result, which endured, seemed to be that a group of people, using rumors passed down from those who had visited abroad, had more or less imagined a collection of styles and manners. The older set still adored frilly and opulent furniture set up in odd configurations and stared down upon by a collection of stern, literal oil paintings.
Linda talked about her love of jazz and art history and about her grandkids. One was an actress. Two were star athletes. One played the drums. Her youngest granddaughter, then five years old, reminded everyone of a little Amy: spirited, energetic, sweet. Sometimes the little girl, absorbed in play, would look up and say, “I’m with Aunt Amy now.”
In 2012, Linda was trying to pull out of the foundation and devote herself entirely to her family in America, but she seemed incapable of truly making the move, tethered to the country that took her daughter from her. She talked affectionately about Easy and Ntobeko, whom she seemed to care for as if they were her own occasionally wayward and disobedient middle-aged man-children. Ntobeko was her favored son; his many accomplishments, large and small, filled her with pride. She talked about how these new relationships had cost her friends from the old days, people who had known her before she became, suddenly, a part of South African history and a paragon of reconciliation.
“I myself am a figure of curiosity and controversy,” she said, sighing. “Sometimes I wonder how and why did I ever do this?”
For the next four months, in an attempt to acquire a satisfactory answer to the question Linda had posed, I interviewed her over the phone. I visited a professor at the University of Cape Town and convinced him to sign off on a guest researcher pass. I spent weeks in the airy college library, combing through files, books, old clippings, and reports. I relentlessly chased after Easy and Ntobeko, with varying degrees of success, as they both tried politely to avoid me.
After a few months of research, I was convinced that I’d stumbled upon a story that needed telling—or, perhaps more honestly, that I desperately needed to tell. Amy was my entrée into this strange world. She had come here with purpose, just twenty-five years old when she left home, and she had tried her best to understand a pulsing South Africa in the midst of revolution. She had died in her quest. I had come here without any such noble purpose, thirty years old, and now I, too, wanted to understand a new South Africa.
The men I would be writing about were the ultimate “other”: poor, black, South African men, convicted murderers, reformed radicals living in a sort of modern wasteland, at once nursing the wounds of apartheid and—if you believed the “Africa Rising” magazine covers that hit the stands annually, emblazoned with the acacia tree set against an incandescent setting sun—heading toward a brighter future. The men had grown up with little education in an urban tribal culture that placed abiding value on ancient Xhosa traditions. And they now lived in this new rainbow nation, that enduring nickname given to post-apartheid South Africa by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who was trying to celebrate the country’s racial and cultural mishmash. I hoped that in understanding these men, I could understand how a country broken apart by a system of colonization, segregation, and dehumanization could heal, reconcile, and move forward. This small, fierce story would tell the larger story of the New South Africa, and of the redemptive power of forgiveness in the face of tragedy.
But you won’t read about that here. That old narrative, the one I was following as I began my research, fell ill early on and perished about a year in. In its stead, a different story emerged.
When I started my work, I didn’t understand the complexities of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, or of South Africa, or, I suppose, of true-life stories in general. I assumed there were clear-cut narratives in the country, with good and bad protagonists and antagonists, and that I would simply tell one of them. But as the Johannesburg-born journalist Rian Malan wrote, “In South Africa, it’s like a law of nature: there’s no such thing as a true story here. The facts might be correct, but the truth they embody is always a lie to someone else….Atop of all this, we live in a country where mutually annihilating truths coexist amicably. We are a light unto nations. We are an abject