We Are Not Such Things (12 page)

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

One day in March 2012, I headed down the N2 highway toward Gugulethu, where Easy was waiting. It occurred to me that my gold Renault hatchback was not too different from the yellow-beige Mazda hatchback Amy Biehl had been driving on August 25, 1993. It occurred to me also that if I were to get whacked, there was no shortage of people who would roll their eyes.

As I drove toward Gugulethu, I tried to forget about the horror stories of the townships. How people kept telling me that I wasn’t to think I was as “free as in America.” Once, over sushi, a friend of a friend had told me about an acquaintance who had been carjacked, kidnapped, and dropped on a street corner in Soweto, Johannesburg’s prominent township, the old stomping grounds of Mandela and his cadres.

“What then?” I asked.

“He put his head down and he got the hell out,” the friend of a friend said.

“Didn’t he ask for help?”

“You don’t ask for help in there. You have a fifty-fifty chance anyway, if you’re a man. If you’re a woman, you have zero chance.”

“Zero?”

“Zero.”

“Even if I found another woman to help me?”

“Yes. You would be raped.”

“And killed?”

“You’d be killed because the rape would never, ever stop. You would be raped to the point of death.”

I didn’t believe the guy at the restaurant, but at the same time even the slightest possibility of being raped to death is one of those things that’s hard to dismiss. This dark communal bogeyman grew larger and more malicious every time he appeared.

Easy had asked me to pick him up in Gugulethu. I had met him briefly at the Amy Biehl Foundation office twice before, but had never been able to speak to him at length or in depth, so this would be my first proper interview and my first time alone with him. It would also be my first time driving into the townships by myself. Easy gave me specific directions: the exit, the left lane, the turn at the light, and I’d find him, standing outside the Shoprite. I jumped at the opportunity because obtaining time with the man had, until then, proved nearly impossible.

For weeks, I had been calling him. His phone was busy. His battery had died. He had no service. Bad network. No contract. Out of airtime. Can’t send an SMS. The phone was stolen, broken, lost, found, dunked in water, dried out, spontaneously turned off, left at home, forgotten at the office, borrowed by his brother, hidden by his girlfriend, accidentally laundered by his mother, in the sofa cracks, at the bottom of his bag, in his cousin’s backyard, in a friend’s car. This was a new phone; how did it work? This was an old phone; it wasn’t taking a charge.

When we did speak, roughly half of what we said got lost in translation. My American accent and his South African lilt were filtered through a sometimes patchy mobile network, his cheap, battered cellphone, and my old-model BlackBerry. We both spoke too fast. Easy’s English wasn’t great, and my Xhosa was nonexistent. When we hung up, I suspected neither of us had the first idea of what had just happened. Sometimes, he raised and dashed my hopes in a matter of seconds.

“I cannot meet today, but let’s make a plan,” he said one Friday.

“Great! What’s the plan?”

“The plan is, you call me Monday. Then we see what’s happening.”

I tracked him doggedly, finding him a few times only by pure luck. He was at once the best-natured and most unreliable person I’d ever dealt with. We would arrange to meet at noon on any given day, and I would arrive at the spot, usually near his office in town. In the best-case scenario, Easy showed up two hours late. In the usual scenario, he did not show up at all. In the worst-case scenario, he not only did not show up, but his phone would be off for the next week. There were excuses, delivered kindly: His boss sent him to Main Street in a suburb, but this particular suburb had a “Main Street” and a “Main Street Road,” and he could not figure out which was which, and for that reason, he’d been AWOL for three hours. His daughter had “fever”—later I’d find that the majority of township illnesses were referred to in English, generically, either as “fever” or “high blood”—and needed the doctor immediately. He was under stress from work. He was under stress from his family. He would be there in ten minutes. In another ten minutes. Just ten more minutes. But ten minutes never meant ten minutes. It meant, “Wait there,” or “Don’t be mad, buddy,” or “I can’t deal with you now.”

Easy called this “African time.” It derived from ancestral rituals, he explained, in which Africans welcomed their ancestors to traditional ceremonies. You couldn’t very well rush an ancestor, he said, so you had to just wait around until the ancestor showed up. Also, consider transportation issues.

“There can be problems, there can face obstacles.” Your horse could collapse, for example. And if your horse collapsed, you’d be pretty late.

“Easy, I don’t see you riding around on a horse.”

He tried a more timeless and convenient explanation: “African time is, you’re not guilty. If we invite you at one, we can also start at two or three. When you arrive, we’re not mad. You are there.”

