by Paul Theroux
A small cross at the roadside in Guguletu by a gas station marked the spot where she was murdered. It is a main road, there must have been many people around who could have helped her. But no one did. A crude sign board behind the cross was daubed Amy Bihl’s Last Home Section 3 Gugs – misspelled and so crude as to be insulting.
Defying death threats, some women in Guguletu who had witnessed the crime came forward and named Amy’s killers. Four young men were convicted of the murder and sentenced to 18 years in prison. But three years after their imprisonment these murderers appeared before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. They had an explanation. ‘Their motive was political and not racial.’ They were members of the Pan-Africanist Congress, they said, and were only carrying out the program of the party, which regarded all whites as ‘settlers.’
Their argument was ridiculous. How this murder could have been regarded as non-racial made no sense. Mandela was out of prison, elections were scheduled, the country had been all but turned over to the African majority. The mob was of course racially motivated, for they had singled her out. Still, the murderers ‘regretted’ what they had done; they claimed they had ‘remorse.’ They pleaded to be released under the terms of general amnesty. Everything they said seemed to me lame and without merit.
The murderers’ freedom would have been impossible without the assent of Amy’s parents, Peter and Linda Biehl, who attended those sessions of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Though the mother of one of the killers was so disgusted and ashamed by her son’s description of what he had done to Amy that she could not face him, the Biehls embraced the killers. They said that their daughter would have wanted this show of mercy, as she was ‘on the side of the people who killed her.’ The Biehls would not stand in the way of an amnesty.
So the murderers waltzed away. Astonishingly, two of them, Ntom-beko Peni and Easy Nofomela, were given jobs by the Biehls. They still worked in salaried positions for the Amy Biehl Foundation, a charity started by Amy’s forgiving parents, in their daughter’s memory. This foundation received almost $2 million from USAID in 1997, for being ‘dedicated to empowering people who are oppressed.’
The details of this arrangement baffled me. As a father, the thought of losing my children this way was horrifying – I would rather die myself. What would I do in the same tragic circumstances? Well, I would want the murderers off the street; and if somehow they gained their freedom I doubt that I would give them a job. It would enrage me to hear them whining and making excuses. I would expect deeds from them. It would pain me to have to look into their faces. Amy’s parents did not share my feelings.
Later, I asked a South African journalist what she thought of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. She said, ‘If it was not for the concept of forgiveness, which was a steering force of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, I wonder where we would have been? Sometimes incredible things happened, an army general responsible for a bombing met a man blinded by the explosion and shook hands. A torturer was forced to relive his actions. Sometimes killers asked parents for forgiveness and were accepted or rejected. Many people felt the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was a sham, but I thought the process was remarkable when it worked.’
The extreme and unusual forgiveness shown by Amy Biehl’s parents is often remarked upon – so often, provoking debate, that it almost seems that the incredible mercy they showed was provocative to a salutary degree. But much of what was said by the murderers and their supporters was just cant and empty words, for though no one in South Africa seems to remember it, at the time of the amnesty the Biehls challenged them by saying, ‘Are you in South Africa prepared to do your part?’
Guguletu’s grimness was its history as a workers’ area – men’s hostels and men’s huts. Male workers in South Africa had always been easier to control if they were away from their families. For one thing, they could always be sent back to their village. The mines were notorious for the hostels that were regulated like prison blocks. The squatter colony of New Rest that grew up beside Guguletu after 1991 was composed mainly of women who wanted to be near their husbands and boyfriends. Because it had been just plopped down on forty acres of sand there were no utilities, and as a consequence it stank and looked terrible. The huts were sheds made of ill-fitting boards, scrap lumber, bits of tin, plastic sheeting. The gaps between the boards were blasted by the gritty wind.
‘I get sand and dust in my bed,’ said Thando, the man who showed me around.
