs, rained down on her head with a brick, slamming it into her skull once, twice, three times. He stood up and kicked her with all the strength he could muster, landing a blow to her torso, and then bent down again with his brick.

“Like wild animals,” Amy’s friend Maletsatsi told an American news team several years later.

Others muscled in, some short, light-skinned boys with bricks. They wanted a part of the action. Then the handsome man who had tripped Amy pushed his way into the center of the mob and he, too, brought down a large stone upon her head. He turned to a friend on the outskirts of the group.

“Give me your knife,” he demanded in Xhosa. His friend handed over a six-inch switchblade. The others stepped away to give the man space. He knelt down on Amy’s thighs.

“What did I do?” Amy asked. “I’m sorry.”

He plunged the knife, all the way to its hilt, into Amy’s body, just beneath her left breast, puncturing the soft blue-white skin, inserting the blade straight into her heart.

The Gugulethu police station on NY1 is about a quarter mile from the Caltex. At around 4:40 P.M. that winter Wednesday, a rangy young cop named Leon Rhodes was sitting in a police truck. Back in the 1990s, the South African Police often drove small yellow pickups with narrow cages built into the back flatbeds, where criminals were placed for transport. They still have similar trucks, and I once saw one at that very Caltex, where a cop was filling its tires with air. A shirtless handcuffed man, missing a couple of teeth, sat in the back, wailing loudly. I peered in, before the cop waved me away.

“Will they take the handcuffs off soon?” I asked Easy, who was with me at the time.

“No, they gonna punish him, throw tear gas in, leave him until someone feel for him and unlock him,” Easy said, with some exaggeration. “Now he’s facing layers and layers and layers of pain.”

Rhodes was one of the only white police officers in Gugulethu, twenty-nine years old and a ten-year veteran. He’d been working in Gugulethu for most of his career. He had just returned to the station from following up on a radio call that reported a truck being stoned in a far corner of the township. Rhodes sat in his vehicle in the driveway, filling out paperwork. Suddenly, a harried man rushed through the open metal gates and rapped on the driver’s side window. Rhodes looked up.

“You must seriously and urgently go down the road,” the man said in Afrikaans, a language black people were required to learn at school. “They’re stoning a vehicle with a white lady by the Caltex.”

Rhodes revved the car and took a sharp turn out of the station, immediately crossed the light at Lansdowne Road, and sped north toward the garage. He could see stones and glass glinting on the road in the distance. A crowd of people was gathered around the gas station, spanning up and down the street. On the residential side, to Rhodes’s left, young people were chanting and toyi-toyi-ing. The people in the street made way, and Rhodes drove through.

As the yellow police vehicle approached, the mob by the station broke up, its members disappearing into the slim side streets, over back fences, over walls, through alleys, into settlements, into houses. The toyi-toyi of some spectators grew less enthusiastic and the chants diminished. Rhodes could see a white woman now, standing, supported by two black women and a colored man. Her small chest rose and fell. She let out no words, only sobs.

A battered car lay on its side, pitted by stones, splattered with petrol. Rhodes parked near the exit where Amy stood.

After nearly a decade in Gugulethu—and one of the deadliest in South African history, at that—Rhodes was used to death and mayhem. He knew his colleagues of all colors smacked around suspects, and he knew vigilante cops did whatever they wished to township residents. He had clocked dozens of hours sitting at the edges of settlements, watching people kill each other for a variety of reasons: girls, domestic issues, family feuds, vigilante justice, turf battles, political dustups, drunkenness, unbridled and unspecified pain and fury, ennui. He couldn’t drive back into those ganglands, since the sandy pathways didn’t allow for cars, and he was just a single cop on the beat, a man with no interest in walking alone into a war.

So he had grown accustomed to simply watching small massacres from the sidelines, in the vague hope that his presence might deter some residents from killing other residents. On more occasions than he could count, he’d rolled into work in the dawn hours to find a body or two, revealed by the morning light, strewn across the streets. He’d seen death and ferocity up close nearly every week. All that was remarkable about this particular case was the color of the victim’s skin. He had never seen a white person beaten in Gugulethu. Sure, some delivery drivers had been struck by pebbles and scratched up, maybe their vehicles damaged by bricks, but they usually sped off.

