Читать книгу: «We Are Not Such Things: A Murder in a South African Township and the Search for Truth and Reconciliation», страница 3

I could see these townships, Gugulethu in particular, from the highway leading away from the airport: a glimmering sea of corrugated tin shacks separated from the road by only a strip of grass, upon which I once saw a man squatting for a shit while casually flipping through a magazine. This accounted for the faint fecal stink that wafted out from the slums, especially on hot days. I was eager to see inside, but I was informed, repeatedly, of the dangers of those ghettos, which teemed with ruthless gangs high on a type of rough local crystal meth called tik.

In an old Lonely Planet guidebook I found, nestled between reviews for the extravagant high tea at the pink Mount Nelson Hotel and a most pleasant ride up the aerial cableway to Table Mountain, I read a quick note on the townships, which were situated in the Cape Flats, a depressed belt of sand and bedrock southeast of the city known as “apartheid’s dumping ground”:

For the majority of Cape Town’s inhabitants, home is one of the grim townships of the Cape Flats: Gugulethu, Nyanga, Philippi, Mitchell’s Plain, Crossroads, or Khayelitsha. Visiting without a companion who has local knowledge would be foolish. If a black friend is happy to escort you, you should have no problems.

Lacking an amenable black escort at the time, I waited until one day, less than a month into my stay, an opportunity to pass over those allegedly dangerous borders presented itself. Sam was setting up a project aimed at improving the delivery of basic social services for the poor, and he had been invited by an NGO to see the conditions in Khayelitsha, a sprawling township of nearly 400,000 people just north of Gugulethu. He asked me if I’d like to come along.

On that hot day in November, we met two women at the organization’s headquarters off a main road, a chilly refurbished municipal building surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by a groundskeeper and his two sooty dogs. The lead guide was a fat and pretty black lady, with a flawless complexion and a short ponytail. Her assistant, also black, was a grave, slender woman with cropped hair and glasses; the left side of her body, running from her chin to her hand, had been consumed by fire long ago, and the skin was knotted with scar tissue.

Townships are divided, roughly, into formal and informal areas. The formal areas are generally those built up with simple cement houses along paved streets. Most were constructed years ago by the apartheid government, and have been, over time, expanded by their inhabitants, repainted various colors, remodeled and tricked out or neglected and allowed to fester. Some were constructed more recently by the new black-led government under the Reconstruction and Development Programme, which aimed to help close the massive gap between the rich and poor, and white and brown. These are known as “RDP houses,” and tend to be small, relatively new, identical matchbox homes clustered together. The key to such a house is obtained by languishing on a waiting list. Woven between, behind, and among the legal homes is a web of backyard shacks, built by homeowners and rented out in an underground township economy.

The formal areas also contain hostels taken over by squatters. During apartheid, companies housed black migrant laborers in single-sex dormitory-like structures, carting them to and from manual jobs each day and allowing them one month a year to visit their families in the rural areas designated for most blacks. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, as apartheid edged toward its demise and the townships became increasingly ungovernable, the companies abandoned these buildings and the workers and their families took over. Twenty years later, they still live in cramped, deteriorating quarters under faded signs bearing the names of the original owners: WJM CONSTRUCTION CORP, UME STEEL LTD, DAIRY-BELLE PTY. Pigeons roost in the broken shower stalls. Once in a while, a police tow truck pulls out from a hostel’s courtyard, dragging a stolen car behind it.

Informal settlements are plots of previously barren urban land upon which people squat, usually in haphazard tin shacks. They are meant to be temporary, but often become permanent as their inhabitants, mired in poverty, fail to either score an RDP house or rent a better spot. The settlements rise up on township borders and on undesirable land within. They contain a mixture of city-born locals, migrants from the underdeveloped South African countryside, and refugees, asylum seekers, and undocumented aliens from repressive Zimbabwe, impoverished Ethiopia, war-torn Somalia, war-torn Democratic Republic of the Congo, and war-torn Burundi. Since the settlements are not government-approved, they receive little in terms of services and once in a while are unceremoniously torn down.

Our guides lived in one such settlement, a maze of makeshift matchbox houses set on gray sand. The plumper woman lived in a tidy single room with her husband, a few children, and the inevitable rat or two. She called her young son, a shirtless ten-year-old with a mischievous smile, and instructed him to watch our car, which we parked in a dirt yard. We would conduct the tour on foot, since the pathways far into the shantytowns—tiny, potholed roads that passed through insecure territories—weren’t built for vehicles. We were deep inside Khayelitsha now, invisible to the outside world.

“See how we are living,” a woman called from behind a low wire fence as we trudged through the sand. In her shack, a flat-screen TV played a daytime soap, and a bunch of people sat on stools, drinking brandy, waving at us. “Come in, come see how we live.”

