We Are Not Such Things (10 page)

“What do I do?” he pleaded.

“They just want the settler,” the man explained. Not Evaron, a colored boy—only that fleeing white woman. It didn’t matter that Amy wasn’t a settler, wasn’t even South African.

Evaron was too scared to go to Amy, surrounded as she was by the mob. It would have been futile, and he would likely have been attacked, and so he stood back, edging toward the Caltex as Amy began to run. First she ran west, away from the gas station and across the dotted line separating the lanes in the road. She pressed her hand above her eye, felt the warm blood, the way her skull gave way, and she let out a scream.

Above NY1 at the Caltex is a barren field, strewn with trash and dotted with tufts of dry grass. A team of twelve-year-old boys had been practicing soccer there when they heard a commotion. They sprinted over to the Caltex and stood by the gas tanks, some on their tiptoes, craning their necks. They had grown up in a world steeped in violence, perpetrated by the white government, their black relatives, their black neighbors, the colored gangsters across the way, their parents’ white employers, white strangers, the white and black and colored and Indian cops, white soldiers, bands of black vigilantes, and political leaders of all colors. This pale, wounded lady was certainly a curious display, worth witnessing, but she was not the first person these kids had seen attacked, perhaps not even that day, and she would not be the last. The fact that she was white, however, made the scene particularly memorable; nobody could name the last time a white person had been taken down like this. Not here, in the middle of Gugulethu.

“There was blood, people throwing stones,” remembered one of the soccer-playing boys, now a grown man. “I can’t say I was happy. I can’t say I was angry.”

Over at the elementary school, children had just been released from the nursery, and their parents and guardians had arrived to pick them up. Now they stood on the corner, holding babies and toddlers in their arms or by the hands, and they, too, stopped to watch.

One man, a three-year-old child propped on his hip, briefly surveyed the scene, in which two black women pleaded with a crowd as a mob attacked a young white woman. The crowd was shouting, “Down with white sympathizers!” He watched as if in a dream, until the child cried, pulling him back to reality. He turned and hurried away with the child in his arms. He didn’t feel too cut up about the whole thing.

“Black people were being murdered by white people, so we weren’t sorry,” he told me years later. He wondered about Amy’s friends, though: “Why would these black people bring a white person here? They knew what was happening in our location.”

As the mob surrounded Amy, an old man stormed out of his house, shouting at the attackers, demanding that they leave her be. The mob pushed him away, and he stumbled to the sidewalk. A grandmother ordered her children inside and locked the door. Her grandson, then seven, pressed his hands and nose to the plate glass window.

“She wasn’t really running fast, she was confused,” the grandson remembered twenty years later, sitting in that same living room. “Her hair was not tied. It was loose.”

Evaron and the two women started to pound on the doors of the Caltex, where the station employees had barricaded themselves. The employees shook their heads. Eventually, with no place to run, Evaron, Sindiswa, and Maletsatsi returned to the gas pumps, where they stood next to the soccer team and watched as their friend was hunted.

At first, Amy was heading toward the mob, as though they might save her. Then, perhaps realizing her error, she swerved away. The mob broke into spontaneous groups. Some were upon her abandoned car, trying to pour out the petrol and burn the thing. A young boy yanked open the door and grabbed some of Amy’s books, Evaron’s backpack and sweater, Amy’s bag, and a camera. He took off in a sprint for his mom’s house on NY111. Others stopped and held their stones limply as the scene unfolded, having lost their taste for murder. The majority of young people stood back on the sidewalk by the houses, spectators now, chanting still: “One settler, one bullet.”

A group of men and boys—some say it was eight, some say fifteen—pursued Amy. Residents of NY1, lured by the noise, walked out of their houses and stood now by their gates. Mostly, they were older women, and in the background, blaring from their TVs but muted by the frenzy on the street, was a dialogue of romance and scandal from the afternoon soap operas. The women were joined by people returning from the center of town, who had walked among the mob and had then stopped as an unexpected scene unfolded before them. With the exception of the old man, only one onlooker tried to save Amy.

