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 20

Easy Nofemela was born on June 6, 1971, as Mzikhona Nofemela. Mzikhona’s literal Xhosa meaning is: “We have a home [through him].” Easy’s mother, Kiki, is from the Sotho ethnic group, and his father, Wowo, is Xhosa; the two met in Gugulethu in 1968.

“The time I see Kiki, I was only Kiki,” Wowo remembered. “I was running after her and try and try and try, and it work.”

Wowo was twenty-one. Kiki was thirteen. Within the year, she had given birth to their first son.

“If you can see her then, you can’t see she is young, but I was nearly in jail for that,” Wowo explained, forty-seven years later. “But I said to her family, ‘I do everything for her.’ And from that time, I not leave her.”

They married in 1970. Mzikhona, their second son, took on the nickname Easy, for his easygoing temperament.

“Easy come, easy go. Easy to accept pain. Easy to release the pain,” Easy once explained to me.

Only Kiki continued to call him Mzikhona, especially when she was cross. “Mmm-zee-KOH-na,” she would say loudly, her face stern, and Easy would hop to: Sorry, sorry. Then he’d usually do the same wrong thing, whatever it was, the very next day, and on and on into his forties, which is to say he never stopped getting in trouble with his mom.

Kiki had her generous breasts sucked dry by the stream of ravenous babies; she put peanut butter on her nipples to get them to leave her alone, but they still cried for more. Kiki fell pregnant with a girl, but endured a stillbirth late in the pregnancy.

“If that girl was living, I got eight children,” Wowo reflected.

In the end, she produced boy after boy, until she had borne six of them, from 1968 until 1982. She nearly died having her youngest child, to whom she gave birth alone while working as a maid; her boss returned home an hour later to find Kiki and the baby clinging to life in a pool of blood. Then there was an adopted son, the child of Wowo’s sister, who was raised as one of the brood, too, bringing the grand total in the Nofemela household to seven boys.

Other young cousins came to stay for weeks or even years, sent to Gugulethu from the rural parts of the country, or from other townships. They lay their blankets on the floor and helped with the washing and ate the dinners of samp, a cornmeal mush, boiled together with sugar beans and onions; meat on a good day; potatoes on a bad day; and pap, the pale cornmeal staple cooked into a porridge, for nearly every meal. Everyone drank their tea weak, made instant coffee with lukewarm water, and took three tablespoons of sugar, at least.

The seven brothers, and eventually their children, remained the center of Kiki and Wowo’s world. The main decor in the house was a framed, poster-sized collage of family photos, compiled with glue and cardboard by Wowo, a neat and precise retired gardener who also liked to sketch. In the middle, he had pasted a portrait of a young Wowo and Kiki, a sturdy and handsome pair in formal wear, staring out, unsmiling in the way of those unaccustomed to being the subject of a picture. Below, he pasted a large print of his own late parents and his wizened grandmother standing in a row on a tile floor, decades of hard labor and loss and crappy mattresses etched on their faces. Next to them, Wowo pasted a snapshot of Kiki’s late mother, glowing and vigorous, smiling next to a birthday sheet cake. Wowo inserted, wherever there was space, baby pictures of various grandchildren, often propped up on couches.

Then Wowo made a border around the photos, using large, rectangular grade-school portraits of each of his sons. They wore their V-neck sweaters and finest collared shirts and posed against blue backgrounds. Xola, the adopted cousin-brother, stands out against the rest, with his broad distinctive face and upturned nose. But the other six Nofemela boys, the genetic melding of Wowo and Kiki, are indistinguishable: dainty, light-skinned faces, little noses, almond eyes, full lips. The first time I saw the collage, I studied it, trying to pick out this boy from that. It proved impossible. It didn’t seem relevant to me then that I couldn’t distinguish one from the next, but it would become so later on.

Today, in their thirties and forties, the brothers all look different, adulthood having stretched and molded them into unique physical specimens. Easy is the shortest and most childlike, Martin the roundest, Vusumzi, the eldest and most imposing, Misiya the tallest, Gagi the most refined. And Mongezi—Monks, for short—is the most beautiful, with a smooth movie-star face, high cheekbones, and straight white teeth, punctuated with a single gold cap on the incisor. It is hard to tell his build or his height because he was paralyzed in 2009, thrown from a minivan taxi in the early morning hours, vertebra C4 injured.

These days, Monks often reclined in a stationary Ford sedan in front of the house. He had a compulsive fear of “fever,” though I later realized he was in fact terrified of contracting pneumonia, a common secondary ailment in paralyzed people, whose lungs are already compromised. He didn’t know why, but he sweat constantly, and he was concerned that the combination of damp sweat and a gust of cold air could cause him illness. Everyone was convinced that Monks could outwit pneumonia by staying very hot at all times, and so the rooms in which he convalesced were outfitted with heaters, and he was constantly shuttled between a sweltering bedroom, a sweltering TV room, and a sweltering automobile, parked in the noon sun. During much of the shuttling, everyone despaired of Monks, who was always making demands and barking orders. Wowo and all the brothers pulled out their backs monthly carrying Monks from bed to couch to car. Once, Easy had said to me, unaware of the reference to the song, “He is my brother, and he is so heavy.”

But back then, before they were marked by the ravages of time, those two Nofemela boys, Easy and Monks, looked just like each other. Months after our first conversations, for reasons I’ll probably never know, Easy gave me a photograph of the two of them that eventually helped me unravel a shred of the truth about what happened on that August day in 1993, the day of Amy’s death.

