We Are Not Such Things: A Murder in a South African Township and the Search for Truth and Reconciliation

“She lose her mind because she think deep thing about how other people have boys but she don’t have boys now,” Easy explained, and the woman didn’t unnerve me anymore.

On NY111, a pile of garbage rose on a corner, a sort of open-air market for a clientele of junk dealers and junkies, who picked through it halfheartedly. Goats nibbled on diapers and moldy bread. There had been metal dumpsters here, but thieves kept carting them away in the night and selling them to scrap dealers, and so the municipality had apparently given up. Apart from the community trash heap, the street was decent enough: chipped, single-level brick-and-mortar government-issue homes running down one side of the block, a patchy field and a three-room community center on the other. Inside the community center was a bulletin board covered with photocopied pictures of African slaves taken from history books and old magazines: the severed head of a young woman, displayed on a metal platter, her eyes rolled back and her mouth hanging open; emaciated men and small boys in traditional dress chained together by their necks; a handcuffed man sitting upright inside a net, staring out; a white general commanding shirtless black men to perform push-ups; a man with a dog’s muzzle tied around his mouth and a metal collar around his neck. A colorful rendering of a rosy-cheeked white Jesus with green eyes and flowing blond hair had been tacked up below the words THIS IS NOT GOD. Nearby were pasted black-and-white pictures of three African kings: King Hintsa, King Shaka Zulu, and King Sekhukhune. Scattered throughout were images of the raised, clenched fist made famous by Mandela, above the Xhosa and Zulu word for power: AMANDLA.

During these sessions, Easy talked just a little about his murder trial, and even less about his years in prison. He focused on recent times. He’d met the Biehls, gotten a job at their foundation, fallen in love with a pretty girl, had Aphiwe. Aphiwe’s mom, nineteen when she gave birth, left Easy and took the baby to go live in a shack. One morning before work, Easy went to visit his daughter, whom he found alone but for an eight-year-old cousin to look after her. He bundled Aphiwe in a blanket and spirited her to his mother’s house. He held her naked to his chest, “like the kangaroo.”