Rhodes pulled up to Amy and asked if she was okay. She let out a low moan. Her hair was so thick, Rhodes thought, and so matted with blood—was it blond or brown? Her eyes, open but blank, rolled back into her head, yet she remained standing. After such a blunt force injury, “your brain just basically dies and deteriorates,” Rhodes told me, after I’d tracked him down to his modest single-level home in a small working-class neighborhood. He was a slender, clean-shaven man with a neat haircut and strong forearms. In his blue jeans, work boots, and checked shirt, he looked like he could just as well be baling hay in Kansas.

He’d stayed with the police force after the transition to a democratic South Africa, but had grown convinced that he could never rise in the ranks, and after twenty-six years serving the citizens of Cape Town he had retired early, at the lowly rank of warrant officer. Before 1994, Rhodes theorized, he worked too closely with black colleagues for the National Party to trust him; after 1994, he was too white for the ANC to promote him.

Rhodes had been working on his anger management issues since his retirement, so he quickly subverted this bitterness, composed himself, and shared with me a newspaper clipping from November 1993, headlined AMY BIEHL’S FINAL MOMENTS. His mother, bursting with pride that her son had been quoted testifying in the criminal trial on the front page of the Cape Argus, had kept it in a plastic folder for eighteen years. Next to the cover story was a column detailing President Bill Clinton’s praise for Linda and Peter Biehl, dotted with head shots of the couple.

Rhodes sat before me on a pink velour love seat, a doily behind his head. Nearby, a rosy-cheeked ceramic maiden peeked out from between two thriving golden pothos plants in copper pots. His wife, absent that day, had arranged amber bottles along a shelf, hung a framed oil painting of a generic alpine scene above the fireplace, and dotted the room with sculptures of roosters. Two small, silken dogs whined to protest their temporary confinement in the garage.

“Looking at her, she was already a goner,” Rhodes said of Amy.

His first instinct was to remove Amy from the scene, and he needed to extricate himself, too. A cop of any color could be a prime target in this sort of situation. The people were still chanting, though with waning verve, “One settler, one bullet.”

Rhodes opened the back of the van and, together with Evaron, loaded Amy onto the cold metal floor. Sindiswa and Maletsatsi followed, letting out escalating howls. Rhodes’s instinct was to ferry Amy to certain safety, so instead of driving to the nearby hospital, he called an ambulance to meet him at the police station down the road.

Back at the station, he parked near the rear, close to the strip of holding cells. He opened the back of the truck. There Amy lay, her eyes closed and her breathing shallow. Rhodes touched her face; she didn’t respond. Evaron picked her up, a limp 117 pounds, deadweight, and set her on the asphalt beneath a low tap. Rhodes went to fetch a sparse first-aid kit from the office.

As Evaron, Sindiswa, and Maletsatsi clasped each other, Rhodes washed Amy’s face, hoping to see the damage beneath the blood. He cradled her head and pushed her tangled hair away—so long, he kept thinking. He wrapped some gauze around the wound above her brow. He took a scratchy, gray government-issue blanket from a nearby holding cell and stretched it across her body. Maletsatsi, Sindiswa, and Evaron hovered nearby. How would they tell Amy’s mother and father about this terrible beating? Surely Amy would be hospitalized for a week or two, considering the severity of her injuries. Would her parents have to fly across the ocean? And what about Amy’s valuables—the backpack, the old Mazda itself? And where were the doctors? And why was she still lying on the pavement and not on her way to the hospital?

Victor West, a young paramedic, had been sitting in his ambulance a few miles away, chatting with his partner, when the radio cackled.

“Make your way to an urgent assault case, NY1 at the Caltex garage,” came the warbled voice.

Urgent assaults were the name of the game in the Cape Flats townships where West had operated for years. To dull himself after picking up dead or nearly dead bodies from shootings and knife fights and domestic brawls, West was drinking two shots of brandy every morning before his shift and four shots after his shift. Every day, he was called to at least ten assault cases, usually including one stabbing: young people were the perpetrators and the victims. West switched on his lights and siren and headed toward Gugulethu.

“Patient is now at the Gugulethu police station,” the dispatcher updated him.

