We Are Not Such Things (57 page)

I tried to put this out of my mind. I had things to do: I was getting married two weeks later, on a vineyard in Stellenbosch, in the Cape Winelands. The main building was an Old Dutch-style hall, white stucco and swooping lines, beside a small man-made lake, where a family of ducks lived. The vineyard sat beneath rugged black and green mountains. I had flower arrangements to look at, Chinese lanterns to consider, the evil grande dame of wedding caterers to meet with and be admonished by.

While I was picking out the perfect casserole pot from an online catalogue, I tried to convince myself that I didn’t believe in the mystery white man. But his hazy face, featureless, burned in my mind. The memory is a strange and unreliable creature indeed, but Easy was neither insane nor suffering from dementia, and drunkenness could not explain the complete conjuring of an incident, along with the accompanying detail and emotion.

So that evening, I sat in the kitchen at my computer. I typed in Amy’s name and ran through articles I’d read a few times already. I looked everywhere for a second murder. I scanned township news and articles in the international media. By 2
A
.
M
., after hundreds of pages, I still had nothing.

Assuming the murder was true, I thought, what did I know about it?

I typed what I knew into the search bar.

The white page flashed open, the results in black type:
DE VILLIERS, DANIEL. A municipal worker fixing street lights who was severely assaulted by PAC-aligned students in Gugulethu on 25 August 1993. An American student was killed that same day in nearly identical circumstances.

“I found out the name of the white guy,” I told Easy a few days later. I was drinking a takeaway coffee and he was sitting, again, in my passenger seat. Easy’s phone had been going straight to voicemail, so I had gone stalking around NY1 and, with the help of one of his brothers, finally plucked him out of a smoke-filled house on a sandy back lane. An old lady, slumped against a shack and barefoot, nodded when I asked her, pointlessly, to keep an eye on my car while I extracted Easy.

“Who?” Easy asked.

“The white guy.”

“What white guy?”

“
The
white guy.”

“Hmmm.”

“The white guy you said was killed.”

“No, I never said.”

“You
just
told me all about it.”

“Maybe you hear wrong. Maybe you make mistake. I don’t know a white guy.”

“You also told me how you weren’t involved in Amy’s attack.”

“Myself and Ntobeko, we were involved. And Mongezi and Vusumzi. Honest, Justice.”

I let Easy out at his parents’ house and drove home, where I began an all-out search for Daniel de Villiers, with no luck whatsoever. I suspected that he was alive, because the TRC report, which contained thousands of other similar entries, tended to state if someone had been killed or merely injured. I tracked down a salesman with the same surname, but he claimed no relation. I ended up calling a few people who were related to the salesman, and they also had no link to Daniel de Villiers. Searching further, I found a too-old Daniel de Villiers who according to the newspapers had been shot dead up near Johannesburg back in 2004; a Daniel de Villiers who lived in a small town in the middle of the Netherlands; and a bevy of young, handsome Daniel de Villierses who were scattered across France.

After about a month, I found a twenty-eight-year-old banker with the last name de Villiers on Facebook. I messaged him continuously until he sent his phone number.

“Ja, I do have an uncle named Daniel,” he said, when I called. He had an Afrikaans accent, since the early French Huguenots who had settled in South Africa had melded into the Afrikaans population. His Facebook profile showed a plump man with hair gelled into spikes. “He used to work for the municipality until some blacks attacked him.”

“That’s him!” I said. Daniel de Villiers was not dead after all. “Do you know how I could reach him?”

The banker hadn’t seen Daniel since he was a kid and had no idea where the guy was. But his grandmother would know more, he was certain. Here was her number. I dialed immediately, but Grandma denied knowing anything about Daniel.

“No, sorry, my dear, we’re very distant family,” she said, before hanging up.

I dialed the banker again. “She says she doesn’t really know Daniel.”

“Ach, of course she does,” he said. “She’s lying.” Unbothered, he gave me the names of his various “aunties,” though he wasn’t really in touch with them, as the de Villierses were, I would learn, a fractured bunch. There were five aunties, and he could come up with only one phone number and one address. But she would know more, he was certain.

Over another month, I tracked down some of the aunties. I called them at work and at home and all the way in Port Elizabeth, a small city along the Indian Ocean. I even found a de Villiers working at a bookstore in Canada. For the most part, they were confused by my calls. One lady had no clue who Daniel was. Another was certain she wasn’t related. A man had never heard of him. Another knew he was a cousin, but that was it.

I ran expensive searches on a real estate database and found only a wealthy restaurateur from Pretoria who had the middle name de Villiers. The trail ended there. As a last-ditch effort, I dragged myself to the Department of Home Affairs in the city center.

Like most South African government departments, the Department of Home Affairs is notoriously inefficient and corrupt. I had even once gotten caught up in one of their schemes. I already had a visa that was valid for three years, but I had needed to provide, within six months of its issuance, proof that I had no criminal record in my home country. I was a few months late in my delivery of such a document. When I did deliver it, a group of employees—who, judging from the human contents of the waiting room, were accustomed to taking advantage of desperate Zimbabweans—seamlessly attempted to bilk me for $250 for “staying in the country illegally.” It was a false claim, as my visa was valid even though my clearance was late. After I threatened to see a prosecutor about the situation, they miraculously canceled the fine. A friend of mine, along with most of his rugby team, had simply purchased their driver’s licenses, and the undocumented migrants I knew spoke of handing over $80 to the right person and obtaining a South African birth certificate.