Trash piled up in a stagnant, water-filled ditch beside the houses. Children with crusty faces played by a pile of refuse, where a herd of goats feasted. The garbage was laced with rat poison. During the rainy season, when water seeped into the shacks and sewage spilled into the streets, kids came down with diarrhea. A pack of dogs slunk by, all grown in the township canine mold: of medium size, sporting short pale-brown fur, with pointy ears pressed low against the head. A few weeks earlier, a different rogue pack of mutts had broken into a shack and mauled a child to death, so the people were in the mood to stone them. A barefoot white man with dreadlocks and a long beard lay in the lap of a black woman, her hair tied back with a violet scarf. They wore stained pajamas and faced the sun.

We passed a low swampland on the border of the highway, shacks built among the reeds; in the rain, pungent murky water rose up through the floors of each house, whose lightbulbs were powered by a spaghetti of ragged lines jury-rigged from the power poles. The shack dwellers were unmoved by posters urging South Africans to KEEP OUR COUNTRY POWER-FUL, part of a nationwide campaign to curb electricity theft.

Toilets were often buckets or the fetid fields by the highway, where people squatted in the open as cars whizzed by, the worlds so separate that neither the drivers nor the defecators seemed concerned by each other’s humanity. Some portable toilets had been provided by companies that had won city contracts, but they were rarely cleaned or emptied, and the resulting indignities had led, in part, to the Poo Wars. Worse, such toilets could easily be toppled, as the installers sometimes skimped on cash by failing to secure them to the ground. Local criminals pushed the unstable toilets over while people were inside, reached in, grabbed cellphones or cash, and left their victims scrambling amid a soup of age-old human waste and neon-blue chemical sludge. Kids on their way to pee in the pitch-black night were hit by cars or snatched off a path and molested. Adults who needed to expel before a morning shift at work were mugged for their cellphones as they hiked in the dim predawn light. The whole area shared a dozen or so communal taps. I tried to figure out how a person could bathe, the dwellings pressed so close together.

“What about privacy?” I asked the assistant.

“Privacy?” She let out a bitter laugh. “There is no privacy.”

The women led us past a row of yellow three-room houses built by an Irish charity. I admired the houses, popping out cheerfully from the mass of gray corrugated tin and old timber, the address numbers painted in pastels by the front doors, accented by a little cartoon flower. The assistant pointed to a ramshackle two-story gray manor at the path’s corner, its roof supported by uneven columns. At the base of the manor was an austere grocery shop manned by an aging grocer in a white hat.

Teenage boys laughed and shared cigarettes by a little spaza shop, a bodega that sells soda, candy, chips, phone cards. A man shaved his friend’s head on a stoop, dipping his razor and soap in and out of a bucket. Children brightened as we passed, reached for our hands. Finally, we came upon the tour’s ultimate destination: a square of sand, smoke rising from its edges. People were bringing buckets of water and pieces of wood and iron back and forth.

“It burned last night,” the guide explained, ushering us into the smoldering lot. Of the three shacks that previously stood here, only outlines on the ground remained, debris all around. Nobody knew how the fire had started—a cigarette in bed? An electrical outage? A gas stove? Or maybe somebody had a grudge; it was not unheard of to lock an enemy in his shack and set it alight, leaving him to pound at the door as he burned. Once a spark caught, all nearby shacks could be consumed by flames; in these tight quarters, built of thin flammable materials, fire spread fast, and sometimes it took out hundreds of shacks before a fire truck could arrive and control the blaze. Whole neighborhoods were flattened and rebuilt on the regular. Our guide had twice lost her home to fire and once lost her shack when the city council resettled her whole block to make room for a new power plant. She had come home to find a slash of red spray paint across her door, marking her place as one to be removed.

“They just painted my door,” she said, shaking her head. I imagined the municipal worker, living in some nicer part of town, brandishing his red can of paint as he strode down these sandy paths, past shelter after shelter patched together, he assumed, with garbage. What’s the difference if you slash a red mark across a mound of trash?

At the empty lot, a group of women stood at an incline. One was tall and busty, in her fifties, wearing a long skirt and a T-shirt that displayed her pendulous breasts. Her arm was wrapped around a smaller, darker woman with thin shoulders and short hair. The guide explained to us: it was this smaller woman whose house had burned and whose father had died in the smoke and fire. She was silent, standing among the remains of her home, staring at us with red-rimmed eyes.

We had been joined on the tour by a gangly ginger-haired American research fellow who, within three minutes of meeting a person, compulsively conveyed that his wife was a black South African.

“Can I give money?” he asked awkwardly, his face reddening. The guide grew equally uncomfortable and shrugged.

We passed the assistant’s shack on the way out. She called her six-year-old daughter to come meet us. The girl had a heart-shaped face, a missing front tooth, and short hair in little twists.

“Hello,” I said. “What is your name?”

“Yes, teacher, thank you, teacher,” she said, batting her eyelashes.

Later, as Sam and I drove away, the streets grew wide and smooth as the township receded. Heavy-bottomed palm trees lined the road. The people were soon lighter and taller, as if to match the ivory buildings that rose along the crashing sea. The restaurants were full of diners ordering calamari and chicken caesar salads. In the distance, along the promenade, the iconic red-and-white-striped Mouille Point lighthouse sparkled, and silky dogs ran after tennis balls in its shadow.

