impossible. I am never quite so searingly aware of the color of my skin as when I am in the township.
In the parking lot, Amy passed by Evaron Orange, a nineteen-year-old cousin of Amy’s roommate, Melanie. He was a baby-faced colored kid with a caterpillar mustache and oiled black hair. He also needed a lift, and so Amy agreed to take Evaron to Athlone, the nearby colored neighborhood where he lived.
The four loaded into Amy’s dinged-up beige Mazda. Evaron sat in the passenger seat and the two women slipped into the back. The Mazda was all muddy tones: tan fabric seats, dull brown carpeting, a dark brown dashboard. Its only pop of color was a bright yellow Cape Town license plate, its only adornment a squat rectangular sticker plastered on the back right bumper, just below the taillight, printed with unadorned black capital letters: OUR LAND NEEDS PEACE.
Amy drove her friends southwest on Modderdam Road, passing the bleak industrial yards of Parow and the Bishop Lavis ganglands. She drove by the flat, crumbling pastel houses that lined the broad thoroughfare, and at the four-way intersection that separates the black townships of Gugulethu, KTC, and Crossroads from the colored townships of Bonteheuwel and Valhalla Park, she turned left onto NY1. NY stands for Native Yard, the lingering apartheid designation for streets in black townships, all of which were simply initialed and numbered: Native Yard 32, Native Yard 58, Native Yard 79, Native Yard 111.
Amy had been to the townships dozens of times, to drink and dance at the clubs and shebeens, the taverns that provided relief from the daily grind of apartheid and poverty, and to visit friends and conduct research. Driving along NY1, she passed the brown-brick Shoprite Center. She continued over a small overpass that stretches above the N2 highway and connects the northern corners of Gugulethu to the rest of the world. On that day, as rush hour neared, traffic was congested on NY1, which offers only a single slender northbound lane and a single slender southbound lane, hemmed in between sidewalks. After the turnoff, Amy followed a small truck down NY1.
She drove past the shoulder-high grass on the outskirts of Gugulethu. She slowed down as she went by the police barracks contained behind razor wire, past the long municipal buildings that comprised the elementary school. Now there was traffic. She edged nearer to the Caltex service station laid out on the corner of NY1 and NY123. The station was positioned just off the road, its six pumps sheltered by a red cement overhang and set next to a low gray-brick building where the cashiers worked behind bulletproof glass.
A quarter mile past the Caltex sat the Gugulethu police station. Amy planned to drop the women near the police station, where she could safely turn around and go off to Athlone with Evaron. But just before Amy reached the Caltex, the truck in front of her stopped short. She pressed the brake.
“Ride, ride,” Evaron said.
“I can’t.” Amy gestured before her at the truck, which was shaking. In South Africa, as in the U.K., people drive on the left, so to Amy’s left was a sidewalk, and to her right was a line of bumper-to-bumper cars traveling in the opposite direction. Ahead, they could make out a group of young people, some of whom seemed to be pressing against the truck.
A man from that group turned and zeroed in on Amy, her pale face shining. The man yelled out and the other young men swiveled around. There is a word in Xhosa, iqungu. It’s similar to the English term bloodlust. It means “the joy in killing.”
The men and boys were speaking Xhosa, yelling to each other. Amy and her friends sat, paralyzed and uncomprehending. One man held in his hand a cracked brick, tan in color, plucked from construction refuse on the side of the road. No, many of them had bricks, almost all of them had bricks or stones clutched in their hands. Now Amy and her friends could see that up the road, ahead of the truck, the crowd was moving, chanting. That first man raised his brick and hurled it toward Amy, fast and straight. The force shattered the windshield, which exploded with a loud cartoon pop. Droplets of glass flew across the car’s interior, coating the seats, the floor, wedging in the clutch, getting stuck in clothes and hair and shoes. Later that night, when Evaron took a bath, he found shards of glass nestled in the seams of his underwear.
Unthinking, disoriented, Amy drove onward. Another brick came, this one on a perfect trajectory, with no windshield to break its flight. It connected with Amy’s face, hitting her square above her right eyebrow. Her head snapped back and then forward. The brick cracked her skull easily, like an eggshell. It left a three-centimeter-long piece of bone, shaped like an arrowhead, hanging loose. The arrowhead bone briefly pressed against her soft pink brain, now exposed.
Blood poured from Amy’s forehead, drenching her hair. She drove a few more yards down NY1, her right arm dangling from the window, before she stopped. A skinny young boy popped up near her. He looked at the four of them sitting there, slipped the watch off Amy’s limp wrist, and melted back into the crowd.
From inside the car, it seemed that the sun had disappeared and the sky had gone black. The stones hailed down. In the backseat, Sindiswa and Maletsatsi began to scream. Evaron pulled Amy onto his lap.
“Oh dear Lord, help me,” he whispered.
There were people all around, shouting. Now you could make out the words, if you listened.
“One settler, one bullet,” the people chanted.
“Africa for Africans.”
“Kill the farmer, kill the boer.”
“Boer” is the Dutch word for farmer. In South Africa, farmers, primarily Afrikaners, grabbed swaths of land that previously belonged to indigenous people and then employed blacks as sharecroppers or low-paid laborers and kept the profits.
A woman stood on the sidewalk across the way. She yelled at Amy and her friends over the slogans.
“Get out!” she implored. “Run, run, run!”
“Run,” urged other disembodied voices, locals standing at a distance who had seen this grisly show before, though never starring a white woman. If a mob surrounds you, you only have one sorry choice: Run, run, run.
More young people were pouring in from NY109, where a path from the train station met NY1. Others were already ahead, blocking traffic. There seemed to be more than a hundred of them, or perhaps it was just eighty. They were engaged in a toyi-toyi, a beautiful, terrifying march-dance originally from Zimbabwe, in which a coordinated group of people lift their knees up high and wave their arms above their heads as they chant and move in protest. As Amy lay on Evaron’s lap, the chants grew louder and clearer and some kids began to lift the car up, hoping to roll it.
“One settler, one bullet.”
Amy, bewildered, her blood-soaked shirt sequined with glass shards, opened the car door and stepped out onto the street.
“Settler, settler!” the mob erupted.
Evaron, Maletsatsi, and Sindiswa toppled out of the car now, too, yelling frantically. The two women appealed to the crowd in Xhosa, insisting that Amy was a student, a comrade, a member of their ANC-aligned National Women’s Coalition. They were waving around their membership cards like tiny laminated shields. A handsome, broad-faced man tried to grab Maletsatsi’s purse, but she shoved him away. A few days later, her back sore, she went for an X-ray and found that her rib had been fractured.
Like most colored South Africans, Evaron spoke English and Afrikaans but did not understand Xhosa. He had never even been to Gugulethu before; he didn’t know these streets. He turned to a man standing nearby.
“What do I do?” he pleaded.
“They
