We Are Not Such Things (40 page)

Peter Biehl ended his statement before the TRC by reading admiring letters that he and Linda had received since Amy’s death from regular people, as well as from South African politicians and intellectuals. One man had written that “August 25th 1993 will always be remembered as the day on which South Africa came to realize we are leaning into an abyss of total self-destruction. Then Amy died and an entire nation took a step back.” Dullah Omar, who died in 2004, contacted the Biehls and praised Amy as “highly regarded by all her colleagues and peers,” and then added, “your beloved Amy became one of us in her spirited commitment to justice and reconciliation in South Africa.” A friend of Amy’s, who had removed the jewelry from her dead body, called her “a most sensitive and wonderful human being.” Peter continued, noting that he and Linda could neither oppose nor support amnesty. Whether or not amnesty would be granted to Amy’s killers, Peter posited, would be the decision of “the community of South Africa.” He ended:

You face a challenging and extraordinarily difficult decision. How do you value a committed life? What value do you place on Amy and her legacy in South Africa? How do you exercise responsibility to the community in granting forgiveness in the granting of amnesty? How are we preparing these young men before us to re-enter the community as a benefit to the community, acknowledging that the vast majority of South Africa’s prisoners are under thirty years of age? Acknowledging as we do that there’s massive unemployment in the marginalized community; acknowledging that the recidivism rate is roughly 95 percent? So how do we, as friends, link arms and do something? There are clear needs for prisoner rehabilitation in our country as well as here. There are clear needs for literacy training and education, and there are clear needs for the development of targeted job skill training. We, as the Amy Biehl Foundation, are willing to do our part as catalysts for social progress. All anyone need do is ask.

Are you, the community of South Africa, prepared to do your part? In her 21 June 1993 letter to the
Cape Times
editor, Amy quoted the closing lines of a poem written by one of your local poets. We would close our statement with these incredible words:

They told their story to the children. They taught their vows to the children that we shall never do to them what they did to us.

When the hearing finished, Linda and Peter shook hands with the four young men who had been seated behind the
APPLICANT
signs. Easy claimed that they also met in an elevator, just inches from each other, and that the Biehls had smiled at them, though neither Linda nor Ntobeko had any recollection of such a meeting. Then the Biehls went back to work in Gugulethu, where they poured nearly half a million dollars in donations and funding into various services for the community. These were the early days of the Amy Biehl Foundation.

On July 28, 1998, a year after the hearing, the amnesty committee finally ruled on the case, writing of the applicants in their five-page decision:

They were taking part in a political disturbance and contributing towards making their area ungovernable. To that extent, their activities were aimed at supporting the liberation struggle. But Amy Biehl was a private citizen, and the question is why was she killed during this disturbance. Part of the answer may be that her attackers got caught up in a frenzy of violence.

The committee then reflected on Peter Biehl’s speech, quoting key parts, and ended with the statement:
The applicants have made full disclosure of all the relevant facts….We have come to the conclusion that they may be GRANTED amnesty for the murder of Amy Biehl.

The Biehls learned of the news back in California.

“Even though I was completely prepared for the outcome and expecting it, I found I really missed Amy a lot that day,” Peter told a reporter.

Soon, the accused had been freed. Easy heard the news while lying on his prison cot; a gardener below his window was listening to the radio.

Ntobeko, Easy, and Mongezi headed back to Gugulethu. Vusumzi went to his mom’s house in Langa, and then moved with her to a little township called Delft. Within the year, Mongezi had raped his neighbor, and by 2003, he had been sent back to Pollsmoor. Vusumzi got a job cleaning the parks. He worked for a year until the contract was canceled, and nobody had seen him in a decade.

By the late 1990s, after the meeting arranged by the anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Peter and Linda had begun to develop their relationship with Easy and Ntobeko. They’d taken them to the waterfront for dinner. They’d watched
Austin Powers
together. Peter advised the men on job training.