During Easy’s childhood, there were always too many people in a small space. There were two chocolates for ten kids, one shirt mended and handed down for twelve years, shared shoes and toothbrushes. The seven brothers were almost one organism, separated only by the corporal borders of flesh and bone. They slept together on a hay-filled sack, a pleasant experience of fraternal intimacy that had one big problem, according to Easy. Time and again, an unknown miscreant was “deep, deep dreaming that he is in the toilet.”

“Before we go to sleep, we talk, laughing, feeling great. But in the middle of the night, somebody is going to give you a dam of water.”

“So who was the culprit?” I asked.

“We wake up and we’re all suspects.”

Easy was not a star student, having started school at age seven. This, he claimed, was due to an inexplicable rule that I have never found in official literature, but that has been mentioned to me several times by black men who entered the education system in the 1970s and 1980s, as well as a Nigerian friend who attended school in Nigeria during the same time: in some instances, to start attending classes, black boys had to be able to reach their right arm over their head and clutch their entire left ear, with their necks stick-straight. This, for whatever reason, meant they were ready to go to kindergarten. Easy, small of stature and short of limb, couldn’t manage to grab his ear until he was nine, but, after watching kids in uniform march past his house for years, he stormed the school and announced to the principal that he wished to study.

“My only problem is my elbow,” he argued, and the principal relented. Once he was there, he was taken with mathematics, physics, and geometry.

“Everything about maths is tricking people,” he said.

In the mornings, Kiki made home-baked Sotho bread—sugary, dense, and steamy. The boys drank a mixture of fruit-flavored corn syrup and water, or, near the end of the month, simply water. Their favorite TV show was Knight Rider. Wowo coached a local soccer team, Harmony United, and taught his own kids to kick around a soccer ball as soon as they could walk. Easy played the game competitively and later somehow convinced journalists to refer to him as a “former soccer star.” In reality, he wasn’t half bad, but he was irritating to play with because no matter how crushing his team’s defeat, if Easy had scored a single goal, he’d celebrate for hours.

“I am a hero!” he’d exclaim, running around with his arms in the air, while the others glared at him.

In the Xhosa tradition, the family elders ruled the roost, and the Nofemela household was run by Melvin Nofemela. Melvin Nofemela was Wowo’s father and Easy’s grandfather. He was born in 1910 in a rural Eastern Cape village and died in 1997 in Gugulethu. He navigated a lifetime marked by massive historical changes, his suffering and his struggles engineered by a succession of distant white politicians and their loyal followers, and his liberation brought about three years before his death by a party of black freedom fighters who remain in power still, their glory days marred by persistent corruption and double-dealings.

In the century before Melvin’s birth, the land of his ancestors had become a battleground. Then, as in South Africa today, the fighting came down to the issue of land ownership. As white people encroached deeper into the nameless sweep of country, its borders yet drawn, wars erupted between the whites and the threatened African tribes with which they made contact. Melvin’s people, the Xhosas, fought the British and colonial forces in the border wars, but by 1860, the once prosperous farmers had been shattered, concentrated in small “native” areas, and stripped of their cattle.

Meanwhile, a new wave of Dutch pioneers, infuriated by British policies in the Cape Colony, loaded their belongings into wagons and headed north, armed with rifles. They pushed the Ndebele into today’s Zimbabwe. They fought the Zulus at a spot that came to be known as the Blood River, where three thousand Zulu soldiers, armed with spears, died at the hands of just over fifty pioneers, who obliterated their enemy with bullets and cannon fire. Within a generation, the Zulu kingdom, once a proud, repressive military dictatorship, had been definitively torn apart, first by civil war and next by an army of British soldiers. Meanwhile, the Sotho people, led by the famed Moshoeshoe, successfully battled Afrikaner commandos, and, years later, were allowed by the British powers to maintain a tiny mountain kingdom, an independent nation carved out of the greater South African mass and known today as Lesotho. Over time, the Pedi and the Shangaan, the Venda and the Tswana, the Tsonga and Swazi, were also dispossessed or run off their ancestral land by Dutch commandos, British army officers, or a combination of the two.

As the battles multiplied, Britain, which had once hoped only to protect a trade route, found itself pumping money into Southern Africa, trying to control numerous wars as well as a rebellious population of Dutch descendants. They had to deal with droughts and locusts and protect settler populations from angry indigenous populations. The colony had become a nuisance.

Between 1852 and 1856, Britain, in an attempt to quell restive Afrikaners, recognized two Afrikaner republics: the interior regions of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. These land masses up to the northeast of the Cape were unenviable parcels of farmland in the middle of precisely nowhere. The Afrikaners were nonetheless pleased at this measure of autonomy, and commenced developing their republics. They were too few in number to build anything significant on their own, so Afrikaner commandos kidnapped black children. These children were often referred to as “black ivory,” in reference to their value as laborers, which was soon higher than that of white ivory. It was certainly more plentiful, as the elephant population had been decimated ever since men with guns landed on the peninsula.

