We Are Not Such Things (8 page)

Europeans, mostly from the lower rungs of Dutch society, drizzled in, including a small group of persecuted French Huguenots and a smattering of German, Swedish, and British scientists, naturalists, and missionaries. Schools were not a priority, and generations lacked much more than basic elementary educations. As the white population grew, the colonists decided they needed more free labor to build up their fledgling community, and sent word back home. In 1658, the first batch of slaves was led ashore, followed by a flood of ships filled with captives from Mozambique, Madagascar, Indonesia, India, and Sri Lanka.

Slaves labored as artisans and fishermen and gardeners. They served in homes as maids and nannies. They constructed roads, hospitals, and bridges, tilled fields, and picked produce. By the 1770s, white Cape Town residents were referred to widely as “baas,” from the Dutch word for boss.

The relationship between slave and owner, especially in a contained area with a small population, was not clear-cut. Depending on their masters and positions, the slaves were treated alternately as lowly but beloved members of a family or as animals that deserved to be whipped into submission. Masters took to baptizing their slaves, but those who committed crimes were executed with deliberate brutality in the center of town: one slave who killed his owner was tied to a cross, his skin burned with smoldering metal, his limbs broken, and his head cut off and fastened to a pole. Some escaped, but those who were caught were punished. The members of one captured group, who sought to found a “free village,” had their Achilles tendons sliced or their feet broken; their leader, sentenced to “death by impalement,” committed suicide. Here was the early relationship between master and servant, white and brown, set between the mountain and the sea: one of use and abuse, where violence or its threat was the universal mode of communication.

As time progressed, the relationships blurred further. White farmers took female slaves as their mistresses. The male settlers, who greatly outnumbered female settlers, also had sex—both forced and voluntary—with local Khoikhoi women who worked their farms, and several settlers married freed female slaves. Many female slaves were forced into prostitution, the market for which was robust, as sailors docked in the Cape for replenishments. Some escaped slaves formed their own communities, while others ran north and were integrated into indigenous tribes—which also, evidence suggests, accepted white members, often criminals who had absconded from the colony to escape punishment.

The outcome of all such interbreeding, intermingling, and time away from Europe was a growing population and a new language. The children of slaves and slave owners, of prostitutes and sailors, of illicit interracial love affairs, were a population of people who were neither white nor black. The language that emerged from all this mixing was the forefather of today’s Afrikaans: a gruff version of Dutch that evolved as the early settlers simplified their mother tongue to communicate with Khoikhoi employees and foreign slaves. Khoi, Xhosa, Zulu, and Indonesian words made their way into the language.

Meanwhile, settlers began encroaching on new tracts of land. A hardy offshoot of pioneers dubbed themselves trekboers (“semi-nomadic pastoral farmers”) and headed north and east in ox wagons, searching to claim better land, cutting through the Karoo, camping and setting up bare-bones dwellings described by one visitor as “tumble-down barns.” The nights were bitterly cold and arid, and the days were so hot that dogs had to be transported in wagons, for their paws would burn if they touched the ground. The dusty nomads burrowed into the interior of the country, alternately employing, warring against, and trading with those whose paths they crossed. They sold butter, sheep, cattle, elephant ivory, and animal hides. They bought tobacco, coffee, and sugar.

Their most valued possessions were their guns and packets of gunpowder. Remote groups of indigenous people still lived within the Karoo, usually near water holes, and so to gain access to that water, trekboers often killed adult members of the Khoikhoi and San (a tribe of bushmen scattered throughout Southern Africa). They spared their children, whom they sold, traded, or raised as slaves. The trekboers also interacted with the Xhosa people who lived in the eastern Cape: tight-knit clans of farmers who kept livestock, tilled subsistence crops, and organized themselves loosely around local chiefs.

