We Are Not Such Things (7 page)

So I drafted a letter to Linda, and sent it to an email address at her Cape Town–based foundation. I explained myself:
I would like to examine the story of Amy’s life, her death, and what happened after—including your and Mr. Biehl’s forgiveness of and relationship with Easy Nofemela and Ntobeko Peni, and the continued work of the foundation—and to write about it, possibly something book-length. I’d like to explore who Amy was and how she got here, as well as what her life and legacy means for South Africa today, nearly twenty years after her death and the end of apartheid.

Thirteen hours passed and then a little red circle appeared on my mail app:
I would be happy to chat…almost 20 years has passed since the event occurred and the story like South Africa is very complicated. You are welcome to call.

I called Linda Biehl in January 2012, a day after receiving her email. After her husband’s sudden death from colon cancer ten years earlier, Linda had sold her Newport Beach house and had thus far not settled down elsewhere. She kept no permanent residence, and instead hopped around the States, flashing her Delta gold card, crashing with her three surviving children in Florida, Pennsylvania, and California, and helping out with the grandkids—and there were six, divided among the households. Once or twice a year, she bought a ticket to South Africa and went to check up on her foundation. Universities and private organizations sometimes hired her to give a speech on reconciliation. Journalists writing about South Africa or forgiveness or an activist’s murder called her once in a while for a quote.

I’d expected a reticent woman, soft-spoken and probably super-Christian. How else, I wondered, but for a serious devotion to biblical standards with which I was admittedly unfamiliar, could a person so intensely forgive and love those who had so powerfully sinned against her?

“No, I find Christianity to be as hypocritical as anything in the world can be,” Linda said during our first conversation. I hadn’t asked her a thing about religion; Linda had just offered it up.

Linda was an engaging storyteller whose tales were dotted with full names of individuals both grand and obscure. She repeated her favorite stories at length, their details precise and unwavering, before she veered off, and I was left with notebooks full of loops, question marks, and arrows. And though she rarely paused long enough for anyone to interrupt her, I soon found that she would eventually, unaided, answer any question I might have, and more. Simply put, she spoke so much and had presumably been asked the same predictable questions so many times that she ended up covering nearly every relevant topic without being asked.

“Religion has nothing to do with it,” she said during the first conversation.

I wanted to ask: So what
does
have to do with it? But she was already talking about her fascination with traditional Xhosa beliefs, and about how she once got sick swilling home brew in an unsealed clay mug in the township. She talked about how the white dinner party circuit bored and upset her; she recalled how a wealthy Cape Town hostess had once asked her to lie silently on a reclining chair in the parlor of a mansion and listen to classical music before eating delivery pizza—a misguided attempt at highbrow entertaining.

“I blame sanctions!” she said. Apartheid-era sanctions were imposed on the country by an international community that had, by the 1980s, become increasingly disapproving of the country’s race-based legislation. Sanctions deprived South Africans of Western popular culture, prevented their beloved Springbok rugby and cricket teams from competing internationally, stymied the economy, and forced the elite to make up their own weird interpretations of European-style sophistication. White people tended to be obsessed with Europe and America, and they craved the fancy mores practiced in those far-off lands. But they were separated from them, and could only turn to each other. The result, which endured, seemed to be that a group of people, using rumors passed down from those who had visited abroad, had more or less imagined a collection of styles and manners. The older set still adored frilly and opulent furniture set up in odd configurations and stared down upon by a collection of stern, literal oil paintings.

Linda talked about her love of jazz and art history and about her grandkids. One was an actress. Two were star athletes. One played the drums. Her youngest granddaughter, then five years old, reminded everyone of a little Amy: spirited, energetic, sweet. Sometimes the little girl, absorbed in play, would look up and say, “I’m with Aunt Amy now.”

In 2012, Linda was trying to pull out of the foundation and devote herself entirely to her family in America, but she seemed incapable of truly making the move, tethered to the country that took her daughter from her. She talked affectionately about Easy and Ntobeko, whom she seemed to care for as if they were her own occasionally wayward and disobedient middle-aged man-children. Ntobeko was her favored son; his many accomplishments, large and small, filled her with pride. She talked about how these new relationships had cost her friends from the old days, people who had known her before she became, suddenly, a part of South African history and a paragon of reconciliation.

“I myself am a figure of curiosity and controversy,” she said, sighing. “Sometimes I wonder how and why did I ever do this?”

For the next four months, in an attempt to acquire a satisfactory answer to the question Linda had posed, I interviewed her over the phone. I visited a professor at the University of Cape Town and convinced him to sign off on a guest researcher pass. I spent weeks in the airy college library, combing through files, books, old clippings, and reports. I relentlessly chased after Easy and Ntobeko, with varying degrees of success, as they both tried politely to avoid me.

After a few months of research, I was convinced that I’d stumbled upon a story that needed telling—or, perhaps more honestly, that I desperately needed to tell. Amy was my entrée into this strange world. She had come here with purpose, just twenty-five years old when she left home, and she had tried her best to understand a pulsing South Africa in the midst of revolution. She had died in her quest. I had come here without any such noble purpose, thirty years old, and now I, too, wanted to understand a new South Africa.