Then, in the year 1866, in a dusty scrubland on the outskirts of a remote agricultural village in the Orange Free State, a young boy found a shiny pebble in the dirt on his father’s farm. It turned out to be a 21.25-carat diamond that was called, aptly, Eureka. Prospectors descended upon the area. In 1871, an 83.5-carat diamond was found on a hill on a property belonging to the farming De Beers family. One month later, a stampede of two thousand men had descended upon the land, and the hill was turned into an enormous depression, forty-two acres across, known as the Kimberley Mine, or, more colloquially, the Big Hole. Today, tourists gape at it.

Twenty years after the discovery of Eureka, as thousands of men marched into the Big Hole, a British carpenter wandered across a hill range in the Transvaal. He kicked a glistening stone and walked farther, scanning the land, until he happened upon a long reef of rocks, beneath which lay the biggest deposit of gold in the world. Soon, 300,000 miners would be working in this remote hinterland.

Word spread, and immigrants poured into South Africa, including thousands of persecuted Lithuanian Jews, from whom my husband is descended. European businessmen arrived with high hopes. Harbors sprang up along the coasts, as did a shipping industry. In the thirty-some years since Eureka’s unearthing, workers, mostly black laborers, had laid nearly four thousand miles of railway. Johannesburg, a city built around the gold trade, exploded, and within ten years of its founding it was larger than 250-year-old Cape Town. The earth was plundered and more minerals discovered: copper, iron, and coal. By the turn of the twentieth century, South Africa was no longer a backwater colony but a place in which a white man could make a fortune.

With the discovery of gold and diamonds, Britain regretted allowing the Afrikaners to set up shop on such precious land. In 1899, the British and the Afrikaner republics went to war. Initially shocked and humiliated by successful Afrikaner guerrilla tactics, imperial Britain resorted to all-out destruction: burning crops, razing homesteads, and interning the opposition in concentration camps, where 26,000 Afrikaners died, 80 percent of them children and the rest mostly women. In the end, the British lost 22,000 troops but prevailed.

The main result of this clash for the Afrikaners was a long-standing hatred for the British passed down through generations, and the birth of a particularly hard-line form of Afrikaner nationalism mixed with Dutch Reformed Christianity. This heady mix of religion and nationalism bloomed into a widespread belief that Afrikaners were God’s chosen people, under fire from blacks and British alike but destined to emerge as the ruling white tribe of Africa. They sought, then, to dominate the land in order to protect themselves and realize a divine plan. These deep-seated beliefs would one day morph into the formal system of governance known as apartheid.

After the Anglo-Boer War, the British and the Afrikaners negotiated a peace settlement. The British colonies merged into the Union of South Africa, which was self-governing under the dominion of the British government until 1961, when South Africa became a republic. The Afrikaner general Louis Botha won the 1910 elections, voted in almost entirely by the white British and Afrikaans minority. Though Botha encouraged Afrikaner pride, he was pragmatic: in a country with a black majority, the Afrikaner’s best bet was to create a white power base with his British countrymen, consolidating resources and authority in white hands.

The year of Botha’s victory was the year of Melvin Nofemela’s birth, on a distant homestead on an empty bluff in the far-off village of Lady Frere. Lady Frere was named after the wife of Britain’s high commissioner to the Cape Colony, a stately mustachioed Welshman named Sir Henry Bartle Frere. Frere, who had previously acted as governor of colonial Bombay, had plans to defend the Cape from a “general and simultaneous rising of Kaffirdom against white civilization,” as he said, and took to crushing Xhosa rebellions and starting a bloody war with the Zulus, despite their chief’s continued pleas for peace.

The exact day that Melvin came into the world was never recorded; birthdays are of little significance in old Xhosa culture. Melvin’s parents were illiterate subsistence farmers who had been tending to their land for generations, worshipping their ancestors, living in huts, and visiting sangomas, or traditional herbal healers, when they needed healthcare. The Nofemelas had little wealth and no formal education. The only schools in rural areas were isolated missionary programs, run by evangelical European families intent on saving African souls.

Melvin’s parents might have considered pursuing an education for their child, but when he was a year old, the Mines and Works Act was passed, prohibiting black South Africans from holding skilled jobs; menial labor would be their appropriate calling. By 1959, black students could only attend university with special state permission.

In that case, Melvin’s family may have hoped to leave the area and purchase land elsewhere, but when he was three years old, the Natives Land Act of 1913 passed. This act barred black South Africans from buying or leasing land in white areas; instead, they were relegated to “native areas” or “reserves,” undesirable and overpopulated plots. The land that blacks could legally own made up 7 percent of the total landmass of South Africa. In 1936, this was expanded to 13 percent. With the passage of the Land Act, blacks living on white-owned land were evicted. Many of them had been well-off peasant farmers, and now, if they did not make it to the reserves, they were forced to trudge from place to place, their families and downtrodden animals in tow, begging white men for a plot on which to pitch their disassembled homes in exchange for their labor.

Melvin could have headed to the cities to take a job, but by the time he was thirteen, the Native Urban Areas Act of 1923 cut short any such dreams and laid the foundations for the first townships, then called “native locations.” This act defined towns and cities as the white man’s turf. If blacks were ministering to white men as laborers or servants, they were permitted to live in segregated areas on the outskirts of the cities. But if a black man ceased to adequately serve the purposes and needs of whites, he could be deported back to the reserves.

Melvin, living on the bluff in Lady Frere, likely knew little of the political forces shifting his early life. But when he met and married teenage Alice, and she had their first baby in 1940 and their second in 1942, he knew he had to make money. Blacks had been surviving off the soil from time immemorial, but once their land had been reorganized and repopulated by the white government—too many people condensed on too little land, with watering holes and streams overrun—it became impossible for most residents to produce enough food on which to survive.

