We Are Not Such Things - Justine van der Leun Page 0,205
Was Vusumzi Ntamo—impoverished, easily manipulated—a guilty part of the frothing mob or just an easy-to-arrest black man? How many others surrounded Amy, and how many of them slipped back into the township forever, to be swallowed by the place? Was Amy a naive student who made a bad choice? Was she a rights fighter who died as she made a stand for equality? Were her friends, who wanted a ride home so badly, victims as well, or had they acted irresponsibly when they brought her into the volatile township?
Linda, it occurred to me, knew about the uncertainty of the South African narrative. She had said as much to that radio interviewer in St. Louis, months after she cut contact with me. The interviewer had called Ntobeko a killer, and Linda had intercepted.
“He was not maybe a perpetrator that actually committed the crime,” she said. “So you use the word killer, but I don’t use the word killer….You know, as much as we tell the story cut and dry, there are all these little sidebars and things that say many of them could have wielded a knife or thrown a stone, but eyewitnesses came forward and kind of picked out some. Ntobeko ran away, was not tried with the other three. But it’s more complicated than just—”
The interviewer, apologizing, cut her off. “These stories always are,” he said, and the conversation veered away.
People, myself included, have a blind spot just here. When Easy, questioned before the TRC in 1997, insisted he had “stabbed at” Amy, but could not be sure if he had really stabbed her, one commissioner had tried to clarify Easy’s actual role in the crime, but Easy’s lawyer led the hearing away from that suspicious detail. I had read the term “stabbed at” many times, and regarded it curiously, but for at least the first year of my research, I simply justified it to myself as the verbal quirk of a court interpreter. White detectives, followed by a white prosecutor and a white judge, had decided Easy’s role in the crime and convicted and imprisoned him; later he admitted to that crime before a diverse group of sympathetic commissioners. And after that, he and Ntobeko had built lives upon this version of the past. They were reformed killers and ex-radicals making good with their victim’s parents; this was recorded for posterity. How could it be otherwise?
Linda also knew that the old records weren’t the whole truth. She had told me this when I was haranguing her for them over the phone. “Nobody wants the truth,” she had said. “Those TRC records aren’t the truth. They are graphic and ugly. The truth is that the country was still in turmoil. She represented the oppressor, and her white face was all that was wrong with the country, and she was killed.”
Newspaper articles and official papers did their part in shaping the story. But they never told of Daniel down the street, his head stomped in. They never mentioned Monks, the lookalike brother. Miss A didn’t figure in as a multidimensional person—a feminist with ANC proclivities, sick of the gangsters in her community, in contact with the police. Nonetheless, the written word—by the court, by journalists—became the mold, and history was solidified within it.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission also created history, a reality for the new schoolbooks. The ANC-aligned progenitors of the TRC wanted to reclaim the past from the National Party, to wipe clean decades of propaganda. Men and women who had once been categorized terrorists were rebranded freedom fighters, and hidden atrocities were brought to light, all captured on color TV and in multivolume reports. But the TRC, despite its name and its marketing campaign, was not purely an exercise in truth telling, nor was it a vehicle for exposure. The TRC, the result of a negotiation between former enemies, was actually designed to circumvent a civil war and help build a nation. Nearly a quarter century has passed since the events took place, and as Easy told me long ago at the Hungry Lion franchise in the mall in downtown Cape Town: “The truth is not anymore existing for years and years.”
The countryside had been so black that once we reached town, even the pitted paved roads and feeble streetlamps seemed like luxuries. We drove to the Nofemela family house in Lady Frere for a quick supper of samp and beans. Wowo wanted to wake at 4 A.M. to drive back to Cape Town, since he was worried that Monks might need him. I negotiated him up to a 6 A.M. start time, and then Easy and I walked down the street to the neighbor’s place. Only a few houses let off a faint yellow glow, and the sky was clear, starry, and infinite.
“Remember in one of our first meetings, when you told me you trained out here for APLA?” I asked. “And you told me you could take me to the training camps?”
“I remember.”
“You never trained for APLA, so what was your plan?”
Easy began to chuckle and hooked his arm in mine. “Nomzamo, no, I will take you exactly to the place. I know exactly what’s going on. I will tell you exactly the place that the people used to go and train.”
“People, maybe, but not you.”
“Me also.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Serious, serious. I know exactly what’s happening here years ago.”
We knocked on the door of the schoolteacher’s house, and she welcomed us in. She had warmed the samovar so that we had hot water. We brushed our teeth and washed in shifts. The little oil heater pumped out as much heat as it could manage, but we each dressed for a night in an igloo, me with a hood tied around my neck and Easy with his hat pulled over his ears. We climbed into our respective twin beds, and huddled beneath woolen blankets.
“In Xhosa we say: Don’t talk the truth on top of the fire,” Easy said. “It means don’t ever try to talk the truth, even if they hold you over fire. The fire make you strong so you never surrender. But I know you, Nomzamo. You did find out the truth. I tell you a straight truth. I’m not now joking.”
It was silent in Lady Frere, set in a former homeland, the birthplace of the Nofemela clan, not far from Nelson Mandela’s ancestral village. The borders had been drawn and rearranged by Europeans, and the town had been named after the wife of a Welsh colonial employee who had warred against Xhosas and Zulus for the British cause. It was situated on a bleak plain, hemmed in by red hills, dotted with sheep. The low-lying house in which we were staying had been set on land once belonging to blacks, then ceded to whites, and then abandoned and given back to blacks, who still had to leave to work in the far-off cities so their families could survive. It was dark in the room, and peaceful.
“No, I’ll never know the true story,” I said from beneath my mountain of blankets.
“I told you before: Is life, this. Full of tricks, disappointment. Love directed in the right direction. Love directed in the wrong direction. People have two side or three or more side. Don’t listen too much to what anyone is saying,” Easy said.
“Including you, apparently.”
“Including me,” he said, and laughed loudly, and then we went to sleep.