We Are Not Such Things (34 page)

Mzi gave the impression of being an elder, though he was in his early forties. He spoke slowly, at length, and demanded close attention. He sipped his orange juice and laid out his life story, whittled down to fit into a lunch conversation with a stranger.

Mzi was, he explained, Easy’s neighbor, one street away, on NY119. If you were to jump over the fence behind Easy’s property, you would land in Mzi’s backyard. When they were younger, the men had in fact commuted this way, but now left such feats to more limber adolescent relatives. Mzi was a former APLA guerrilla, introduced to politics at age eleven by a radical Rastafarian schoolteacher. He was naturally reticent, athletic, and subtle, the son of an overworked fruit vendor mother and a roaming, absent Casanova-slash-truck-driver father. His dad did well at work, mostly because he was light of complexion. Business owners trusted him more than your darker black guy. A black man with skin like a colored is called
amper baas
in Afrikaans.
Amper baas:
almost boss.

By the time he was twelve, the best day of Mzi’s life had occurred when he dreamed one night of owning a bicycle and, upon waking, found just such a bicycle abandoned near his house. He was sensitive and he craved attention, which the Rastafarian teacher paid him. Mzi’s first mission as a fledgling freedom fighter involved carrying a grenade, hidden in a hollowed-out loaf of bread, across Gugulethu. Having delivered the grenade successfully, he was entrusted with similar tasks, transporting weapons around the Cape Flats. Soon, he had turned his mother’s house into an arms cache without her knowledge. His younger brother Steyn—equally slim, silent, swift, and impressionable—joined Mzi in his APLA activities. Later, Steyn would be one of the APLA trio—the three men indicted and released in Amy’s case. All day, Steyn and Mzi’s mother sat by a table of stacked bananas and broccoli down by the Heideveld train station, while her sons hid bullets under the bed.

But Mzi’s mother had an inkling that her children were involved in politics, and, like mothers across South Africa, she was panicking. Boys were dying all over the township. Apartheid forces were intent on protecting the segregated state that they had created, and their tactics were becoming more brutal, desperate, and sophisticated. Black political factions were warring with each other.

Mzi’s mother did not wish to see her boys killed, so she sent Mzi to stay with some relatives in Port Elizabeth. But contrary to his mother’s hopes, Mzi grew increasingly politicized there. School was boring, learning rote. But politics, especially during that heady time, were irresistible.

In Port Elizabeth, Mzi officially joined the PAC and was swiftly shipped off to Lesotho, the tiny independent nation carved out of South Africa. Along with eighteen other boys, he lived in a small rural village, ran up the hills before dawn, and studied under the tutelage of a Tanzanian-born, Chinese-trained APLA commander. After, he traveled to a remote farm in the Eastern Cape that served as a training center. Mzi was a nineteen-year-old weapons expert whose hobby was bare-knuckle boxing. He helped to organize the fresh recruits from across the country, who would learn the basics of Africanist and black nationalist theory, in addition to violent resistance.

“The youngest I saw was fourteen years,” Mzi recalled. “If he was or was not too young, that was not my business.”

Mzi also intermittently worked as a courier, transporting arms from the Eastern Cape to Cape Town. When he snuck into Gugulethu, he faced assault by ANC loyalists, who were warring against the PAC stronghold of NY111 and NY119. The issues of gang territories had gotten wrapped up in the issues of politics, and what, exactly, everyone was fighting for often got lost in the dustups. In 1994, Mzi’s mother’s house was hit with a petrol bomb, thrown by those ANC kids, rendering it a burned-out shell, its every surface scorched; his mother had to leave for several years. Steyn was shot. Once, Mzi was surrounded and attacked by an ANC mob that kicked his head in—an injury he had tended to by a sangoma after escaping from a state hospital, where he was certain he’d be tracked and arrested. This perhaps accounted for his ever-so-slightly misshapen head.