But, unexpectedly – to me, at any rate – there was an upbeat spirit in the place, a vitality and even a sense of purpose among the squatters. No lights had been put in but there were shops that sold candles for a few cents and other goods were listed in scrawls on cardboard: Oil, Teabag, Sugar, Salt – the basics.
I had not gone to New Rest alone. I had been put in touch with a white couple who took interested foreigners there as a way of putting them in touch with life at the margins of Cape Town. The visitors, startled by the squalor, inevitably made contributions to a common fund. A créche for the children of working mothers had been started with this money – probably the only clean and well-painted building in the place, where two kindly African women looked after thirty-five well-behaved children from the camp.
Most of the shacks were owned by women and more than half the women were employed somewhere in Cape Town, as domestics or cleaners or clerks. The shops in the camp were run by women, and so were the little bars – known as ‘shebeens’ throughout South Africa, an Irish word (originally meaning ‘bad ale’) that had percolated into the language from soldiers’ slang. I went into several of these shebeens and saw drunken boys and men sitting hunched because of the low ceiling. They were nursing bottles of Castle Lager, and smoking-and playing pool and pawing ineffectually at fat little prostitutes.
Life could get no grimmer than this, I thought - the urban shanty town, without foliage, too sandy to grow anything but scrawny geraniums and stubbly cactus; people having to draw water into plastic buckets from standpipes, and using candles in their huts; cold in winter, sweltering in summer, very dirty, lying athwart a main highway; what was worse? Rural poverty at least had the virtue of gardens and animals and the traditional house of reliable mud and thatch. Rural poverty had its pieties, too, as well as customs and courtesies.
Thando took me to meet the committee. This too was funded by contributions from the visitors. The committee was of course all men. But they were optimists.
‘There are no drugs or gangs here,’ one man said. ‘This is a peaceful place. This is our home.’
The squatters were mostly people from the eastern Cape, the old so-called homelands of the Transkei and the Ciskei, as well as the slums of East London, Port Elizabeth and Grahamstown, industrial cities which were not faring well in the new economy.
The committee had aims. One was for roads to be made throughout the squatter colony; another was for piped water.
‘We want to build houses here,’ a committee member explained to me.
The scheme had been outlined and blueprinted by some volunteer urban planners at the University of Cape Town. Every shack had been numbered and its plot recorded. A census had been taken.
‘In situ upgrade,’ the committee spokesman said, rolling out the plan on the table in the committee room.
The idea of transforming a squatter camp into a viable subdivision by upgrading existing dwellings had been accomplished in Brazil and India but not so far in South Africa. This meant that in place of each miserable shack there would be a small house or hut. The driving force for this was the pride the people took in having found a safe place to live. The goodwill of foreign visitors also helped: they had contributed money for the crèche, for three brick-making machines, and for the establishment of a trust fund. The fund was administered on a pro bono basis by an otherwise outward-bound travel company, Wilderness Cape Safaris, which had put New Rest on its itinerary. Some children were sponsored by visitors who sent money regularly
for their clothes and education. It was a strange hand-to-mouth arrangement, but the element of self-help in it made me a well-wisher.
I asked what had been here before the squatter camp and got an interesting answer. It had been low bush with the specific function of concealing initiates (mkweta) in circumcision ceremonies (ukoluka) performed by the local Xhosa people. The deed was done with the slice of a spear (mkonto) on boys – men, really – aged from seventeen to twenty-five. No one could explain why circumcision was left so late, but all agreed that it was a necessary rite of passage, essential for male bonding.
‘Even these days they use it,’ one of the committee members said. ‘In June and December, we see them – sometimes many of them, hiding in the bush at the far side.’
Though it was not bush, but only scrub land that lay next to the highway and bordered large scruffy settlements, the area must have had some significance as a refuge in earlier times. Here the newly circumcised young men were rusticated for six weeks of healing, wearing only rough blankets, cooking over smoky fires, their faces painted in the white clay that designated them as initiates of the old ceremony. They remained in the background. In the foreground was Guguletu and this camp. New Rest, the squatter camp, was filled with people so grateful, all they wished for was to make their shacks more permanent, so they could stay there for the rest of their lives.
