‘At that time my spirit just says I must kill the white’

The following is an extract from Justine van der Leun’s book, We Are Not Such Things, A South African Township, the Murder of a Young American, and the Search for Truth and Reconciliation, published by HarperCollins and distributed in South Africa by Jonathan Ball Publishers. THE journalists and documentarians and small-time film producers filed out of the van and toward the St Columba Anglican Church, a grey brick building on the corner of NY 1 and NY 109 in Gugulethu, a township 17km outside of Cape Town’s city centre. Easy and I stayed behind, he in the driver’s seat and me on the passenger’s side.

Easy was a short, compact man with butterscotch skin and a large, round, clean- shaven head. At 42, he had this weird ability to shape-shift. Did he look like a hardened old gangster? Yes, some days. Did he look like an adorable, harmless child? Yes, some days. If I look at photos I’ve snapped of him over the past few years, he is men

and his mom had spent months tending to it. After that, for a few years at least, Easy felt like it made him look particularly tough.

I liked Easy very much. I won’t pretend otherwise. But then again: precisely 20 years before our meeting in the van, on August 25, 1993, and approximately 15 yards away, Easy had been part of a mob that had hunted down a young white American woman. If you plucked her out of that moment in history and slotted me in, my fate would have likely been the same. Easy chased her through the streets, chanting the slogan “one settler, one bullet”, and hurled giant, jagged bricks. He stabbed at her as she begged for her life. She died, bleeding from her head and her chest, on the pavement just across the road.

At least this is the crime Easy repeatedly claimed to have committed. He was convicted of her murder, and sentenced to 18 years in jail. He’d done it, he publicly stated, because “during that time my spirit just says I must kill the white”. The dead woman was named Amy Biehl, and she was 26 years old.

Once we finished our conversation, Easy and I hopped out of the van. He locked the door and patted the hood. The vehicle was a shiny silver donation from a local auto dealership that said across the side in bold letters: The Amy Biehl Foundation.

PICTURE: DAVID RITCHIE Last year, on August 25 was the 22nd anniversary of Amy Biehl’s death. The Amy Biehl Foundation opened new premises in Sybrand Park where it runs its Entrepreneurial Enterprise Skills Development programme.