Mzi and his comrades disregarded Mandela’s orders for peace in the 1990s—after all, he was not their leader; their leader was Letlapa Mphahlele, APLA’s militant director of operations and the current president of the dwindling PAC—and they headed down to the Eastern Cape with plans to attack a police station. There, Mzi and company were arrested and held in prison until 1995, when the PAC negotiated their release. During that time, he was tortured. His cell was flooded at night. “And I would wake up floating,” he said.

Mzi had no marketable skills and little education, so he promptly joined the South African National Defence Force. The military, like other federal organizations, was undergoing massive reform. Black guerrillas were integrated into the army, along with members of the military forces of the fractured homelands. Under the sunset clause, members of the white old guard were given the choice to stay or go, and those who stayed served side by side with the men previously categorized as terrorists. But Mzi hated the integration, too, and insisted that the white officers maintain their supremacist mentality. One such officer dropped a tray of food on him in the mess hall. Mzi pummeled the man, and his career began to tank.

By 2000, Mzi had gone off the military base and was back in prison—this time for a robbery he swore he hadn’t committed. The real criminal, I learned, was widely accepted throughout Gugulethu to be a wayward relative of Mzi’s, a good-for-nothing young private ironically named Peacemaker, who allegedly framed Mzi to save himself. According to Mzi’s convoluted story, he begged Peacemaker to take credit for his crime, but Peacemaker, in the army infirmary after a knife fight with some townies, just smoked a cigarette and crooned R. Kelly’s “I Believe I Can Fly.” Mzi subsequently got booted from the army and ended up behind bars again.

By his second stint in prison, he was happy to fight anyone to relieve his anger. After an altercation with another prisoner, Mzi was sent to solitary confinement. In the cell, he found a book called
Buddhism Without Beliefs: A Contemporary Guide to Awakening
by Stephen Batchelor. He had always been a loner and had always been interested in world religions. Plus, meat made his teeth hurt. A married couple made weekly trips to the prison to teach the principles of Buddhism and meditation to inmates, and Mzi joined their classes. He became a vegetarian and spent the last two years of his incarceration meditating, gardening, and earning his high school diploma. While in prison, Mzi renounced violence, a fact he did not advertise in Gugulethu. In Gugulethu, one’s reputation as a dangerous man was a form of armor. Without it, you were too vulnerable.

Before prison, Mzi had been in a long-term relationship with a woman, and they had two children together. When he was released in 2005, he kept refusing lamb chops and saying things like, “I want to get in touch with my feminine side.” His partner was not taken by the new, sensitive Mzi; she had preferred the “black tiger,” the “silent warrior” of yesteryear. So she left him, taking his son and daughter to a middle-class suburb called Wynberg. To make matters worse, she shacked up with an ANC guy. Now, Mzi lived in a lean-to behind his mother’s house, which had been refurbished since the petrol bombing.

Mzi’s room, which I would pass by many times, was a tidy affair, with just a bed, a dresser, and a chair in it. His decor consisted of two pictures. In one, from 1991, he is a nineteen-year-old freedom fighter dressed in camouflage gear, sitting on a pile of red dirt surrounded by dry brush, aiming an assault rifle into the distance. The other picture is a poster-size photo of a tank surrounded by a flash of fire set against the black night, emblazoned with the words
3
SA INFANTRY BATTALION
. In the upper-right corner is an image of a twenty-seven-year-old Mzi in state-issued military fatigues and a black beret. His flat expression is unforgiving.

The Struggle, he said, had been “like a dream” when he was in it. It was a hazy time, all that fighting and hiding, with so much bloodshed and, yes, excitement, too. He had felt so alive and full of purpose. But when the revolution was over, he found his personality distorted and daily life difficult to navigate. Mzi had not held down a steady job since the army. He’d applied to be a mobile phone salesman and a truck driver, “but the application was not successful.” He had worked briefly for a center that focused on reconciliation, but funding had diminished as South Africa became less interesting to the world, and he was eventually let go. He had started a tour company that he called the Social Nexus Consultancy, but the name didn’t draw in many clients, and he didn’t know how to advertise. Mainly, Mzi worked on a volunteer basis for the waning PAC, as the “newly appointed Military Veterans Affairs officer.” In this capacity, he tried to secure government jobs for a ragtag group of men who had fought in the bush for APLA. Unlike many well-connected ANC military veterans, the APLA men were largely unemployed.