This being South Africa, and specifically the Western Cape, there was hardly any distance between this squatter camp /circumcision refuge and another kind of refuge. Twenty miles up the highway in Paarl, on the slope of Paarl Mountain itself and its fluted monument to the Afrikaans language, among gentle hills draped in vineyards, was a magnificent country house hotel, the Grande Roche Luxury Estate Hotel. This was an eighteenth-century manor restored to its former glory and now receiving guests. I went there for lunch. The slave quarters had been gutted and redecorated into guest suites. Weddings were held in such a lovely chapel you would hardly have known that this buffed-up and beautified place had been the slave chapel.
A pool, a spa, a walled herb garden, a library, and a gourmet restaurant: the Grande Roche had everything. In Bosman’s, the hotel restaurant, which had achieved Relais Gourmand status, I had lunch – the Caesar salad with slices of Karoo lamb and the herb dressing, my entrée a red stumpnose – something like snapper – served on polenta, with baby vegetables and several glasses of Grande Roche’s own sauvignon blanc. Dessert was marinated strawberries and clotted cream.
Then I sat in the sunshine on a deck chair among the blossoms of the Grande Roche rose garden, drank coffee, nibbled chocolate bonbons from a china saucer, and looked south where rising smoke darkened the sky. There, under that smutty sky, on the Cape Flats was the squatter settlement – grateful people in shacks – where I had spent the morning.
Above me, offering shade, was a lovely tree in blossom with thick pendulous orange flowers.
A svelte white woman passed by me, with the pert, uplifted profile of someone breathing deeply, perhaps inhaling the aroma from the herbaceous border of the path. She wore a blue silken dress and a stylish large-brimmed white hat. Her lovely shoes crunched on the gravel. She smiled at me. I said hello. We talked a little.
‘What kind of tree is that?’ I asked.
‘That’s a coral tree,’ she said. ‘A kaffir boom, actually – you must not say that name these days, though.’
My destination on this African safari had been Cape Town. But, as is often the case with a long trip, I arrived at this destination only to gain a vantagepoint and see another destination, farther ahead, tempting me onward. So I dawdled and procrastinated in this sunny windswept city, and the coziness of a clean hotel, and the greater novelty in South Africa of the only province in which Mandela’s African National Congress was not in the majority. The provincial government was in the hands of the Democratic Alliance, a squabbling coalition of right-wing and conservative parties, Cape Town’s way of asserting that it was unlike any other place in South Africa. Happily for me, people spoke their mind, a reaction perhaps to so many years of whispering.
Some of these locals were so vivid as to seem caricatures. ‘Swanie’ Swanepoel was one of those. A big pale fleshy-faced Boer with angry blue eyes, a jaw like a back-hoe, thick farmer’s hands and tight suspenders stretched across his huge gut and bursting shirt, hooked to his slipping trousers. Everything about him, his voice, his eyes, even his jowls and the way he crooked his fat fingers emphasized his sense of grievance. He had hated the way the system had changed, and his refrain was, Where is the world now?
He was from Upington, an agricultural town in the Northern Cape, on the upper reaches of the Orange River, a twelve-hour drive from Cape Town.
“ ‘You don’t know what it’s like to be poor,” people tell me. Yes, I do! I was poor! We had nothing,’ he told me in his second-hand shop in Cape Town. ‘My mother ran a boarding house. She took in poor blacks and gave them food. For that we were known as kaffir boeties. But the world didn’t know anything of that. The world demanded that we hand over our country. They had sanctions against us. So we had to do it. And so what happened ten years ago was a disaster. And where is the world now? You know they’ve been killing farmers?’
‘I heard about a thousand white farmers have been killed in ten years,’ I said.
