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.”
He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster.
—FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
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.
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
