Paul Theroux - Dark Star Safari

New Rest was adjacent to an equally squalid but older settlement, called Guguletu, a place of old low beat-up brick houses. Guguletu had achieved prominence in 1993 when a 26-year-old Californian, Amy Biehl, was killed here. She had been a Stanford graduate, living in South Africa as a volunteer in voter registration for the following year’s free election, and had driven three African friends home to the township as a favor. Seeing her white face, a mob of African boys (‘dozens’) screamed in eagerness, for this was a black township and she was white prey. Her car was showered with stones and stopped, she was dragged from it. Her black women friends pleaded with the mob to spare her. ‘She’s a comrade!’ Amy herself appealed to her assailants. She was harried viciously, beaten to the ground, her head smashed with a brick, and she was stabbed in the heart — killed like an animal.

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.