He howled at me, ‘Twice that number! The world doesn’t care. I say to Jews, “This is our holocaust! This is our genocide!” They say, “You deserve it.” You have seen this?’
He opened Volksmoord/Genocide, a book of photographs, grisly dismemberments, decapitations and maimings, the text by Haltingh Fourie, in Afrikaans and English. Not much text was needed to know that what was being depicted were the murders of white farmers by African vigilantes in the hinterland. The crime-scene photographs were so horrific I had to turn away.
‘This is happening on our farms right now,’ Swanie said. ‘They think they can drive me out, but I am not going anywhere. Not to Australia, thank you very much. My people have been here for three hundred years! No one cares.’
‘I’m listening to you, aren’t I?’ I said.
‘No one is writing about this,’ Swanie said.
‘What do you want people to write about?’
‘The genocide,’ he said, and tapped the picture of a disemboweled and headless farmer in Volksmoord. He gave a rueful laugh. ‘I know Mandela. I wanted to complain. He said, “Call my secretary.” So I did. The secretary says, “Who are you?” I tell her who I am, Swanepoel, such and such. She says, “Where were you for twenty-seven years when we were in prison?” I says, “Lady, what prison were you in?” She says, “What?” I says, “Don’t what me!” She says, “You Boers,” and hangs up.’
‘How do you know Mandela?’ I asked.
‘Because he was around,’ Swanie said. ‘He wasn’t in prison for twenty-seven years. He was on Robben Island for nineteen and then he had a very easy time of it in Victor Verster over in Drakenstein’ – I had seen it myself on the way back from Franschoek, a rural prison now renamed in the heart of the wine country. ‘Mandela was living in the warder’s house, like a bloody summer camp. And he lied to me.’
Since there was no way I could verify how well Swanie knew Nelson Mandela I changed the subject. But he was so aggrieved, there was no subject for which he did not have a ready-made rant.
‘We’re blamed for everything,’ Swanie said. ‘You know about that march in Cape Town in ninety-two?’
I said I knew nothing of it.
‘They were marching and chanting, “One Boer! One bullet!” Mandela didn’t stop them! And that woman Jabavu! You know her?’
I said I didn’t. But he was in full cry, so what I said hardly mattered.
‘An Indian woman, she wrote a book saying, “If a black was in line waiting to be served in a shop, and a white person entered, the black had to stand aside.” She was talking about District Six, and maybe there was some truth in it. But who owned the shops? Indians! The Jabavus! The Jews! The
Muslims! The Boers never owned shops. We were farmers. We were in the Karoo – in the country, on the farms.’
Swanie was now so angry that he threw down Volksmoord and began to close his shop, slamming the burglar bars, hoisting the metal screen, setting the padlocks in their hasps.
‘I fought in the war – how many of these other bloody people fought in the war?’ he howled. ‘It’s the same as always, like when we were invited to sit at Dingaan’s kraal. “Leave your weapons – we won’t hurt you.” The Boers thought the Zulus were being honest, so they went along. That’s what this is now. It is Dingaan’s kraal. The Boers went along and they were slaughtered!’
Like many another South African his sense of history was immediate and aggrieved. To illustrate betrayal he had plucked an episode from 1838. Dingaan was Shaka the Zulu’s son and successor. And what Swanie did not say was that the Boers in revenge for that bit of trickery massacred 3000 Zulus in the Battle of Blood River – the river so named because its waters frothed incarnadine with Zulu blood.
The District Six that Swanepoel mentioned had been polyglot, multiracial, colorful, a cultural hothouse that was a cross between Catfish Row and the French Quarter. It had occupied about forty acres at the edge of Cape Town center, not far from Swanie’s shop. I met many people who had lived there, who regretted its passing. District Six had represented what the whole of South Africa could become without racial barriers. The big happy community had produced writing and music that was so full of vitality and a spirit of freedom that the white government was worried.