Pamela was a pretty, curvy twenty-year-old with straight black hair in a short ponytail. She had been hanging out in her backyard, off the main street, when the mob marched by, full of boys and girls she recognized from the neighborhood. When Pamela heard music, something boiled inside her and she had to move, so she joined in the singing and toyi-toyi-ing. Sometimes a protest was just an excuse to do something, to escape the boredom and grind of township life. But when they hit NY1, Pamela realized that this was no normal, peaceful march; to the contrary, this group was in an electric, destructive mood. From a distance, she saw a white person driving toward them.

Pamela watched as the mob began throwing stones. She watched as Amy, bleeding, fell from her car, as the men chased her. Pamela had never before seen Amy, but as Amy ran, Pamela stepped out of the crowd and began, too, to run. Pamela still doesn’t know why she did it. When the cops came to her door days later, she denied all knowledge of the event, and even seasoned officers couldn’t break her resolve.

She ran toward Amy, reaching out her arms. Now Amy and Pamela were running to each other. Pamela touched Amy, she grabbed at her, their hands met, their eyes met, too. Pamela was holding Amy, feeling the blood on Amy’s hands. She and Amy were about the same size—small and athletic—but for a moment Pamela shielded Amy with her body.

But then the men and the boys were there, chanting and yelling and whooping, and bearing down on both of them, waving stones and knives. Pamela knew these boys, but they pushed her aside. Amy pulled away, and Pamela’s hand slipped from hers. Pamela stood on the gravel now, alone, as Amy and the boys ran on.

“It was a very cruel scene to watch,” she told me in 2013.

Amy crossed back over the street at a diagonal to avoid those behind her. She headed in the direction of the gas station. Now she was slower, less steady. The mob was trying to throw stones at her as they ran, and the combination of two efforts—running and pitching—made them less effective at both. She reached a patch of grass just before the white fence and turned around, her hands extended, as if to appeal to her attackers, to offer peace or surrender. Then the handsome, broad-faced man who had tried to steal Maletsatsi’s bag put his foot out to trip her.

Amy pitched backward, but a childhood of gymnastics classes ten thousand miles away had burned balance into her muscle memory, and she fell to the ground in a sitting position, her arms out. She looked up at the mob, her back pressed against the fence, and pushed her hair away from her eyes. The curtains parted; the men looked down at Amy’s face. Her blue eyes stared into theirs. For a moment, impossible to measure, the mob stepped away in one coordinated wave, their expressions registering something like fear.

“Why? I don’t know,” Easy later told me. “I try my entire life to understand why they are scared.”

Then they set upon her. Sindiswa, her cheeks slick with tears, broke away from the gas pumps and pushed up against the men, protesting, until one turned to her and sliced her hand with a knife, and she retreated again. Another boy, unable to muscle into the mob, turned to find Evaron quivering on the asphalt. He was colored, which meant he was enough of a target in a pinch. The boy ran at Evaron, stabbing in his direction. Evaron was neither a fighter nor an athlete, but he moved calmly away from each swoosh, some unknown instinct or force guiding him.

“When you see death in front of your face, you don’t care if you believe in God or not: you pray,” Evaron told me. “I prayed, and I think my prayers were answered.”

After a few seconds, the eyes of Evaron’s assailant widened with shock and he ran away without explanation. Evaron turned again toward Amy. “She was being butchered to death.”

A scrawny slip of a teenager with dark skin had grabbed a bunch of Amy’s hair to steady her, and, balancing himself upon her legs, rained down on her head with a brick, slamming it into her skull once, twice, three times. He stood up and kicked her with all the strength he could muster, landing a blow to her torso, and then bent down again with his brick.

“Like wild animals,” Amy’s friend Maletsatsi told an American news team several years later.

