Free We Are Not Such Things by Justine van der Leun

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 the months, discussing politics, feminism, policy—and boyfriends, sex, and gossip. On the day of her death, Amy was clearing out her workspace at UWC, organizing her papers, and packing up any spare notes as she prepared to head back to America. She used a university phone to call Rhoda, who was working from home that day, and they spoke for nearly two hours.

    “Rhoda, I’m so sentimental for this place,” Amy said as their conversation finally neared an end. She had filled her suitcases with patterned cloths for friends at home and CDs of local musicians. She had sold her car, which she planned to deliver to the buyer the next day. Rhoda and Amy agreed to meet up for lunch one last time before Amy flew out. As they hung up, Rhoda told Amy to stay away from the townships. The radio was abuzz with news of protests, rallies, and stonings. Marching kids were smashing up government property and attacking government-employed health workers. Amy knew all this. She was lucky, she remarked, that she’d made it all this time without anything ever happening to her.
    “There’s a lot of unrest,” Rhoda ordered in her clipped voice. “You will not go in today. Do you understand?”

    Amy said she understood. She was well aware of the thousands of lives lost, most of them black, in the fireballing political strife of