We Are Not Such Things - Justine van der Leun Page 0,27

Evaron quivering on the asphalt. He was colored, which meant he was enough of a target in a pinch. The boy ran at Evaron, stabbing in his direction. Evaron was neither a fighter nor an athlete, but he moved calmly away from each swoosh, some unknown instinct or force guiding him.

“When you see death in front of your face, you don’t care if you believe in God or not: you pray,” Evaron told me. “I prayed, and I think my prayers were answered.”

After a few seconds, the eyes of Evaron’s assailant widened with shock and he ran away without explanation. Evaron turned again toward Amy. “She was being butchered to death.”

A scrawny slip of a teenager with dark skin had grabbed a bunch of Amy’s hair to steady her, and, balancing himself upon her legs, rained down on her head with a brick, slamming it into her skull once, twice, three times. He stood up and kicked her with all the strength he could muster, landing a blow to her torso, and then bent down again with his brick.

“Like wild animals,” Amy’s friend Maletsatsi told an American news team several years later.

Others muscled in, some short, light-skinned boys with bricks. They wanted a part of the action. Then the handsome man who had tripped Amy pushed his way into the center of the mob and he, too, brought down a large stone upon her head. He turned to a friend on the outskirts of the group.

“Give me your knife,” he demanded in Xhosa. His friend handed over a six-inch switchblade. The others stepped away to give the man space. He knelt down on Amy’s thighs.

“What did I do?” Amy asked. “I’m sorry.”

He plunged the knife, all the way to its hilt, into Amy’s body, just beneath her left breast, puncturing the soft blue-white skin, inserting the blade straight into her heart.

The Gugulethu police station on NY1 is about a quarter mile from the Caltex. At around 4:40 P.M. that winter Wednesday, a rangy young cop named Leon Rhodes was sitting in a police truck. Back in the 1990s, the South African Police often drove small yellow pickups with narrow cages built into the back flatbeds, where criminals were placed for transport. They still have similar trucks, and I once saw one at that very Caltex, where a cop was filling its tires with air. A shirtless handcuffed man, missing a couple of teeth, sat in the back, wailing loudly. I peered in, before the cop waved me away.

“Will they take the handcuffs off soon?” I asked Easy, who was with me at the time.

“No, they gonna punish him, throw tear gas in, leave him until someone feel for him and unlock him,” Easy said, with some exaggeration. “Now he’s facing layers and layers and layers of pain.”

Rhodes was one of the only white police officers in Gugulethu, twenty-nine years old and a ten-year veteran. He’d been working in Gugulethu for most of his career. He had just returned to the station from following up on a radio call that reported a truck being stoned in a far corner of the township. Rhodes sat in his vehicle in the driveway, filling out paperwork. Suddenly, a harried man rushed through the open metal gates and rapped on the driver’s side window. Rhodes looked up.

“You must seriously and urgently go down the road,” the man said in Afrikaans, a language black people were required to learn at school. “They’re stoning a vehicle with a white lady by the Caltex.”

Rhodes revved the car and took a sharp turn out of the station, immediately crossed the light at Lansdowne Road, and sped north toward the garage. He could see stones and glass glinting on the road in the distance. A crowd of people was gathered around the gas station, spanning up and down the street. On the residential side, to Rhodes’s left, young people were chanting and toyi-toyi-ing. The people in the street made way, and Rhodes drove through.

As the yellow police vehicle approached, the mob by the station broke up, its members disappearing into the slim side streets, over back fences, over walls, through alleys, into settlements, into houses. The toyi-toyi of some spectators grew less enthusiastic and the chants diminished. Rhodes could see a white woman now, standing, supported by two black women and a colored man. Her small chest rose and fell. She let out no words, only sobs.

A battered car lay on its side, pitted by stones, splattered with petrol. Rhodes