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