“At first, everyone talked about the mob who killed Amy,” Linda explained. “Then four were convicted, four were in prison. They didn’t have names or identities—not to us or to anyone. At the TRC, we saw what they were like. Then Easy and Ntobeko came to us, and it became the two, and we learned more about them as individuals.” The Biehls had been asked by a social worker to support Vusumzi Ntamo, and had briefly entertained the possibility of working with Mongezi Manqina. But they wanted to form relationships that exemplified reconciliation, not to function purely as patrons. Easy and Ntobeko, the original pair from NY111, reached out to the Biehls, seemingly interested not simply in money, but rather in a partnership that might benefit the township.

Early on, Easy claimed that the TRC and the Biehls had also helped him to become an individual. “You take yourself out of the shoes of a young soldier,” he told me when we first met, back when he insisted he had been an APLA member who had trained in the bush for months. “You become yourself. I’m not kind of person hurting some other people’s family. I love another as I love myself.”

The idea of new identity was certainly appealing, but it was available only if the old identity was that of a principled freedom fighter. Perhaps equally appealing were the opportunities that Linda and Peter provided Easy and Ntobeko, opportunities never before available to a Gugulethu-born ex-con and high-school-dropout: a good job, a steady salary, clothes from America, gifts, a plot of land, international travel, and recognition. Easy once explained some of Linda’s finest qualities to me: “Makhulu, she spoil children. She convince people.”

Nearly a year to the day of the TRC decision, the Biehls stood before a crowd at the official launch of Easy and Ntobeko’s short-lived youth club in Gugulethu. Within months, Linda and Peter would offer the two men jobs with the Amy Biehl Foundation and the men would stop leading local kids on hikes.

“I’m happy to be here and pleased that my daughter’s killers are doing something positive for the community and that they are not being driven by politics or economic gain,” Linda said to a rapt crowd that soon broke into applause.

By the spring of 2012, Easy’s life was unraveling. I wanted to ask him about Mzi’s contention that he had not killed Amy after all, that in fact he hadn’t even been a soldier, but there was never a good time. Ndumi was pregnant, and her pregnancy had sent Easy into a panic. He had always wished to build a family with one single woman, a family that would eat the same food at the same table and receive the same punishment, just as he and his brothers had. Now, Ndumi’s growing belly announced that he would never reconcile with Aphiwe’s mother, and that his dream of a traditional Xhosa family was dead.

Aphiwe’s mother, Lucretia, had been an eighteen-year-old orphan when Easy, fresh from prison, met her. Linda called Easy Lucretia’s “white knight.” He’d brought her free promotional bread from the foundation and wooed her, and she soon moved away from her sisters and into the Nofemela house on NY111. She worked at a shoe store, and when she had problems with her boss, Easy met with the man. He was wild for Lucretia. Linda even helped him buy a small diamond ring with which to propose. When Lucretia became pregnant, she and Easy were equally excited and terrified.

“I don’t want to tell you how the doctor checked she was pregnant!” Easy told me.

“Tell me.”

“He put two fingers up vagina. She came to me and said—” Easy lowered his voice to a whisper, “ 
‘This doctor is doing a crime
.
’
I say, we must ask somebody who knows if is normal. And my aunt, she laugh just like you did now.”

“How did you feel about Lucretia?”

“I love her too much. She is the first who show I can make babies.”

Together, the two had begun to build a life, until one day, a few months after the birth of Aphiwe, Lucretia told Easy that she only loved him like a brother, not a husband. She pawned her diamond ring and left him, an event that was the genesis of Easy’s bleeding ulcer: he spent months getting drunk and eating spicy meat to forget her. Then he tried, unsuccessfully, to soothe the ulcer by drinking goat’s milk.

“She broke my heart,” Easy said another time, while Ndumi sat nearby.

“You also broke her heart,” Ndumi spat. “Tell truth. If you don’t tell truth to us, tell truth to yourself.”