Melvin left his family in search of a job elsewhere, like many able-bodied black men at the time. In addition to supporting his family, he owed the government taxes, despite receiving neither rights nor representation. Along with hundreds of thousands, Melvin headed north and got a job in the expanding mines. His pay was a pittance, especially compared to a white man’s doing the same work: in 1951, the white gold miner earned nearly fifteen times the wage of the black gold miner, and by 1970, white miners earned twenty-one times the wage of black miners. Because of the Mines and Works Act, Melvin could never rise above the lowest rung of the job hierarchy. He was housed in a hostel, a single-sex compound that often pressed ninety men into a single dormitory. When he left to visit his parents, Alice, and his children for three weeks a year, he was strip-searched in case he was smuggling gold.

Though the idea of unionizing was gaining traction, it was still a daunting task. In 1913 at an open-pit diamond mine in the middle of the country, a black worker offended a white foreman, who proceeded to kick him to death. When his black colleagues went on strike, white workers and cops banded together to kill eleven black miners and injure thirty-seven others. Fighting for one’s rights was lethal business.

Melvin desperately missed his family, his hometown, his community. He returned annually to slowly build a small traditional house with a clay floor and straw roof. On one of his short holidays home, he took a second wife, as per Xhosa custom. His longing for his children and his hatred of the sweltering, perilous mines grew. Between 1933 and 1966, nearly twenty thousand men had died in the mines, which did not have adequate safety measures. The vast majority of victims were black. Frightened, both of death and of leaving his family destitute, Melvin searched for another job.

By that time, the Mines and Works Act had been expanded, so that white citizens would get first dibs at employment in other burgeoning industries: the railways, civil service, iron, and steel. Despite this, Melvin managed to get a job laying track for the expanding railways. First, he was based in Lady Frere, but soon the railways moved him to Cape Town. While the second wife remained in Lady Frere, Alice and the children followed, living with thousands of migrants on the outskirts of the city, pitching shacks just miles from stately white-owned 1950s-era homes with all the trappings of Western comfort and modernity. Melvin and Alice held strong against the odds. Often, defeated by distance, lacking telephones, and overwhelmed by loneliness, black men began affairs in the cities, which fractured many families and resulted in scattered children. Despite their commitment to each other, however, the Nofemelas found city living prohibitively expensive; they kept their elder children with them and sent the babies to be raised by relatives in the country.

The government, noting the unending creep of women from the reserves to the city, wished to remove “surplus females” (i.e., women who didn’t serve white businesses or other white interests) and growing families from the locations. But Melvin had other plans. He was saving money with the dream of bringing all of his children back together, one by one.

Nineteen forty-eight was Melvin’s thirty-eighth year. His son Wowo had just been born, and would in two years be sent to live with his uncle. Across the ocean, World War II had come to a close—of the 5,500 South Africans killed while supporting the Allies, a forgotten 25 percent were black. The world was reeling from the Holocaust, and the Nazis were on the losing side of history. But one party in South Africa was taking its inspiration from Hitler. This was the National Party, led by D. F. Malan, a Dutch Reformed cleric who campaigned on the platform of apartheid, Afrikaans for “separateness.”

The central theory behind apartheid was that South Africa was not a single nation, but in fact a collection of separate nations, each populated by a certain ethnic group. Conflict in South Africa stemmed from the unreasonable attempts of these nations to meld into one, and such conflict could be eliminated if only each group existed in separate but equal spheres, free from the demands and traditions of other pesky cultures. As with all systems of segregation, however, the truth was that the founders of apartheid intended to create a society that was indeed separate, but was breathtakingly unequal. Then they could keep all the good stuff for themselves.

Malan’s challenger was the incumbent Jan Smuts, a lesser racist, all things being relative. (Smuts, though opposed to giving blacks political power, helped draft the constitution of the United Nations’ forerunner, the League of Nations, and met with Gandhi on the rights of Indians in South Africa.) Only coloreds in the Cape and whites could vote in the election. On May 26, 1948, Melvin watched from the sidelines as Malan took power. One of the Malan government’s first orders of business was to eliminate the voting rights of coloreds.

In 1950, the National Party passed the Group Areas Act, a law that Prime Minister Malan dubbed with great reverence “the very essence of apartheid.” For centuries, various colonial and white governments had been redistributing black land into white hands, so that less than 10 percent of the population owned more than 85 percent of the land. But after their victorious 1948 election, the Afrikaner nationalists running the country started putting in place what they called groot apartheid, or grand apartheid.

The act aimed to forcibly separate each of the four official South African racial classifications into their own living areas. In Cape Town, whites, for the most part, inherited the beautiful city center, the leafiest suburbs, and the ocean views; Indians were bestowed with two small neighborhoods; and colored people were placed in square government matchbox houses in bleak zones that neighbored Gugulethu. Although the records are poor, some studies estimate that between 1960 and 1982, over 3.5 million South Africans were forcibly relocated, ripped from their property, and taken to townships or newly created “homelands.” The apartheid dream was to eventually create a white nation free of black inhabitants.