The Xhosa people, as the first settlers noted, were a healthy, friendly group. They were not averse to fighting to defend what was theirs, but they weren’t warriors. They preferred to farm their fields of tobacco, grain, and produce, and to graze their livestock. They slaughtered animals for frequent ceremonies, drank rich homemade beer, and smoked pipes and cigarettes. Above all, the Xhosa people nurtured their families. An early Dutch explorer noted, in 1689, the strength of the Xhosa bonds: “It would be impossible to buy slaves there, for they would not part with their children, or any of their connections for anything in the world, loving one another with a most remarkable strength of affection.”

In the 1790s, as Europe was plunged into crisis by the French Revolution, the British temporarily turned the nearly bankrupt Dutch trading outpost into a naval base. The British hoped to protect the Cape colony, their valuable midway point on the Europe–Asia trade route, from being overtaken by the French. While the Cape held no grand financial promise in and of itself (it exported a little wool, some animal hides, and elephant tusks), the British soon found another use for the growing outpost: as a source of job creation for Brits struggling in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars. British citizens, mostly those of the desperate lower classes, could be resettled on Xhosa farmland, thereby quelling potential social unrest in England.

The British knew that for the Xhosa, cattle had been, from time immemorial, the main marker of wealth. According to a Dutch colonial employee, cattle were, to the Xhosa patriarch, “practically the only subject of his care and occupation, in the possession of which he finds complete happiness.”

British Parliament therefore sent over orders for their people to execute homicidal commando raids of “kaffir” villages (“kaffir” was initially used to refer to non-Christians, but eventually became a derogatory term for a black person), during which women and children were slaughtered and cattle stolen. Desperate Xhosa guerrillas nearly won a battle to reclaim land, but were ultimately dispossessed of even more territory and lost 23,000 cattle. After leading conquests in 1811 and 1812, the Cape’s governor, Sir John Cradock, cheerily reported back to London on the success of these attacks: “I am happy to add that in the course of this service, there has not been shed more Kaffir blood than would seem necessary to impress on the minds of these savages a proper degree of terror and respect.”

In 1820, four thousand British citizens—poor artisans, mostly, unaware of the battles being fought in South Africa and hoping for their own property allotment—were shipped over and handed one hundred acres each of the rough and wild eastern Cape. These inexperienced farmers found themselves out of luck: they were stranded in the middle of a simmering series of frontier wars, about which they had not been informed when they applied to go to Africa. To add insult to injury, the grasslands were difficult to cultivate without the generational wisdom the Xhosas possessed. Within a few years, many of the sour-grass plots were abandoned as the British took refuge in the settlements of Grahamstown, Port Elizabeth, and East London.

For their part, the Xhosas were fractured, grief-stricken, plunged into poverty: over the years, they had lost their land, many of their animals, and their communities to settlers. Unable to come to terms with their sudden reversal of fortune, they became convinced that this onslaught of misery had been brought on by furious ancestors. A young female prophet reported that if the tribe slaughtered their remaining livestock and stopped planting crops, they would be forgiven and rise again, and so the desperate people abided by her word. By 1857, the population was starving. The Xhosa people would mount various offenses to secure the return of their land, but ultimately the majority of them realized that their only survival option was to work at a pittance for the white farmers who now tilled their former land.

Amy Elizabeth Biehl came into the world 315 years after the Dutch landed on the Cape and 110 years after the Xhosa people faced what then seemed to be their darkest hour. She was born on April 26, 1967, in Chicago, Illinois, to loving, upper-middle-class parents. It was a cool and hazy spring Wednesday, and a light rain drizzled down on the lakeside city. She died on August 25, 1993, in Gugulethu, Cape Town, at the hands of a violent mob of students, gangsters, and unemployed young people. It was a clear winter Wednesday, 78 degrees and unseasonably sunny.

Journalists often misidentified Amy as a “volunteer,” an “aid worker,” or an “exchange student.” Some referred to her as an “angel” or a “golden girl.” When she died, the headlines were melodramatic and simplistic:

A WOMAN WHO GAVE HER LIFE TO AFRICA

PRAISES SUNG BY ALL

DEATH OF AN IDEALIST

POOR AMY

In fact, Amy was a serious academic and an activist, but she didn’t present as the widely held caricature of the intellectual, at least not in photos. Amy was female, first of all, and she was conventionally pretty. She had long dirty-blond hair, straight teeth, and a spray of freckles across her delicate nose. She had fashionable clothes bought by her father and a sense of style inherited from her mother, who in her later years became a couture saleswoman at Neiman Marcus in well-heeled Newport Beach. She was slender from years of competitive sports. She was confident in her opinions but modest and allergic to causing offense. She had good posture and a decent handshake. She was not above telling a bad joke.

