Were this week’s statements of remorse by Amy Biehl’s killers pure expediency – or did they bring us closer to the truth of the past? Gaye Davis was at their amnesty hearing
THE meeting, when it came, was no more than a handshake in one of the corridors leading off the low-ceilinged room high in a central Cape Town block where the amnesty hearing was taking place.
All that morning and for the whole of the previous day, Peter and Linda Biehl had heard the four young men whose hands they briefly held explain why they had come to be party to the murder of the Biehls’ daughter, Amy, the 26-year-old Fulbright scholar and committed democrat, who had told her parents about the courage and determination of South Africa’s disenfranchised young lions.
As Mongezi Manqina, Ntobeko Peni, Easy Nofemela and Vusumzi Ntamo took their seats behind a desk, a phalanx of photographers descended, unleashing a blinding barrage of flashlights at close range and causing them to shrink back in their seats.
In everyone’s memories were Amy Biehl’s last moments as she defended herself from the mob stoning her with bricks, pulling her long blonde hair and kicking her outside a Guguletu service station on August 25 1993, where Manqina rammed a knife under her ribs and into her heart, the force of his thrust carrying the blade to its hilt; the wound – among many – which killed her.
Biehl was preparing to return home to the United States; her farewell party was that night. Friends had warned her the mood in the townships was ugly. Although negotiations for a political settlement were under way, there was anger on the streets. Teachers were demanding recognition for their union; students were mobilising against an exam fee to be levied.
At a political meeting that morning Manqina and his fellows had heard militant speeches: the Pan Africanist Congress’s armed wing, the Azanian People’s Liberation Army (Apla), had proclaimed 1993 as the Year of the Great Storm – and then there was the “one settler, one bullet” slogan of the PAC.
“The order was we should make South Africa ungovernable, burn down government vehicles – and every white person we came across was an enemy,” Peni told the hearing.
After the meeting they’d stoned a truck, tried to burn it and come under fire from white policemen. In Guguletu they found a crowd stoning vehicles, one of them the beige car in which Amy was ferrying colleagues home. When the brick shattered a window and struck her head, she got out and stumbled, bleeding, across the road to the service station.
“We chased after her and I tripped her and she fell down next to a box with the name `Caltex’ on it,” Manqina told the hearing. “I asked one of the persons in the crowd for a knife … and moved towards [her] as she was sitting down in front of the box facing us … I took the knife and stabbed her once.
“I stabbed Amy Biehl because I saw her as a `target’, a `settler’.”
Having made the journey from their Californian home to a country with which they will forever be bonded, Peter and Linda Biehl sat surrounded by friends and former colleagues of their daughter to learn the truth of what happened that day. They did not oppose the amnesty application: they were here, they said, in support of the process – the nation’s attempt at healing itself of its own wounds of the past.
Having lied during their criminal trial, insisting they had nothing to do with the murder, Manqina and his fellow applicants had travelled from prison under armed guard to tell the truth in exchange for the amnesty that would free them from serving the rest of their 18-year jail sentences.
A knot of Pan Africanist Students’ Organisation (Paso) members in one corner of the room greeted them with the PAC’s open-palmed salute. The backs of their T- shirts read: “Dark or blue we shall overcome.”
There is truth and then there is truth. The delicate trowel work of carefully nuanced questions was often blunted by the interpreter’s spade, while the style of the different committee members differed widely. Judge Bernard Ngoepe’s gentle probes for clarity and stated unhappiness with the quality of the interpretation sharply contrasted with Judge Andrew Wilson’s staccato barks.
“Isn’t it that you were involved in a mindless savage attack on this young woman and that it was not politically motivated?” he asked Peni.
“Our killing Amy Biehl had everything to do with politics – the unrest at the time and international attention helped bring South Africa to where we are today,” he replied.
He hadn’t heard Biehl’s colleagues pleading for her to be left alone as she was a comrade, but even if he had, “a white person was a white person in our eyes” and he wouldn’t have acted differently. Paso’s goal was to restore the land to the African people.
“During those days we were told to assist Apla,” said Nofemela. “If you were killing a white person, it’s how we were going to get our land back.” “Yes!” breathed his supporters.
For the truth commission’s lawyer, Robin Brink, the attack could not have been politically motivated. It was rather an act of “wanton brutality, like a pack of sharks smelling blood”.
“No,” said Nofemela, “that’s not true, we are not such things … It’s because she came to Guguletu at a wrong moment … that day we were very emotional and we find Amy in our location.”
As the hearing progressed, it became clear the truth would remain forever open to speculation and dismissal. Each applicant apologised for Biehl’s death. “When I look closely at what I did I realise it was bad – we took part in killing someone we could have used to achieve our own aims … I ask Amy’s parents, friends, relatives – I ask them to forgive me,” said Peni.
But while some of those present found their expressions of remorse expedient, Peter Biehl found in them some of the truth he was searching for and was unsure he’d found.
“What I kept looking for was how close to the truth are we getting, in the sense that the truth and reconciliation process begins with the truth. I can imagine that these four young men were scared to death and under those circumstances would retreat behind their coaching [by their lawyers] as their first line of defence in their fear.”
Yet in their apologies he believed the truth may have been reached: “Remorse is not essential to granting of amnesty,” he said.
Together the Biehls made a statement before the committee, describing their golden, brilliant daughter, the fine athlete and straight-A student who was passionately committed to helping Southern Africa grope its way towards democracy, and whose death left a gaping hole in their lives.
“We have felt that in all of this Amy the person was lost,” Linda Biehl said later. “Amy was a very big part of our lives, we felt it was important people should know who she was. Amy was a person and they [the applicants] are people – the people element was very important to us as well as the political.”