The homelands would help realize this dream. Each homeland was intended to act as a pseudo-autonomous “nation” for a particular ethnic group, where all its members would live in peace. The homelands, which eventually numbered ten, were actually rural backwaters, where white investment was illegal. They were geographically fractured, separated by white farms, and overcrowded, set on just 13 percent of South African territory. In one central eastern homeland named QwaQwa, designated for the Sotho people, 777 people were expected to survive on the fruits of a single square mile; Easy’s mother, Kiki, had been born there.

There was neither sufficient healthcare nor sanitation in the homelands, which resulted in outbreaks of cholera, tuberculosis, polio, and even the bubonic plague—in the mid- and late twentieth century. In 1974, the infant mortality rate of black children was 110 per 1,000, and the primary cause of their death was malnutrition.

“There was too much witch in the Transkei,” Easy once told me, referring to the portion of today’s Eastern Cape province that included his family’s hometown of Lady Frere. “The women have many miscarriages.”

Melvin, once a citizen of South Africa, was considered by lawmakers a member of the “Xhosa nation,” and was to become a citizen of Transkei, where he was expected to settle permanently. He might work in the “European” cities or towns—and might, in the course of this work, father children in these white areas—but his family would always be temporary laborers in the greater South Africa. As the Department of Bantu Administration and Development stated in 1967: “As soon as [black workers] become, for one reason or another, no longer fit for work, or superfluous in the labour market, they are expected to return to their country of origin or the territory of the national unit where they fit ethnically if they were not born and bred in their homeland.” The state, still intent on marketing the homelands as decolonized areas, installed cooperative black chiefs linked to the apartheid leadership. In 1977, Parliament granted Transkei independence. This independence was recognized by no country in the world other than South Africa.

Melvin, like many black South Africans, defied official attempts at confinement. By the late 1950s, Melvin and Alice had succeeded in bringing all of their twelve children back to Cape Town. They lived in a cramped, makeshift shack in an area called Elsie’s River, on the outskirts of the city. But then, as per the Group Areas Act, Elsie’s River was declared a colored area. Colored people, who had been forced from their homes—many lovely houses near the sea were handed over to whites—were relocated to crime-ridden apartment blocks or shoddy little houses on the Cape Flats. In 1960, Melvin and his family, including thirteen-year-old Wowo, were loaded onto an open truck and driven five miles south, where they were unceremoniously dumped, with their belongings, on a vast field on the border of the preexisting township of Nyanga.

For two weeks, as they built a new shack by hand, they sheltered under a table and washed and drank from a single tap installed a mile away. Nearby sat rows of houses constructed for “bachelor” men, whose purpose was to provide labor to white industry. Those dumped on the field took to calling their new neighborhood “Elsie’s,” since they had all been rounded up there. But soon groups of removals came from elsewhere, and the government dubbed the area Nyanga West.

In 1962, the government saw that Nyanga West was growing, teeming with new arrivals rounded up throughout Cape Town, as well as the regular migrants from the Eastern Cape. They renamed the area “Gugulethu Emergency Camp,” and it would soon become the city’s third official township. Gugulethu means “our pride.”

“What did you do?” I once asked Wowo, as he recalled his displacement.

“You can’t complain. You keep quiet.”

“What did you think?”

“You can’t think nothing if you want to stay alive.”

The white Cape government favored coloreds, likely because Afrikaners and coloreds share a common ancestry, a language, and, often, a disdain for blacks. White people could not be expected to perform much of the menial work needed for the growing economy, and so the government’s plan was to eventually expel blacks from the Western Cape and use coloreds as their cheap labor. But the endeavor proved difficult. First, the colored workforce was not big enough to meet the demand for workers; second, blacks kept illegally sneaking in across the homeland borders, squatting in the bush, and begging for work in the cities. The government soon decided it would have to build more township houses to contain such people. After eight years of squatting in the emergency camp, Melvin’s name came up on the government’s wait list, and the Nofemelas were allowed to rent a small house on NY6. The next year, they were shuffled to a three-bedroom house on NY41; fourteen family members took up residence in the space, sharing a lone outhouse. This overcrowding was common and enduring: in 1978, in a township bordering Gugulethu, a single bed was designated, on average, for six people.

By 1980, Wowo was thirty-three and married to twenty-five-year-old Kiki. They had five children. The house on NY41 was overflowing, and relatives had built small tin shacks in the backyard. Even if they had been financially able, they could not legally purchase property in the Western Cape, since it was not a black homeland.

Finally, Wowo was granted his own place, a two-bedroom on NY111, where he remains today; he and Kiki took one room and their sons took the other. Kiki gave birth to her youngest soon after they moved in, and Wowo’s sister’s boy came to live with them—eventually seven boys were sleeping together on one big straw mattress. Since obtaining the house, Wowo had slowly extended it to the furthest edges of the property line; an overhang made of uneven cement blocks abutted the edge of the sidewalk, and a series of stand-alone brick rooms pressed against the far end of the backyard.

By 2013, Melvin’s grandchildren numbered fifty living souls—twenty men and thirty women, Easy among them. They were taxi drivers, clerks, housewives, hairdressers, insurance salesmen, postal workers, train conductors, cleaners, hospital workers, hotel room-service providers, supermarket checkout clerks, and employees of the South African Revenue Service. Ten were students. Five were unemployed. Nobody knew what two of them did with their days. One suffered from depression, one was disabled, and one was, according to her relatives, “a slow thinker from birth,” who’d been raped and who now had to be supervised twenty-four hours a day. Some lived in the Eastern Cape province—after apartheid, the country’s homelands were absorbed into the nine provinces of today—while most lived in the Western Cape, home to Gugulethu. Six had died. The number of great-grandchildren was climbing into the triple digits.