So when the opportunity to see Easy—better yet, to hold him captive in my car so he could not escape and would have to talk to me—presented itself, I did my best to push aside any nagging doubts. I drove in the shadow of Lion’s Head peak, veered left to stay on the N2, past the stinky old power plant and the trash-strewn fields, past Cape Town’s first township, Langa, and the shacks on its outskirts, past the Joe Slovo Village of cement apartment blocks overlooking the highway beneath a faded billboard offering affordable housing that the advertisement promised would provide that ever-elusive
“DIGNITY
,” past the broken-down horses grazing highway-side on the outskirts of Bonteheuwel. I turned off the N2 as directed and veered left along a barren strip of dry field. People were crossing the road at a clip, clutching each other’s arms, as cars sped through. My palms were moist now, my back damp. Everything looked foreign and incomprehensible. An otherworldly junk dealer with dreadlocks, blue eyes, and gigantic silver hoop earrings rode atop old bed frames and scrap metal piled high on a horse-drawn cart. A newspaper vendor at the stoplight held up the
Daily
Sun,
an English-language tabloid with a multimillion-strong, almost entirely black readership. Today’s headline:
PROPHET BURNT TO DEATH.

An ancient man with a dent in his head limped to the car window, hands out, eyes vacant. I shook my head, as though I could do nothing for him despite my most sincere wishes to help. The light changed to green and I turned into Gugulethu. Here was the Shoprite Center Amy had once passed. It contained a liquor store owned by Chinese immigrants, a KFC, a hardware store that advertised an array of gun safes, and a halal butchery, the slogan of which was “Where the Rainbow Nation Meat.” Inside the actual Shoprite supermarket, where guards armed with machine guns stood at the doors to stem the tide of perpetual stickups, a bulletin board was plastered with signs offering “cash in a flash :-)…forward ID number, income, and name,” as well as a “mobile fridge for hire…for weddings, funeral, church event and much more,” and pleas for work:

My name is Thelma Ima Zimbabwe Im looking for a job any job household to look after children Im 24 years old.

My name is vuyadwethu. I’m xhosa girl. I’m 32 years old. I’m looking for kind of job like clean house or looking after children. The language I understand is English and Afrikaans. But I’m not perfect. I will be glad when you call me. I really need a job Thanks

Looking for a job trainee cook book keeper c work house maid

I knew Easy, I reminded myself. But then I started to wonder: do we
really
know anybody at all? Perhaps this was a game, and I was the all-too-willing pawn, lured straight into a bloody setup. Witnesses in Gugulethu kept their traps shut. There is very little worse than to be considered an
impimpi
, or snitch. In the old days—and still, in the far unseen reaches of the vigilante-controlled settlements where cops dare not set foot—groups would “necklace” a suspected impimpi or a thief or anyone tried and convicted in the local kangaroo courts. The grimly euphemistic necklace is, in fact, a gasoline-soaked tire that is secured around a victim’s neck and set alight.

Nobody knew me in this part of the woods. I thought of all the terrible rumors I’d heard about the townships; I had dismissed them, though I also had evidently absorbed them. Wasn’t this the Wild West? Was anyone safe here? And didn’t Easy once get sentenced to eighteen years in prison for the stoning and stabbing death of a young white woman?

Then I saw Easy standing at the bus stop, waving at me, and I slowed. He was wearing a pressed teal and navy striped button-down shirt tucked into gray trousers. There were some folks waiting for the bus, mostly heavyset grandmas in long skirts, laden with grocery bags. There were a few kids holding hands with each other, a baby tied on his mom’s back with a bath towel, a woman reading a book, some teenage boys kicking a soccer ball down the street. An elderly man in a newsboy cap was selling fruit beneath a ragged umbrella. A wave of pedestrians, some in high heels and some in slippers, passed back and forth from the Shoprite and over the bridge into Gugulethu. A few girls had clay smeared over their faces to protect their skin from the sun. Nobody noticed me, as far as I could tell.

Easy got in. He slumped in the seat and sneezed loudly. His nose was stuffy, his eyes puffy.

“I have flu,” he announced, sniffling. “When you have flu, you need your mom to help, to listen your cough.”

A young couple walked by, arms wrapped around each other, eating ice cream. I felt a tear of salty sweat trickle down my chest and settle in my belly button.

When I first arrived in Cape Town, I wore a sapphire-and-rose-gold engagement ring on my left ring finger, and when I passed black men on the street, I unconsciously turned the ring inward, so that the stone pointed at my palm. I tried to change the behavior, but even when I left the ring just as it was, I still felt that hot urge, as involuntary as a reflex. Soon, I took the ring off and put it in the safe in our seaside rental apartment, since almost every South African home has a safe welded into the back of a closet. But no matter. Today, I didn’t need a circle of precious metal to expose me, if only to myself; the drive to Gugulethu had done the trick. I offered Easy a tissue and we turned back toward town.