Others muscled in, some short, light-skinned boys with bricks. They wanted a part of the action. Then the handsome man who had tripped Amy pushed his way into the center of the mob and he, too, brought down a large stone upon her head. He turned to a friend on the outskirts of the group.

“Give me your knife,” he demanded in Xhosa. His friend handed over a six-inch switchblade. The others stepped away to give the man space. He knelt down on Amy’s thighs.

“What did I do?” Amy asked. “I’m sorry.”

He plunged the knife, all the way to its hilt, into Amy’s body, just beneath her left breast, puncturing the soft blue-white skin, inserting the blade straight into her heart.

The Gugulethu police station on NY1 is about a quarter mile from the Caltex. At around 4:40
P
.
M
. that winter Wednesday, a rangy young cop named Leon Rhodes was sitting in a police truck. Back in the 1990s, the South African Police often drove small yellow pickups with narrow cages built into the back flatbeds, where criminals were placed for transport. They still have similar trucks, and I once saw one at that very Caltex, where a cop was filling its tires with air. A shirtless handcuffed man, missing a couple of teeth, sat in the back, wailing loudly. I peered in, before the cop waved me away.

“Will they take the handcuffs off soon?” I asked Easy, who was with me at the time.

“No, they gonna punish him, throw tear gas in, leave him until someone feel for him and unlock him,” Easy said, with some exaggeration. “Now he’s facing layers and layers and layers of pain.”

Rhodes was one of the only white police officers in Gugulethu, twenty-nine years old and a ten-year veteran. He’d been working in Gugulethu for most of his career. He had just returned to the station from following up on a radio call that reported a truck being stoned in a far corner of the township. Rhodes sat in his vehicle in the driveway, filling out paperwork. Suddenly, a harried man rushed through the open metal gates and rapped on the driver’s side window. Rhodes looked up.

“You must seriously and urgently go down the road,” the man said in Afrikaans, a language black people were required to learn at school. “They’re stoning a vehicle with a white lady by the Caltex.”

Rhodes revved the car and took a sharp turn out of the station, immediately crossed the light at Lansdowne Road, and sped north toward the garage. He could see stones and glass glinting on the road in the distance. A crowd of people was gathered around the gas station, spanning up and down the street. On the residential side, to Rhodes’s left, young people were chanting and toyi-toyi-ing. The people in the street made way, and Rhodes drove through.

As the yellow police vehicle approached, the mob by the station broke up, its members disappearing into the slim side streets, over back fences, over walls, through alleys, into settlements, into houses. The toyi-toyi of some spectators grew less enthusiastic and the chants diminished. Rhodes could see a white woman now, standing, supported by two black women and a colored man. Her small chest rose and fell. She let out no words, only sobs.

A battered car lay on its side, pitted by stones, splattered with petrol. Rhodes parked near the exit where Amy stood.

After nearly a decade in Gugulethu—and one of the deadliest in South African history, at that—Rhodes was used to death and mayhem. He knew his colleagues of all colors smacked around suspects, and he knew vigilante cops did whatever they wished to township residents. He had clocked dozens of hours sitting at the edges of settlements, watching people kill each other for a variety of reasons: girls, domestic issues, family feuds, vigilante justice, turf battles, political dustups, drunkenness, unbridled and unspecified pain and fury, ennui. He couldn’t drive back into those ganglands, since the sandy pathways didn’t allow for cars, and he was just a single cop on the beat, a man with no interest in walking alone into a war.

So he had grown accustomed to simply watching small massacres from the sidelines, in the vague hope that his presence might deter some residents from killing other residents. On more occasions than he could count, he’d rolled into work in the dawn hours to find a body or two, revealed by the morning light, strewn across the streets. He’d seen death and ferocity up close nearly every week. All that was remarkable about this particular case was the color of the victim’s skin. He had never seen a white person beaten in Gugulethu. Sure, some delivery drivers had been struck by pebbles and scratched up, maybe their vehicles damaged by bricks, but they usually sped off.