Though Melvin had no official political power, in his house, his word was law. The family considered Melvin as close to a god as they would find in this lifetime, and so as long as he was around, Wowo may have been a married father of seven, but he did not have the final say in his own household.

In the years since the first European missionary introduced Christianity to South Africa in 1737, many black preachers had taken over congregations and had created a particularly African brand of Christianity. Melvin and his wife Alice believed in Jesus Christ their Lord and Savior and in their Xhosa ancestors, who demanded animal sacrifices in return for protection. Everyone in the family followed suit, though at least one of their sons eventually disavowed traditional mores for conventional Christianity and was always grumbling about his relatives’ lost souls. Easy, for one, believed halfheartedly in Jesus and wholeheartedly in the powers of his ancestors, and the meeting of the two seemed natural to him.

Melvin, “short-tempered but peaceful,” according to Easy, encouraged prayer and was prone to beating disobedient kids. Alice supported this form of discipline.

“If she is angry, she get Father to beat you,” Wowo recalled fondly. “She’s a good wife. She like people, she like her children, but she is not funny, and if you make funny things, you make her cross.”

Melvin was wise and prescient. You had best pay attention to him, because he knew what he was talking about.

“My grandfather said to one my brothers: by the end of the day if you don’t want to listen you will result in prison and you will result in steal things,” Easy remembered. “My brother was in and out and in and out of prison, and he get sick and pass away. My grandfather propheted that.”

“Sick” in township parlance can often be a euphemism for HIV, which has a 19 percent prevalence rate among South African adults. And Easy was using the word “brother” in the black South African sense: when he said “brother” he meant “cousin.” Biological brothers and sisters are not differentiated from cousins; the family structure is such that uncles and aunts have power and responsibility equal to fathers and mothers, and any local adult can discipline or direct a child—a village to raise a baby, indeed. As a Xhosa person, if your sibling dies or falls ill or simply has too much on his plate, you are expected to take in his children and raise them as your own. In this way, Wowo lived in his uncle’s house from the age of three until the age of eleven, and in this way, he raised his sister’s child.

Xhosa people refer to complete strangers, too, as brother or sister—bhuti or sisi, respectively. An older man is tata; an older woman, mama. Nelson Mandela, father of the nation and the world’s most famous Xhosa, is referred to as Tata Mandela. Truly old men and women are addressed with great extravagance as tatomkhulu (grandfather, the term Easy and others used to address Peter Biehl) or makhulu (grandmother, the term Easy and others use to address Linda Biehl). Once, a young man addressed me as mama.

“No, call me sisi!” I said, and he looked at me blankly. I thought he was telling me that I was old, like when people stopped calling me “miss” and started calling me “ma’am.” But later I learned that “mama” was simply a term of honor and respect, and the man had been trying to flatter me. To be mama is to be held in high regard, though to be bhuti or sisi isn’t bad either. A Xhosa friend once explained to me that in adhering a familial term to a person, one humanizes him or her.

“Even if you don’t know my name, if you call me sisi, I am somebody.”

By the time of his death in 1997, Melvin was a tata, or a tatomkhulu. In traditional Xhosa culture, a baby’s umbilical cord and placenta are buried near their birthplace—Lady Frere, in Melvin’s case. In a perfect world, a Xhosa returns to die near this very burial place, near his ancestors and relatives, on the land they all worked, completing the circle of life, from the soil and to the soil. You can live anywhere, but your home will always be where your umbilical cord rests—and in fact, when a Xhosa person recites his lineage, he usually begins by stating in Xhosa where his cord is buried.

But Melvin died and was buried in Gugulethu township; he never found the time or the money to return to his homestead and build the hut in which he wished to spend his final days. By the time Melvin died, Mandela was president and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission had commenced (in fact, Easy sat before the TRC in the year of Melvin’s death). But the TRC didn’t particularly register with Melvin. So much had been taken from him even before he was born; and after he was born, he was slowly stripped of most prospects he might have had. Melvin’s entire life had been shaped by apartheid politics, but he remained apolitical and had not endured any terribly dramatic incident that labeled him, officially, as a victim: no police beating, no imprisonment or torture. So Melvin did not qualify as someone against whom human rights violations had been committed, and the commission was therefore irrelevant to him, and he was irrelevant to the commission.

Easy’s mother, Kiki, was born Pinky Magdelene Mahula on June 6, 1955, in the tiny, depressed, overcrowded homeland of QwaQwa, that slip of earth designated for the Sotho people by the apartheid government. When Kiki was young, her family relocated to Gugulethu, where they eked out a living. Kiki left school at twelve. Her first baby, born when she was thirteen, couldn’t pronounce Pinky, and called her Kiki—and the nickname stuck. By the time she was twenty, she had four kids in her care. By the time she was thirty, she had seven.

Kiki had no choice but to work, and found a job as a maid and nanny, caring for three strapping white children in a rich white suburb. Kiki’s boys wished that she would wait for them with snacks and hugs when they returned home from school, like they saw TV moms doing, but she was in a Dutch-gabled home near the cricket fields, preparing sandwiches for the children of an insurance executive, and the boys had to make their own way.