Traffic was heavy, as residents of the townships headed home in dilapidated minivan taxis, in the back of pickups, in private cars. The men wore the blue jumpsuits of manual laborers—literal blue-collar workers—and the women wore their maid costumes—typically a button-down knee-length cotton dress with a small apron and a matching head scarf. They piled into and out of buses and vans. The ambulance hooted and swerved, making its way past the cars slowly. The streets were littered with the detritus of protests and rallies, bits of burned tire and rubbish.

It had been thirty minutes since the radio first cackled when West finally reached the police station. He and his partner navigated through a throbbing crowd that had gathered by the gates. The paramedics pulled up to the interior courtyard. Police were milling around, and three agitated young people stood over a form covered in a gray blanket, lying on the cement near a corner of jail cells. West hopped out of the ambulance and rushed over.

“We lifted the blanket and we were shocked to see a white person,” West recalled when I met him at a mall restaurant in the upscale suburb of Claremont in 2012. Amy had been, he would later say, “the cherry on top” of the general trauma of his work; a few years later, he was hospitalized for post-traumatic stress disorder and alcohol addiction. He was long sober now, a round-faced man with jet-black curls, pale café-au-lait skin, and a toothpaste-commercial smile, who, with his wife, ran seminars for at-risk kids in the down-on-its-luck colored neighborhood in which they lived. How strange, he thought on that August 1993 day, how really unusual to see all that wet blond hair in tangles. West bent down and pressed his hand to Amy’s wrist and then her neck, searching for a pulse. Nothing.

He examined her bloodied body and found what Rhodes had not: in addition to the crack above her brow, she had suffered two large fractures on the back of her head and a deep stab wound in her chest.

“What struck me most is that she had long boots on,” West recalled nineteen years later. But his memory, which seemed to him so sharp and true, was flawed. In fact, the medical examiner’s photographs show that Amy was wearing black lace-up oxfords with a 1990s-style square toe and square heel.

“Is she okay?” Evaron asked. Maletsatsi and Sindiswa stood behind him. Shouldn’t she be taken immediately to the hospital? And then shouldn’t someone call her parents? What about her car? The women were becoming increasingly hysterical, and had begun to shout questions. The paramedics didn’t answer. They pulled the blanket over Amy’s damp, unmoving face.

That evening, after Amy’s friends had gone home, a contingent of gruff police officers swept into the small station, questioning everyone, the cops even, taking over rooms and telephones. These men, with their jowls and barrel chests and packs of quickly disappearing cigarettes and bottomless cups of black coffee, were the Riot and Violent Crimes Investigation Unit, and they would begin the inquiry into Amy’s murder.

The big bosses were not thrilled about this particular crime; the entire nation was already experiencing an extended anxiety attack over the threat of mass race-based violence, and now this? The top brass was prepping for a major governmental transition, and everyone was hoping to avoid bloodshed. Nelson Mandela and other political prisoners had been freed in 1990, after twenty-seven years. Soon thereafter, he and his comrades conducted protracted negotiations with the apartheid leadership, with the end goal of free, democratic elections in which people over eighteen of all races could vote. Everyone recognized that in a country with, roughly, a 10 percent white population and a 90 percent nonwhite population, free elections would mean the end of minority rule. The country remained in flux.

Foreign governments disapproved of apartheid and so South Africa had been subject to trade and arms embargoes. The country’s leadership and its white citizens had become global pariahs. Apartheid had become the cause du jour among American and European pop stars and actors. Mandela was an international hero and, despite laws and legal titles, his influence extended to most black South Africans, as well as a growing number of white, colored, and Indian South Africans. Anti-apartheid political violence was spiraling. Protests, strikes, and rallies were being held almost daily. President F. W. de Klerk of the National Party could see the writing on the wall. The regime, which had recognized that Mandela was their best shot at a bloodless power handover, was negotiating with their former enemies. The ranks of the ANC were growing. In a March 1992 referendum, nearly 70 percent of the all-white electorate had voted “Yes” to allow a process that would ease negotiations toward the dismantling of apartheid.