At the time, we were living in a dull, cold rental apartment, which was angled so that not even the smallest beam of sun could enter, ever. On one side, shaded windows overlooked a golf course, and on the other side, small, high windows overlooked an open hallway that circled an interior courtyard. These windows above the courtyard presented an acoustic nightmare that sent the din of a radio in another apartment or the low pitch of a conversation in the common area directly into our living room at top volume. I hated the place, with its walls coated in mold in the winter and its unflattering fluorescent lights. In the basement, the storage areas used by residents had once been rooms where black and colored maids would sleep. A few communal bathrooms, which included toilets and showers, had been built in the hallways during apartheid so that the help did not use their boss’s private facilities.

But on that day, the flat took on new characteristics. It was luxury, pure and simple, with its sturdy walls, its two secure locks, windows to protect against the elements, plentiful electricity, and a bathroom and toilet of its own. I stood in a scalding hot shower and felt filthy rich. I never wanted to go back to the townships and I wanted to go back immediately.

But you couldn’t just wander aimlessly around there. It was too far from town for a pop-in, and there weren’t, for example, coffee shops with Wi-Fi where a person could hang out. So I started to research various NGOs that did work there. I asked around, again surveying the people I knew, but I was only met with gestures of concern. It seemed that I was a not uncommon species of foreigner who thinks a bleeding heart or a hankering for a taste of “real Africa” will keep her safe as she wanders, smiling dimly and handing out lollipops, through destitute black areas. So in my search for volunteer work, I was met, several times, with the same question, uttered with a mixture of irritation and concern:

“Haven’t you heard of Amy Biehl?” people said. “Better not come down with Amy Biehl Syndrome.”

I was twelve when Amy Biehl was killed, and not up on international news, so I had never heard of her. Now, with no friends in South Africa and only a bit of freelance work trickling in, I had plenty of time to burrow into that Internet rabbit hole. I began to look into the story of the young white scholar attacked by the black mob. The tale had been covered at length, with over 100,000 search results on Google. For days, I read articles and studied images. The murder had been so odd, the fury so misplaced, and the choice of victim so ironic. The story, as it rolled out before me in backlit print, conveniently followed along the country’s timeline for the past nearly two decades: oppression, inequality, activism, protest, race-based violence, imprisonment, freedom, amnesty, reconciliation. Over the years, the headlines themselves traced the arc of recent history:

A BRUTALIZED GENERATION TURNS ITS RAGE ON WHITES

(The New York Times, 1993)

THREE BLACKS FOUND GUILTY OF “RACIST” KILLING

(The Herald, Glasgow, 1994)

SOUTH AFRICANS APOLOGIZE TO FAMILY OF AMERICAN VICTIM

(The New York Times, 1997)

4 SOUTH AFRICAN KILLERS OF U.S. STUDENT GET AMNESTY

(Chicago Tribune, 1998)

BIEHL PARENT, APARTHEID FIGHTER BRIDGE GAP

(The Santa Fe New Mexican, 2004)

IN SOUTH AFRICA, AN IMPROBABLE TALE OF FORGIVENESS

(Los Angeles Times, 2008)

This was a microcosm of South Africa for twenty years, and it was the hopeful story people liked to tell and be told. The oppressed, once driven to wanton disorder, now displayed an unreal spirit of forgiveness. They were led by Mandela himself, who, after twenty-seven years in prison, forgave his oppressors. At his inauguration, his jailer was given VIP seating. The end result was white people and black people who had endured a terrible time locked in an embrace. As far as stories go, Amy Biehl’s was pretty perfect in terms of PR for South Africa, the rainbow nation. And America, with its generous ambassadors in the form of Linda and Peter and martyred activist Amy, didn’t come out too badly either. The whole thing was so peculiar that I couldn’t stop reading about it.

Over dinner, I reported my findings to Sam, who had been fourteen at the time of Amy’s death and eighteen during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings, and so remembered her name and the basics of the story, but not much more. I went over the murder, the particularly undeserving victim, the famed amnesty, the remarkable show of mercy, the close relationship between the mother and the men, who even called Linda Biehl “Grandmother” in Xhosa.

I mentioned it to my conservative in-laws, who didn’t understand why anyone would ever reward their daughter’s killers with a job. Their dinner guests were equally unimpressed by the tale—the general story they knew by heart but the details they only vaguely remembered. One posited that such a gesture might encourage other black folks to kill white girls in order to score jobs, and she could not be dissuaded by the fact that over the course of nearly twenty years, nobody had ever done such a thing. Later that week, as Sam and I sat in the park by the sea, I expounded upon the story again.

“You sound pretty interested in this,” he finally said. “Why don’t you write about it?”

In the following days, I tried to locate a book on the subject, convinced that surely somebody had already covered this singular story at length. Indeed, many journalists had filed reports in all forms of media. There had been documentaries and talk shows. A South African playwright, inspired by Linda Biehl’s act of compassion, had even written a fictionalized account, Mother to Mother, which she then adapted into a one-woman play that toured every few years. But nobody had ever written a book.

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.

3.

Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy.

—F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

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.”