The Afrikaans journalist Antjie Krog wrote of visiting an old friend who, when asked if she should provide her maid with soap or a heater during winter, claimed that maids “don’t get cold like white people” and “don’t like washing.” When Krog asked if the maid missed her own faraway children, her friend answered, “Maids don’t feel like other people about their children. They like to be rid of them.” I heard similar sentiments repeated in the white community, over and over again.

These dehumanizing opinions of black people naturally boiled over into neglect and mistreatment by employers of their employees. And such mistreatment naturally caused the employees pain and humiliation, which, since they could not speak up to their employers, they often took out on their own families.

“The white person is very naughty,” Easy remembered. “Our mothers are domestic workers, raising other kids. Our fathers are garden boys. When they come home, your mother push children away. Your father come home and give you harsh punishment.”

Kiki was tired at the end of each long day, and she was not the hugging sort, but she still bandaged her babies’ cuts, gave them baths, cooked their dinners. The elders slaughtered a goat every time a new child was born.

As they grew older, the Nofemela boys became aware of apartheid and what it meant for them. There was a shining world, they learned, outside Gugulethu, but they were not allowed there. Their parents had seen such places, but only because they worked over the city borders.

“We been blocked from town,” Easy said.

In 1950, two years after the National Party took power, Parliament passed the Population Registration Act. This required all South African citizens to register as one of four racial classifications: white, Indian, colored, or black. To determine the race of ethnically ambiguous folks, the government implemented several highly scientific tests, such as the pencil test: If the pencil inserted into your hair fell out, congratulations! You’re not black. Once you had been officially deemed a member of one racial classification, you would have to live, learn, love, and work among other similarly categorized people. Interracial relationships were illegal.

Perhaps more problematic, from the early 1700s until 1986, a series of laws had been passed, bit by bit, to curtail the movement of black people and maintain white control of resources and jobs. By 1956, black men and women over the age of sixteen were required to carry “reference books,” or passbooks, everywhere they went. These books contained their photographs, employment records, fingerprints, ID numbers, tax details, and employment details, which had to be signed by a white employer. If a black person wished to enter a white area for any purpose other than labor, he was to request official written permission, which, if granted, would be noted in his passbook. The passbook was to be furnished to any policeman who demanded to inspect it; failure to produce the pass, or a pass that did not justify its bearer’s movement, was grounds for immediate arrest. In 1975, when Easy was four years old, nearly 400,000 people were arrested for offenses related to their passes.

Taking the kids to the city was not, therefore, an easy feat. At night, from the dark townships, you could make out the sparkling city center in the distance, an unreachable world eleven miles west. When Easy did make the rare twenty-five-minute expedition to Cape Town—say, to accompany his parents to a government office or to work—he returned to Gugulethu with stories: skyscrapers, abounding electricity, seaside boardwalks, white folks in bespoke suits carrying leather briefcases, markets full of figs and peaches and whole roast chickens on the spit, rings of fried cake called doughnuts, malls displaying fashionable clothes, mansions on oak-lined streets, pruned botanical gardens full of picnickers in pretty dresses. It was the 1980s.

“You see the beautiful lights far away, you visit the city,” Easy remembered. “You tell your friend, ‘Yho! I was in America.’”

But once Easy had made it to this makeshift America, his experience was limited to that of an observer, alternately enraged and admiring. Easy could not step foot into the gleaming stores except to buy something and get out; so that white businesses did not lose potential customers, black people were permitted to buy food but not sit down and eat it. Easy could not walk on the same beaches as white people or sit on the same park benches or use certain toilets. Taxis, buses, trains, elevators, hotels, churches, parks, movie theaters, and restaurants were segregated. The entrances to the nice areas were marked with large signs stating a simple regulation, spelled out in Afrikaans and English, and enforced by both civilians and police, viciously if they were in the mood:

BLANKES ALLEEN

WHITES ONLY

Easy and I started to see each other more often. He allowed me to ride along with him in the cranky Amy Biehl Foundation vans. I sat to his left as he drove kids from their schools in the townships to their various lessons in the ritzier parts of town: guitar, cello, singing, ballet. The van was always full of loaves of bread, which were to be ferried from the foundation to the after-school programs. Once, we stopped at a light where an old lady stood in the rain, holding up a sign asking for help. I motioned to the pile of white bread, encased in plastic, on the floor.

“We can’t give her some bread?” I asked Easy. He picked up two loaves from the floor and handed them out the window. “Is it against the rules?”

“You can see the condition,” Easy said as the light turned green. “You can break the rules.” Then he thought for a moment. “In fact, is not breaking the rules. You can teach.”

We also began to have regular lunches together. Our joints included the Darling Street KFC, the Shoprite KFC, the Sea Point KFC, or the lower level of the Hungry Lion fried chicken establishment at the downtown Cape Town mall. Chicken, barbecued or fried, with nary a fancy sauce, was guaranteed to please Easy. If he acquired a three-piece meal, he had a habit of tucking one piece away to later give to his mother, to his daughter, Aphiwe, or to a friend or colleague. But twice, for his birthday, when I presented him with what he referred to as a “birthday chicken,” an entire roasted bird, he ate it all by himself in under thirty minutes, very neatly. Years later, I emailed him a “Happy Birthday” message, and promised to maintain our tradition when I next came to Cape Town. I cant wait to have my birthday chicken when you are back in South Africa chickens are few now and thanks so much to remember my birthday chicken, he replied.

