We Are Not Such Things - Justine van der Leun Page 0,21

all, and she was conventionally pretty. She had long dirty-blond hair, straight teeth, and a spray of freckles across her delicate nose. She had fashionable clothes bought by her father and a sense of style inherited from her mother, who in her later years became a couture saleswoman at Neiman Marcus in well-heeled Newport Beach. She was slender from years of competitive sports. She was confident in her opinions but modest and allergic to causing offense. She had good posture and a decent handshake. She was not above telling a bad joke.

Amy had not wandered blindly into Gugulethu that August day, some ignorant missionary who thought her smile could cut through the fury of a disenchanted and dispossessed generation of blacks. She knew there was a storm brewing in South Africa. She’d majored in African Studies at Stanford, and at graduation she had plastered the words FREE MANDELA in masking tape across her cap, which her grandmother, a Midwestern Republican, kept trying to pick off. After Stanford, as an employee of the nonprofit National Democratic Institute, Amy had traveled to South Africa, Zambia, the Ivory Coast, Ethiopia, Burundi, and what is today the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In 1989, she spent time in Namibia, which was holding free elections as it transitioned to independence from South African rule. She traveled there again in 1991 to study the early workings of a new parliamentary democracy. She even went on a jog through Lusaka, Zambia’s capital, with Jimmy Carter.

By the time Amy landed in South Africa in September 1992, she was well versed in the long-standing issues of liberty, race, and rights that had shaped postcolonial African discourse. She was especially interested in the country as apartheid began to crumble and Nelson Mandela’s rise to the presidency became increasingly inevitable. She wanted to be in the middle of the action. So when Amy landed her Fulbright, she packed her bags and Linda drove her to Los Angeles International. In the waiting area, Amy fell into an engrossing conversation with another passenger, who was also up-to-date on South African politics. Distracted, she hugged Linda goodbye. Though they spoke on the phone during Amy’s ten months in South Africa, the last words Amy delivered to Linda in person were a parting command as she boarded the plane: “Don’t cry, Mom.”

In Cape Town, Amy immersed herself in her research topic: the rights and roles of women, primarily black and colored women, in an emerging democracy. She traveled into the depths of the townships and witnessed firsthand the squalor in which black people were forced to live under apartheid law. Diplomatically inclined and tactful, Amy rarely expressed, verbally, the effect this inequality and racism had on her. Perhaps she knew it was not her place to complain, that the emotions of a white American on the subject of state-sanctioned racism were hardly relevant. But sometimes she let it rip. Once Amy and her boyfriend, Scott Meinert, who was visiting from the States for a couple of weeks, wandered into an all-white bar wearing T-shirts emblazoned with Mandela’s face. The patrons unhappily received two white kids with a black opposition leader plastered across their chests, and some spit a few under-the-breath comments at the pair: “Like the darkies, do you?” Amy ignored them, drank her beer, and strode back to the parking lot, where she got in her car and started hitting the dashboard with all her might and letting fly a stream of profanities. She was furious at herself for taking the high road.

While in Namibia, Amy met some rising ANC dignitaries, including Brigitte Mabandla, who would become minister of justice and constitutional development in post-apartheid South Africa. The late 1980s and 1990s were prime periods in the history of what is referred to as the Struggle, or the long fight for freedom. Back then, high-ranking ANC members were often also professors, and Mabandla headed up the Community Law Center at the University of the Western Cape. Inspired, Amy chose to conduct her South African Fulbright-funded research at the University of the Western Cape instead of the more prestigious and whiter University of Cape Town. At UWC, a university historically designated for students of color, she drafted memos for Dullah Omar, Mandela’s lawyer who would become the president’s minister of justice, and for Rhoda Kadalie, an intellectual and activist who would become Mandela’s commissioner of human rights. Rhoda was then a single mother in her late thirties, and she and Amy grew especially close over