media, and this did not augur well. Within two days of Amy’s death, a gunman attacked a bus running from Cape Town to Pretoria, and the Cape Times headline read SA WORLD’S MOST VIOLENT COUNTRY. The pressure was on.
As the sky grew dark, the detectives set up their satellite offices and barked to each other. Ilmar Pikker, a hulking chain-smoker with a curly red beard, headed up the investigation. He was a workaholic with a taste for meat, fried food, and Camel cigarettes. He loved the force more than life itself, every night rounding up punks, kicking in rickety doors, staking out terrorist meet-ups. Back then, he didn’t have a complicated relationship with his job.
Journalists began to slink around outside the station, alerted to a possible cover story by the staticky noise on the police radios. In Gugulethu, the news passed from neighbor to neighbor. Those boys, they killed a white lady, they ran her down, they beat her to death by the gas station, they stabbed her. She was walking around, one witness recalled, “like a Barbie covered in ketchup.”
Some township residents were buoyant, some blasé. Some were watching the news on TV with great interest. A few were busy pawning Amy’s watch and books. Some took off for their auntie’s place one township over because you knew the cops would come making trouble any minute now, so let them pick up some other kid. Since Amy had spent time socializing and working in Gugulethu, some residents remembered seeing her smiling face; she looked like a nice person, and it was a shame that they had killed her like that.
Some couldn’t sleep that night, thinking of that innocent girl, thinking of her parents way off in America, how they must be feeling now, her mother especially. Some were ashamed of their own people, those good-for-nothing hooligans. Some were giving each other high fives; how many of us die, how many of our children are murdered, and who sings their songs? Why should we be the only ones to lose babies? Why not them, too? Some were proud. Some were heartsick. Some planned a protest march; they wanted this scourge to stop, and for people of all colors to be spared. They started painting signs demanding “Peace Now.”
One slender young woman with a sleek, inky pixie cut walked down NY1. She was twenty-six at the time, like Amy. She read biographies and appreciated high fashion. She believed in black magic and women’s rights. She was a serious person, rarely laughed or smiled. After the attack, she had called a cop friend and asked what had happened to the girl she saw being beaten by the Caltex, and the cop friend had told her that the girl had died.
She crossed Lansdowne Road and pushed through the crowd at the police station gate. She asked the uniformed officer for Rhodes, whom she knew. Rhodes came out of the station, looking even paler than usual, since the Riot and Violent Crimes Investigation Unit had been questioning him like he was some sort of suspect, and plus, figures of authority made him fidgety. He motioned the woman into the compound, and they stood to the side, near an anemic tree.
“I can tell you who killed the white lady,” she said. “You cannot tell anyone who I am. Do you promise?”
“I promise,” Rhodes said, scribbling down names on his notepad. “Thank you.”
She nodded and walked straight home. She wouldn’t eat for a day or so; she wouldn’t sleep that night, thinking of what they did. She sat up in the dark. She could see Amy running from the men, all down that street, a fox running from a pack of dogs, then torn to shreds. For what? Not for liberation. Not for a free South Africa. Not for land or dogma. For nothing.
It was twilight at the station. Rhodes looked down at the notebook, at the sheet of paper he would soon hand over to Pikker, who would again aggressively question him, this time for the witness’s name. Rhodes would always insist that he hadn’t recognized her, that she’d just been an anonymous face in the crowd. Pikker would find her anyway, many months later. On the paper, there were three addresses in Gugulethu, all within a quarter mile of the murder site. Next to each address was a corresponding name:
Mongezi Manqina
Ntobeko Peni
Easy Nofemela
Having created the Frankenstein monster (and it is no less terrifying because it is largely illusory), the lyncher lives in constant fear of his own creation.
—WALTER WHITE, Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States, 1889–1918
We are betrayed by what is false within.
—GEORGE MEREDITH
One day in March 2012, I headed down the N2 highway toward Gugulethu, where Easy was waiting. It occurred to me that my gold Renault hatchback was not too different from the yellow-beige Mazda hatchback Amy Biehl had been driving on August 25, 1993. It occurred to me also that if I were to get whacked, there was no shortage of people who would roll their eyes.
As I drove toward Gugulethu, I tried to forget about the horror stories of the townships. How people kept telling me that I wasn’t to think I was as “free as in America.” Once, over sushi, a friend of a friend had told me about an acquaintance who had been carjacked, kidnapped, and dropped on a street corner in Soweto, Johannesburg’s prominent township, the old stomping grounds of Mandela and his cadres.
“What then?” I asked.
“He put his head down and he got the hell out,” the friend of a friend said.
“Didn’t he ask for help?”
“You don’t ask for help in there. You have a fifty-fifty chance anyway, if you’re a man. If you’re a woman, you have zero chance.”
“Zero?”
“Zero.”
“Even if I found another woman to help me?”
“Yes. You would be raped.”
“And killed?”
“You’d be killed because the rape would never, ever stop. You would be raped to the point of death.”
I didn’t believe the guy at the restaurant, but at the same time even the slightest possibility of being raped to death is one of those things that’s hard to dismiss. This dark communal bogeyman grew larger and more malicious every time he appeared.
Easy had asked me to pick him up in Gugulethu. I had met him briefly at the Amy Biehl Foundation office twice before, but had never been able to speak to him at length or in depth, so this would be my first proper interview and my first time alone with him. It would also be my first time driving into the townships by myself. Easy gave me specific directions: the exit, the left lane, the turn at the light, and I’d find him, standing outside the Shoprite. I jumped at the opportunity because obtaining time with the man had, until then, proved nearly impossible.
For weeks, I had been calling him. His phone was busy. His battery had died. He had no service. Bad network. No contract. Out of airtime. Can’t send an SMS. The phone was stolen, broken, lost, found, dunked in water, dried out, spontaneously turned off, left at home, forgotten at the office, borrowed by his brother, hidden by his girlfriend, accidentally laundered by his mother, in the sofa cracks, at the bottom of his bag, in his cousin’s backyard, in a friend’s car. This was a new phone; how did it work? This was an old phone; it wasn’t taking a charge.
When