Easy’s relationship with Ndumi, to whom he would now be forever bound, had always been less serious. She and Easy had always liked to go out drinking and carousing.

Ten years earlier, Ndumi had graduated from community college. It was the happiest day of her life. She and her family, who felt a collective sense of awe for the world of higher education, had been under the impression that a degree—any degree, from anywhere, given to anyone—was a key that opened all those doors that had until then remained shut, locked, and barricaded against them. On the water-stained wall of her one-room shack, she had posted several torn, photocopied bits of paper bearing mantras for success:

WINNERS ADMIT FAILURE AND LEARN FROM IT, LOSERS DENY FAILURE AND BLAME OTHERS

SUCCESS REQUIRES…PASSION, FOCUS, COMMITMENT

7 HABITS TO CREATE SUCCESS

Nearby, she posted a photograph of herself in her graduation cap, her arm hooked with her cousin’s, a woman whom she considered a sister and a best friend, and who had died of AIDS a few years back. She also kept affixed to her wall a photograph of her grandmother, the person she loved more than anyone in the world and who had raised her after her mother disappeared, returning only once the kids were grown. Ndumi’s grandmother had also died and to Ndumi’s great regret she had not been able to make her grandmother truly proud. She had never gotten the government job of which she dreamed, a failure she blamed on her lack of connections. Instead, she’d spent the past nine years stocking shelves and running a cash register at the Century City Pick n Pay. No promotions, no opportunities. The one thing she could say for herself was that she’d earned enough money to buy the family a TV, furniture, some pots and pans and decorations. She was proud of this. Almost everything else in her life was the cause of a great, seething frustration.

Now, as the baby’s arrival grew imminent, Easy and Ndumi, who had been on and off for five years, were edging toward breakdown by the day. They used to go partying together, but on account of the pregnancy, Ndumi was off the booze, which had shifted their dynamic. She was edgy, which made Easy avoid her, which made her edgier.

“I will name that baby an Afrikaans name, one that means oppressor,” Easy once told Ndumi when he was a little drunk.

“Oh,
my
baby will be named after the oppressor, while Aphiwe is named ‘gift’?” Ndumi said bitterly. She believed Aphiwe was a barrier between her and a normal domestic life. What if Easy always loved Aphiwe more than the child Ndumi was carrying?

In July 2012, at the old Dutch-style Somerset Hospital down by the waterfront, Easy and Ndumi’s baby was born early via emergency cesarian, weighing under four pounds, his skin so sheer that the blue veins pulsed through, and so white that Ndumi wondered aloud for months how such a creature had come from her dark-skinned self. He was called Ukhanyiso. “It mean light from God,” Ndumi said. More specifically, it means “revelation.”

For a short time after the birth, Easy, Ndumi, and Ukhanyiso were a family. Ndumi abandoned her shack and took up residence in her old bedroom in her father’s house. The room was solid and warm, with a petroleum heater in the corner to steam it up. The child was too small to drink from her breasts, she said, and so she mixed for him formula that he suckled from a dropper. Easy and Ndumi took turns massaging a medicinal blue jelly on Ukhanyiso’s small body, a sangoma’s salve they believed would keep him safe and healthy. Easy, the experienced parent, taught Ndumi about changing diapers, holding, rocking, burping, and pressing the naked baby to your chest, kangaroo-style. He abstained from drink and, to Ndumi’s delight, ignored his mother’s incessant calls. He spent all his free time at Ndumi’s place on NY78, marveling at Ukhanyiso.

Aphiwe ran straight from school to Ndumi’s shack every day, grabbing her baby brother and sucking on his cheeks. She drank the fruit-flavored corn syrup Ndumi mixed for her and fell asleep on the bed with her Mary Janes still on. While Ndumi watched TV, Aphiwe paced back and forth in the patch of sun by the door, talking softly to herself, playing a solitary game. She tried on Ndumi’s high heels and clomped around the dirt yard in them as Ndumi regarded her skeptically.