After some time in Cape Town, I had made a smattering of friends, a portion of them black. My black friends, for the most part, had been born into families of modest means in the homelands. One woman, an investment banker with an MBA, had attended school beneath a tree. One man, a successful quantity surveyor, had believed as a child that any newly purchased item “smelled white.” Another man, an international rugby coach, had grown up without electricity. But they had been blessed with raw intelligence, luck, and determined parents who, though they may never have attended college themselves, believed in education with the extreme reverence of those for whom proper schooling had never been a given. These parents labored and pushed and persevered, with remarkable fortitude, in the single-minded determination that their children would attend university—and then, if the dream were to be expanded upon, postgraduate studies.

These friends were “black diamonds,” as upwardly mobile black professionals in South Africa are called. They earned good money, invested, leased Audis, bought condos, built up designer shoe collections, and traveled to Dubai and Paris. When we socialized, I didn’t notice many strange looks. The black diamonds emitted a specific, if invisible, aura of success and sophistication that allowed onlookers to comfortably, if disapprovingly, make sense of me plus them. This is a brave new world: that person sort of matches that other person.

But when I was with Easy, people stared. He was branded by the township, with scars and ballpoint pen tattoos and all of the other markings of place: a McDonald’s promotional polo shirt, a heavy Xhosa accent, the barely perceptible jitters when milling around fancy stores. More than once in Easy’s life, he had stood in the vicinity of a pile of newspapers on a corner, only to have an elderly white woman approach and hand him a few rand in coins. Meanwhile, I bear the markings of a comfortable white upbringing, in particular that pervasive and inbuilt sense of entitlement that radiates from the privileged. To make matters more unusual for curious onlookers, I stand five-ten and Easy stands five-five.

White people gawked; black people spoke up. At one point, near Christmas, I found myself standing in a store in Cape Town’s most expensive shopping center, holding Easy’s young baby, an infant so pale that he looked as if he might be mixed-race and whom Easy jokingly referred to as his “umlungu” baby—or white baby. The two Xhosa saleswomen looked at me and then at Easy and then back at me, and one finally approached me to ask, “Is that your baby?”

Once, when Easy stopped to buy a peach for himself from a sidewalk vendor, an old black man admonished me. “Why you have him pick your fruit for you?” the man, sitting on a stoop, grumbled, assuming that Easy was performing some menial task for me. “Just reach in yourself!”

Easy and I spent a lot of time in Gugulethu, riding aimlessly around his area, the streets surrounding NY111. We drove past barbecue stands that specialized in sheep’s head, a local delicacy, and the herbalist who could help with “weak erection, early ejaculation, court cases, lost lovers, blood pressure, ETC.” We passed a man who stood on his front lawn dressed as a sensei.

“You get the energy, and that gives you the power,” he orated in the direction of a dirt patch.

“He is training his students in karate,” Easy told me.

“Where are they?”

“He can see them,” Easy said, “but we cannot.”

NY111 was our main drag. What had seemed so foreign on my first trips to the townships, I learned by heart. That slender woman, with gray hair cropped close to the scalp, who liked to dance up and down the street, was drunk first thing in the morning. Whenever she saw me, she sauntered up and asked, without any conviction, “Can you get a job for me, chummy?” She had once been the mother of six living children: five sons and one daughter. But one by one, her sons were taken down by the township: a police shooting, a shebeen shooting, HIV, a poorly treated illness of mysterious origin, and a stabbing-and-stoning incident. Only her girl remained.

“She lose her mind because she think deep thing about how other people have boys but she don’t have boys now,” Easy explained, and the woman didn’t unnerve me anymore.

On NY111, a pile of garbage rose on a corner, a sort of open-air market for a clientele of junk dealers and junkies, who picked through it halfheartedly. Goats nibbled on diapers and moldy bread. There had been metal dumpsters here, but thieves kept carting them away in the night and selling them to scrap dealers, and so the municipality had apparently given up. Apart from the community trash heap, the street was decent enough: chipped, single-level brick-and-mortar government-issue homes running down one side of the block, a patchy field and a three-room community center on the other. Inside the community center was a bulletin board covered with photocopied pictures of African slaves taken from history books and old magazines: the severed head of a young woman, displayed on a metal platter, her eyes rolled back and her mouth hanging open; emaciated men and small boys in traditional dress chained together by their necks; a handcuffed man sitting upright inside a net, staring out; a white general commanding shirtless black men to perform push-ups; a man with a dog’s muzzle tied around his mouth and a metal collar around his neck. A colorful rendering of a rosy-cheeked white Jesus with green eyes and flowing blond hair had been tacked up below the words THIS IS NOT GOD. Nearby were pasted black-and-white pictures of three African kings: King Hintsa, King Shaka Zulu, and King Sekhukhune. Scattered throughout were images of the raised, clenched fist made famous by Mandela, above the Xhosa and Zulu word for power: AMANDLA.

During these sessions, Easy talked just a little about his murder trial, and even less about his years in prison. He focused on recent times. He’d met the Biehls, gotten a job at their foundation, fallen in love with a pretty girl, had Aphiwe. Aphiwe’s mom, nineteen when she gave birth, left Easy and took the baby to go live in a shack. One morning before work, Easy went to visit his daughter, whom he found alone but for an eight-year-old cousin to look after her. He bundled Aphiwe in a blanket and spirited her to his mother’s house. He held her naked to his chest, “like the kangaroo.”