Justine van der Leun - We Are Not Such Things: The Murder of a Young American, a South African Township, and the Search for Truth and Reconciliation

Copyright 2016 by Justine van der Leun

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

S PIEGEL & G RAU and Design is a registered trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

Darhansoff & Verrill Literary Agents: No foreign sky from Requiem 19351940 from Poems of Akhmatova by Anna Akhmatova, selected, translated, and introduced by Stanley Kunitz with Max Hayward (Mariner Books, an imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1997), copyright 1967, 1968, 1972, 1973 by Stanley Kunitz and Max Hayward. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Darhansoff & Verrill Literary Agents.

Harpers Magazine: Excerpt from To Those Who Follow in Our Wake by Bertolt Brecht, translated by Scott Horton, copyright 2008 by Harpers Magazine. All rights reserved. Reprinted from the January 2008 issue by special permission of Harpers Magazine.

HarperCollins Publishers: Excerpt from Long You Must Suffer from The Essential Rilke, selected and translated by Galway Kinnell and Hannah Liebmann, translation copyright 1999 by Galway Kinnell and Hannah Liebmann. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Van der Leun, Justine, author.

Title: We are not such things: the murder of a young American, a South African township, and the search for truth and reconciliation / by Justine van der Leun.

Description: First edition. | New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2016.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015045138| ISBN 9780812994506 | ISBN 9780812994513 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Biehl, AmyDeath and burial. | South Africa. Truth and Reconciliation Commission. | MurderPolitical aspectsSouth AfricaCape Town. | Anti-apartheid activistsCrimes againstSouth Africa. | Fulbright scholarsCrimes againstSouth Africa. | South AfricaRace relationsPolitical aspectsHistory20th century. | Gugulethu (Cape Town, South Africa)Social conditionsHistory.

Classification: LCC DT1974.2 .V35 2016 | DDC 305.8009687355dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015045138

ebook ISBN9780812994513

spiegelandgrau.com

Book design by Caroline Cunningham, adapted for ebook

Cover design: Rachel Ake

Cover images: Shutterstock

Map by Jeffrey L. Ward

Frontispiece photo: Nofemela family archives

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S TATE LAWYER: You see what I am going to suggest to you, Mr. Nofemela, is that the attack and brutal murder of Amy Biehl could not have been done with a political objective. It was wanton brutality, like a pack of sharks smelling blood. Isnt that the truth?

E ASY N OFEMELA: No, thats not true, thats not true. We are not such things.

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The journalists and documentarians and small-time film producers filed out of the van and toward St. Columba Anglican Church, a gray-brick building on the corner of NY1 and NY109 in Gugulethu, a township eleven miles outside Cape Town city center. Easy and I stayed behind, he in the drivers seat and me on the passengers side. Easy was a short, compact man with butterscotch skin and a large, round, clean-shaven head. At forty-two, he had this weird ability to shape-shift. Did he look like a hardened old gangster? Yes, some days. Did he look like an adorable, harmless child? Yes, some days. In one of the photos Ive snapped of him over the years, he is menacing, crouching on the ground with a cigarette between his thumb and forefinger, his band of brothers behind him, one of them holding up a disembodied sheeps head. But in the next, hes curled on a small stool, cradling his infant son and smiling as his ten-year-old daughter drapes herself over his shoulder.

Easy laughed generously, from the belly, and moved in quick spurts. His features were framed by a constellation of small dark scars: from a knife fight, a stick fight, an adolescent bout with acne, that time he crashed a van into a horse in the middle of the night and then fled, that time the taxi he was riding in collided with a hatchback, and a recent incident involving a scorned ex-girlfriend with long nails and a vendetta. His arms were dotted with fading ballpoint-pen tattoosone pledging devotion to a long-defunct street gang, one to a prominent prison gang, and one to an old flame named Pinky. The first one had become infected immediately, when he was fifteen, and his mom had spent months tending to it. After that, for a few years at least, Easy felt like it made him look particularly tough.

I liked Easy very much. I wont pretend otherwise. But then again: precisely twenty years before our meeting in the van, on August 25, 1993, and approximately fifteen yards away, Easy had been part of a mob that had hunted down a young white American woman. If you plucked her out of that moment in history and slotted me in, my fate would have likely been the same. Easy chased her through the streets, chanting the slogan One settler, one bullet, and hurled jagged bricks at her. He stabbed at her as she begged for her life. She died, bleeding from her head and her chest, on the pavement just across the road.

At least this is the crime Easy repeatedly claimed to have committed. He was convicted of her murder, and sentenced to eighteen years in jail. Hed done it, he publicly stated, because during that time my spirit just says I must kill the white. The dead woman was named Amy Biehl, and she was twenty-six years old.