“I sacrificed my youth, my family, everything, to liberate this country when I was young, and look at me now,” he said calmly, pushing his empty plate to the side. He had some mustard on his lip, which he dabbed with a napkin. “I depend on my mother to feed me.”

We sat in silence for a while as Mzi sipped his orange juice through a straw.

“So, can you tell me about Amy Biehl?” I asked.

Mzi nodded. He didn’t know much about Mongezi Manqina and Vusumzi Ntamo, the other two men convicted of Amy’s murder, but he knew Easy well and had grown up down the road from Ntobeko. The townships were made of little pockets of homes that were passed down from generation to generation. Plus, few people ever left the township, in part because the cycles of poverty trapped people and in part because the township, for its many problems, was also a close-knit community that could be tough to abandon. You couldn’t play your music loud in the suburbs, or invite the neighbors to a big party, or slaughter a cow for the ancestors. This meant that neighbors like Mzi and Easy were intertwined with each other and, perhaps without ever discussing anything directly, knew each other’s entire life stories, if imperfectly, by heart.

Mzi recalled Easy and Ntobeko when they were teenagers involved in PAC politics. Ntobeko had the potential to become a leader but was, back in 1993, too young and eager. Instead, he was appointed the chairman of the PAC student association at his high school—a position that had been announced at the rally on the day of Amy’s death. Meanwhile, Easy, too gregarious to be trusted as an operative, was just a regular member of the student branch.

“APLA is for boys who don’t talk,” Mzi observed. The PAC was a political party, and anyone could join. APLA was the PAC’s military branch, and its members were selected more carefully. The implication was clear: Easy was too verbose to operate behind the scenes.

I thought back to my earlier conversation with Easy, on the wooden bench in the Company’s Garden by the ancient pear tree. I remembered his stories of the snakes in the Eastern Cape, his eight months in the countryside, shooting AK-47s. He couldn’t go back there, he’d said—the old commandos would kill him. I thought back to coal-voiced Masana, who claimed to be Easy’s commander, who bragged of training him.

“Sorry, but none of the men convicted was a member of APLA?”

“Well, I can say Easy and Ntobeko had a crash course in the Gugulethu bush,” Mzi conceded. “But they were not APLA.”

The bush of their youth, according to Mzi, was not the savage land out in the Eastern Cape. No, Mzi himself had been there, but not Easy. Easy and Ntobeko had trained with some older fellows near NY111, in a tangle of thorns and high grasses that had since been razed and developed. Ntobeko’s sienna-colored house, complete with one of Gugulethu’s first automatic garage doors, now sat on that land, once a barren plot that Linda had purchased for him. Easy remembered his time in the bush like people I knew remembered summer camp: he and Ntobeko and their friends and brothers had spent warm nights among the trees. There, they found a nest of eggs, buried them in the sand, and cooked them by making a fire above. There, they led a goose to a hole filled with goose goodies, and then killed and ate the goose. There, they talked about their first girlfriends and their first fights with those girlfriends. They ate snakes they’d found, which tasted like sheep intestines—a comparison that didn’t help me imagine the flavor.

Most likely, Mzi noted, the boys were given some quick lessons in guerrilla tactics. That was the norm: a fighter might train a kid who might then train some others unofficially. But Easy and Ntobeko were not soldiers, he assured me; they were just students who supported the PAC cause: Africa for Africans.

Mzi heard about the Amy Biehl matter a couple of days after it went down, when he’d returned to Gugulethu from the Eastern Cape in his capacity as a courier. He went to rest at an anonymous safe house—safe shack, rather—in a triangular settlement nestled between NY111, NY119, and NY118. His comrades were there; they always were, ready with a little welcome-home dagga
—
the South African term for marijuana, pronounced
da-ha—
and some good gossip when Mzi swung through.