Because of this culture of corruption, terrorists loved the South African Home Affairs office. You could get a real passport with a fake name for a fee, if you knew the right guy. In 2002, a Home Affairs employee was arrested in connection with the theft of four thousand passports. In 2004, a Tunisian al Qaeda leader confessed to possessing a South African passport. In 2006, the Pakistani mastermind of a plot to blow up airplanes with liquid explosives was arrested with a South African passport. In 2011, an al Shabaab and al Qaeda leader was killed in Mogadishu, a fraudulent South African passport in his possession. In 2013, the “White Widow,” a British woman involved in Kenya’s Westgate Mall massacre, traveled to the scene of the attack on a fraudulent South African passport purchased from Home Affairs officials. With help from her extremist cronies, she allegedly helped murder 67 shoppers and shopkeepers and wound 175.

The lax attitude of such officials made it easy for a journalist to seek out information. I knew a guy who knew a guy whose brother-in-law worked at the department, and so I wandered into his office and he agreed, quite easily and without demanding so much as a dollar, to search the database for Daniel de Villiers. Without an ID number or date of birth, we didn’t have much luck, but I did leave with three notecards scribbled with names, phone numbers, and addresses of possible de Villiers relatives.

One of these contacts led me to a friendly teenage girl who lived at boarding school, loved horses, and had no known relation to Daniel. One led me to a man named Philippe, who lived out by the beach and had never heard of Daniel. And one listed an Alfred Devilliers, no space between “De” and “villiers,” whose phone number was no longer working and whose listed address was abandoned.

Finally, I reached a cousin of Daniel’s, who remembered that about twenty years earlier he’d been attacked.

“He showed me the shirt, full of holes, full of blood! You couldn’t see the color of the shirt,” she said.

Though the cousin had no idea where Daniel was, she had a brother named Gareth who had once nurtured a real friendship with Daniel. But she wouldn’t be able to help me find Gareth: she hadn’t spoken to her brother for years. He lived somewhere in the Cape, she figured, and he had a son named Alfred—whose disconnected phone number and abandoned address I’d gotten from my connection at Home Affairs.

Since I’d run through nearly every de Villiers in the country, it seemed that Gareth was, indeed, my last chance. But he wasn’t popping up on any Internet searches or in any property record pulls. I asked a police source to look into the matter, and he found a possible family member in police records: In 2001, one “Gareth Devilliers” had been arrested for disorderly conduct. The cop popped by the address listed in the police file, but all he found was a different family who had been living there for years. Six months of looking for Daniel, and he remained a shadowy figure—there was no trace of him alive, but there was also no trace of him dead.

I nursed a hope that old TRC records could help me find Daniel. The Department of Justice, it seemed, held old files from the TRC—odd, I thought, as the TRC was comprised of public hearings, and its main mandate was to bare the many secrets of apartheid atrocities before the country and the world. But they were kept behind lock and key now. To see the files, you had to partake in an arduous and often futile process: a South African law called the Promotion of Access to Information Act allowed anyone to request documents from the government. You paid a fee of about $25 (prohibitive for many poor people, who may have been collecting only that amount in welfare checks every month), filled out forms stating your needs, and applied to the relevant government official.

When I first put forth my request for the back records from the Amy Biehl TRC case, I ran it by a woman I knew who worked for a foundation that advocated for government transparency. She gave a sigh of world-weariness. Between 2012 and 2013, a mere 16 percent of the Promotion of Access to Information Act requests made by civil society organizations had led to the full release of records. In 2014, an NGO conducted a small survey, sending out 223 PAIA requests to municipalities rather than the federal government. They requested nonsensitive information on local budgets that would take ten minutes for an employee to access and send. But only 30 municipalities responded. After the NGO appealed, they received 13 more responses. The vast majority of information officers simply did not bother to honor the law.

“The bigger the amount of docs, the more likely they’ll make a badly grounded refusal because they don’t feel like scouring them,” the woman from the government transparency foundation told me. Some people suspected that PAIA requests for files related to the TRC were refused because current high-up ANC officials were mentioned in those files, along with the atrocities they may have committed in the name of the Struggle, and powerful people didn’t want those old skeletons let out of their closets.

Indeed, the Department of Justice seemed as devoted to avoiding my request as the Department of Corrections had been when I wished to visit the prisons. Month after month, they ignored emails and only intermittently returned calls—usually somebody enthusiastic contacted me, made big promises, and then disappeared. Eventually, after five months, during which I repeatedly called and emailed a number of officials, the department sent me an email. All I had to do, they said, was obtain permission from Amy Biehl’s next of kin, as well as from each of the men amnestied, and I would be rewarded with the files. The permission, they noted, had to be filed on an affidavit stamped by the South African Police, and sent back to them. This demand led me to write Linda Biehl and ask if she would allow me permission to access the files, something I would come to regret.