The election, which Mandela’s African National Congress would handily win, was to be held in April 1994, in eight months’ time. But in late 1993, that seemed unimaginably far away. The country balanced on a precipice; the smallest tilt and it risked collapsing into all-out civil war. Far-right white-power groups were preparing for Armageddon, and more moderate whites were panicking about how they would survive black leadership; many whites were nervous that payback was coming, and that all semblance of order would break down when that payback arrived. And while it is clear, in hindsight, that democracy was on its way, the black population was deeply distrustful of the status quo power structure and often suspected the media of spreading propaganda, as it had done for decades. They were nervous that they would be hoodwinked and would never truly see freedom, and so they continued mounting protests and rallies. For years, the apartheid government had fomented violence in black areas; the government had surreptitiously provided assistance to certain black political groups and vigilante mobs that warred against each other. Now the government had a situation—in part of their making, if indirectly—that needed to be contained, and quick. A dead white girl was bad. A dead white girl killed by a black mob was very bad. A dead pro-ANC white girl killed by a black mob was very, very bad. The absolute worst, however, was this: a dead white girl with ANC sympathies killed by a black mob, and the girl was, of all things, American. South Africa was hoping to reinvent itself in the national and international media, and this did not augur well. Within two days of Amy’s death, a gunman attacked a bus running from Cape Town to Pretoria, and the Cape Times headline read SA WORLD’S MOST VIOLENT COUNTRY. The pressure was on.

As the sky grew dark, the detectives set up their satellite offices and barked to each other. Ilmar Pikker, a hulking chain-smoker with a curly red beard, headed up the investigation. He was a workaholic with a taste for meat, fried food, and Camel cigarettes. He loved the force more than life itself, every night rounding up punks, kicking in rickety doors, staking out terrorist meet-ups. Back then, he didn’t have a complicated relationship with his job.

Journalists began to slink around outside the station, alerted to a possible cover story by the staticky noise on the police radios. In Gugulethu, the news passed from neighbor to neighbor. Those boys, they killed a white lady, they ran her down, they beat her to death by the gas station, they stabbed her. She was walking around, one witness recalled, “like a Barbie covered in ketchup.”

Some township residents were buoyant, some blasé. Some were watching the news on TV with great interest. A few were busy pawning Amy’s watch and books. Some took off for their auntie’s place one township over because you knew the cops would come making trouble any minute now, so let them pick up some other kid. Since Amy had spent time socializing and working in Gugulethu, some residents remembered seeing her smiling face; she looked like a nice person, and it was a shame that they had killed her like that.

Some couldn’t sleep that night, thinking of that innocent girl, thinking of her parents way off in America, how they must be feeling now, her mother especially. Some were ashamed of their own people, those good-for-nothing hooligans. Some were giving each other high fives; how many of us die, how many of our children are murdered, and who sings their songs? Why should we be the only ones to lose babies? Why not them, too? Some were proud. Some were heartsick. Some planned a protest march; they wanted this scourge to stop, and for people of all colors to be spared. They started painting signs demanding “Peace Now.”

One slender young woman with a sleek, inky pixie cut walked down NY1. She was twenty-six at the time, like Amy. She read biographies and appreciated high fashion. She believed in black magic and women’s rights. She was a serious person, rarely laughed or smiled. After the attack, she had called a cop friend and asked what had happened to the girl she saw being beaten by the Caltex, and the cop friend had told her that the girl had died.

She crossed Lansdowne Road and pushed through the crowd at the police station gate. She asked the uniformed officer for Rhodes, whom she knew. Rhodes came out of the station, looking even paler than usual, since the Riot and Violent Crimes Investigation Unit had been questioning him like he was some sort of suspect, and plus, figures of authority made him fidgety. He motioned the woman into the compound, and they stood to the side, near an anemic tree.

“I can tell you who killed the white lady,” she said. “You cannot tell anyone who I am. Do you promise?”

“I promise,” Rhodes said, scribbling down names on his notepad. “Thank you.”

She nodded and walked straight home. She wouldn’t eat for a day or so; she wouldn’t sleep that night, thinking of what they did. She sat up in the dark. She could see Amy running from the men, all down that street, a fox running from a pack of dogs, then torn to shreds. For what? Not for liberation. Not for a free South Africa. Not for land or dogma. For nothing.

It was twilight at the station. Rhodes looked down at the notebook, at the sheet of paper he would soon hand over to Pikker, who would again aggressively question him, this time for the witness’s name. Rhodes would always insist that he hadn’t recognized her, that she’d just been an anonymous face in the crowd. Pikker would find her anyway, many months later. On the paper, there were three addresses in Gugulethu, all within a quarter mile of the murder site. Next to each address was a corresponding name:

Mongezi Manqina

Ntobeko Peni

Easy Nofemela