Amy had not wandered blindly into Gugulethu that August day, some ignorant missionary who thought her smile could cut through the fury of a disenchanted and dispossessed generation of blacks. She knew there was a storm brewing in South Africa. She’d majored in African Studies at Stanford, and at graduation she had plastered the words
FREE MANDELA
in masking tape across her cap, which her grandmother, a Midwestern Republican, kept trying to pick off. After Stanford, as an employee of the nonprofit National Democratic Institute, Amy had traveled to South Africa, Zambia, the Ivory Coast, Ethiopia, Burundi, and what is today the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In 1989, she spent time in Namibia, which was holding free elections as it transitioned to independence from South African rule. She traveled there again in 1991 to study the early workings of a new parliamentary democracy. She even went on a jog through Lusaka, Zambia’s capital, with Jimmy Carter.

By the time Amy landed in South Africa in September 1992, she was well versed in the long-standing issues of liberty, race, and rights that had shaped postcolonial African discourse. She was especially interested in the country as apartheid began to crumble and Nelson Mandela’s rise to the presidency became increasingly inevitable. She wanted to be in the middle of the action. So when Amy landed her Fulbright, she packed her bags and Linda drove her to Los Angeles International. In the waiting area, Amy fell into an engrossing conversation with another passenger, who was also up-to-date on South African politics. Distracted, she hugged Linda goodbye. Though they spoke on the phone during Amy’s ten months in South Africa, the last words Amy delivered to Linda in person were a parting command as she boarded the plane: “Don’t cry, Mom.”

In Cape Town, Amy immersed herself in her research topic: the rights and roles of women, primarily black and colored women, in an emerging democracy. She traveled into the depths of the townships and witnessed firsthand the squalor in which black people were forced to live under apartheid law. Diplomatically inclined and tactful, Amy rarely expressed, verbally, the effect this inequality and racism had on her. Perhaps she knew it was not her place to complain, that the emotions of a white American on the subject of state-sanctioned racism were hardly relevant. But sometimes she let it rip. Once Amy and her boyfriend, Scott Meinert, who was visiting from the States for a couple of weeks, wandered into an all-white bar wearing T-shirts emblazoned with Mandela’s face. The patrons unhappily received two white kids with a black opposition leader plastered across their chests, and some spit a few under-the-breath comments at the pair: “Like the darkies, do you?” Amy ignored them, drank her beer, and strode back to the parking lot, where she got in her car and started hitting the dashboard with all her might and letting fly a stream of profanities. She was furious at herself for taking the high road.

While in Namibia, Amy met some rising ANC dignitaries, including Brigitte Mabandla, who would become minister of justice and constitutional development in post-apartheid South Africa. The late 1980s and 1990s were prime periods in the history of what is referred to as the Struggle, or the long fight for freedom. Back then, high-ranking ANC members were often also professors, and Mabandla headed up the Community Law Center at the University of the Western Cape. Inspired, Amy chose to conduct her South African Fulbright-funded research at the University of the Western Cape instead of the more prestigious and whiter University of Cape Town. At UWC, a university historically designated for students of color, she drafted memos for Dullah Omar, Mandela’s lawyer who would become the president’s minister of justice, and for Rhoda Kadalie, an intellectual and activist who would become Mandela’s commissioner of human rights. Rhoda was then a single mother in her late thirties, and she and Amy grew especially close over the months, discussing politics, feminism, policy—and boyfriends, sex, and gossip. On the day of her death, Amy was clearing out her workspace at UWC, organizing her papers, and packing up any spare notes as she prepared to head back to America. She used a university phone to call Rhoda, who was working from home that day, and they spoke for nearly two hours.