The men I would be writing about were the ultimate “other”: poor, black, South African men, convicted murderers, reformed radicals living in a sort of modern wasteland, at once nursing the wounds of apartheid and—if you believed the “Africa Rising” magazine covers that hit the stands annually, emblazoned with the acacia tree set against an incandescent setting sun—heading toward a brighter future. The men had grown up with little education in an urban tribal culture that placed abiding value on ancient Xhosa traditions. And they now lived in this new rainbow nation, that enduring nickname given to post-apartheid South Africa by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who was trying to celebrate the country’s racial and cultural mishmash. I hoped that in understanding these men, I could understand how a country broken apart by a system of colonization, segregation, and dehumanization could heal, reconcile, and move forward. This small, fierce story would tell the larger story of the New South Africa, and of the redemptive power of forgiveness in the face of tragedy.

But you won’t read about that here. That old narrative, the one I was following as I began my research, fell ill early on and perished about a year in. In its stead, a different story emerged.

When I started my work, I didn’t understand the complexities of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, or of South Africa, or, I suppose, of true-life stories in general. I assumed there were clear-cut narratives in the country, with good and bad protagonists and antagonists, and that I would simply tell one of them. But as the Johannesburg-born journalist Rian Malan wrote, “In South Africa, it’s like a law of nature: there’s no such thing as a true story here. The facts might be correct, but the truth they embody is always a lie to someone else….Atop of all this, we live in a country where mutually annihilating truths coexist amicably. We are a light unto nations. We are an abject failure. We are progressing every day as we hurtle backward.”

Early on, I became convinced, naively, that with enough frenzied effort, I could find the Big Truth about the Amy Biehl story. I was after the objective truth: that elusive creature, a forensic reality that conformed to proven or provable facts, something mathematical and scientific and doubtless. But Easy, the man who over the years brought me closest to this truth and led me farthest from it, broke it down for me.

We were sitting across from each other at a linoleum table at the Hungry Lion fast food establishment in downtown Cape Town. Easy was wearing his buttercup-yellow Paul Smith polo, which he bought from a Nigerian who dealt in cut-rate fine garments, which were either stolen or counterfeit, it was hard to tell. He was drinking a ginger soda and I was spitting questions at him.

Months earlier, Easy had christened me Nomzamo, a Xhosa name. All Xhosa names have literal meanings that are reflections of a person’s character or the hopes of the parent for the child. Nomzamo comes from the Xhosa word
zama
, “to try.” It can be interpreted as “she who strives and perseveres” or, probably, in my case, “pain in the ass.” Easy had explained it as: “You always try, try, try. It’s a good name.”

“What do you really want to know?” he finally asked, looking at me with a mixture of compassion and bewilderment. He was wiping the grease from his fingers onto a paper napkin.

“I want to know the truth!” I exclaimed.

Easy studied me for a moment and then broke into guttural laughter.

“Nomzamo, Nomzamo, Nomzamo,” he said. “The truth is not anymore existing for years and years.”

In 1652, the Dutch, in their colonial trading heyday, established an outpost of the Dutch East India Company on the Cape, the purpose of which was to replenish passing ships with vegetables, meat, and water. To get the enterprise started, three boats of Dutch men (and a smattering of women) were sent to Africa. Several months after embarking, the crew docked in a natural bay that sat below an enormous mountain, dotted with knotty bushes and flowers. The broad black mountain was unique: it seemed as though it had been sliced in half with an enormous knife, and instead of a peak, it sported a long, flat top. The Dutch called it Tafelberg, or Table Mountain. They named the chilly water beneath it Tafelbaai, or Table Bay. Today the dense clouds that spread across are called “the tablecloth.”

The group, having heard rumors of aggressive locals, arrived armed and determined. They immediately fashioned a large fort of mud, clay, and timber just inland, and dubbed it Fort de Goede Hoop, or Fort of Good Hope. They began to farm the surrounding area, and in their spare time they dressed in pinafores and suits and performed swooping Dutch folk dances on the African vista.

They swiftly took over increasing swaths of land. Threatened Khoikhoi mounted various small wars over the next decades, but they were almost always defeated by modern weapons. Resistant Khoikhoi were branded with irons, assaulted, and imprisoned—some on Robben Island, just off the coast, where, around three hundred years later, Nelson Mandela would toil as a political prisoner. Bit by bit, day by day, the Khoikhoi lost the land they had once used to graze their cattle. The cattle were then sold to or stolen by Europeans until the tribespeople were shattered. Lacking their traditional means of survival, many Khoikhoi took to working in poor conditions on Dutch farms.

But there were not enough Khoikhoi to work the land; their numbers were small anyway, and in 1713 they would be nearly wiped out by a wave of imported smallpox. While the initial goal of the Dutch East India Company had been only to act as a rest stop for sailors, the European newcomers now decided to construct the basic infrastructure of a colony, growing fruit and grain and raising livestock. The powerful trading company set up its own governmental structure: it made laws, appointed governors, and granted land, with no regard for the indigenous people except as they related to the use or nuisance of the colonists.