We Are Not Such Things Read Online Free Page A

daughter of one of the four men convicted and imprisoned for her daughter Amy Biehl’s death on August 25, 1993.
    The group arrived at the marble cross, the kids stopped playing, and everyone briefly grappled with what to do next. Somebody had placed upon the memorial a blown-up old photo of the late Peter Biehl, a smiling, white-haired man with the chunked-out build of a retired college football player, flanked by a young Easy flashing a peace sign and a young Ntobeko grinning broadly; it had been taken during their first meeting and was weighed down with a cracked brick, of the sort that had been used to bludgeon Amy. Amy’s old Cape Town university colleagues had offered to arrange a memorial day a while back but hadn’t done anything, so this whole makeshift show had been put together on the fly in the days since Linda had landed a week earlier.
    “Who wants to give a speech?” Linda asked. A curly-haired former colleague of Amy’s stood up, said a few words about her departed friend, let out a sob, and threw herself into Linda’s arms. Linda patted her while maintaining a close-mouthed smile; the photographer snapped away. Some others filed before the small crowd and spoke about the loveliness of Amy, the strength of Linda, and the importance of grace and transformation. Nancy, holding her STOP THE SENCELESS VIOLENCE sign, took the stage for twenty minutes, during which her husband shot her a stream of “cut-it-short” glares, which she ignored.
    “Amy was a beautiful soul!” Nancy said. She wore wire-rim glasses and long colorful earrings.
    I stood away from the group and leaned against a white sedan. Mzi Noji, a middle-aged, unemployed ex-militant, ex-con, and army veteran, arrived on foot, wearing his green cap, embroidered with the phrase UNIVERSAL MESSAGE over a Rastafarian flag. Mzi was a lifelong social activist, raised during the height of the anti-apartheid struggle. Even today, when he claimed that he wanted to get on with his life, he continually found himself embroiled in protests, marches, negotiations, meetings, neighborhood committees, and organizations.

    I’d met Mzi by chance a year earlier, and he had become an unexpected kindred spirit, as well as my guide, my translator, my friend. He accompanied me on my expeditions and investigations into the Amy Biehl story, often driving my car and dredging up forgotten people from within the depths of the townships. Mzi was also to be my key to unraveling the truth, or as much truth as possible, of what really happened on that fateful day twenty years before.
    Until I met Mzi at a burger shop downtown, I had been tracking the same story that every journalist before me had written, except that my aim had been to tell for the first time the full tale as it stretched over two decades. But Mzi informed me that he believed that this long-accepted story of the circumstances of Amy’s death was not exactly accurate. His revelation had led me, in a series of nearly unbelievable coincidences, to a meeting I had had the day before. After months of frenzied searching, I had finally found an old and ruined man who had also been in Gugulethu on August 25, 1993, though few remembered him. Nobody had ever told his account of that day, nor made the chilling links between what had happened to him and what had happened to Amy Biehl five hours later and a quarter mile away. The old man knew something about brutal mobs and racial violence, and he was the final piece in the jigsaw I had been painstakingly piecing together for two years.
    Mzi sidled up next to me, his cap pulled low over his deep-set eyes. He was tall and strong, with a little paunch he was self-conscious about, so he was always abstaining from chocolate milkshakes even though he loved them. We each crossed our arms on the roof of the sedan and rested our chins on our forearms. By then, Easy had reappeared and parked the van to the side of the memorial, and was hiding behind us, hoping he would not be