Free We Are Not Such Things by Justine van der Leun Page B

pulled from his truck by a mob of young black locals, stomped, stabbed, and left for dead. Despite the race of the victim, that crime, too, escaped the attention of law enforcement or media. There was neither an investigation nor a single arrest. Later, I was to find out a heretofore unreported and improbable link between that obscure, forgotten crime, with its two decades of pain and suffering that followed, and what happened to Amy that day.

    Sindiswa and Maletsatsi waited forty-five minutes, but nobody would pick them up, so the women trudged back to campus. There they found Amy clearing out her office. They asked her for a lift. Despite her promise to Rhoda to stay away from the townships, Amy agreed to drive Sindiswa and Maletsatsi home.
    “I always say she went because she forgot she was white,” Rhoda told me. As a white person who has spent years doing research and interviews in Gugulethu, I find this alleged slip of memory to be nearly impossible. I am never quite so searingly aware of the color of my skin as when I am in the township.
    In the parking lot, Amy passed by Evaron Orange, a nineteen-year-old cousin of Amy’s roommate, Melanie. He was a baby-faced colored kid with a caterpillar mustache and oiled black hair. He also needed a lift, and so Amy agreed to take Evaron to Athlone, the nearby colored neighborhood where he lived.
    The four loaded into Amy’s dinged-up beige Mazda. Evaron sat in the passenger seat and the two women slipped into the back. The Mazda was all muddy tones: tan fabric seats, dull brown carpeting, a dark brown dashboard. Its only pop of color was a bright yellow Cape Town license plate, its only adornment a squat rectangular sticker plastered on the back right bumper, just below the taillight, printed with unadorned black capital letters: OUR LAND NEEDS PEACE.
    Amy drove her friends southwest on Modderdam Road, passing the bleak industrial yards of Parow and the Bishop Lavis ganglands. She drove by the flat, crumbling pastel houses that lined the broad thoroughfare, and at the four-way intersection that separates the black townships of Gugulethu, KTC, and Crossroads from the colored townships of Bonteheuwel and Valhalla Park, she turned left onto NY1. NY stands for Native Yard, the lingering apartheid designation for streets in black townships, all of which were simply initialed and numbered: Native Yard 32, Native Yard 58, Native Yard 79, Native Yard 111.

    Amy had been to the townships dozens of times, to drink and dance at the clubs and shebeens, the taverns that provided relief from the daily grind of apartheid and poverty, and to visit friends and conduct research. Driving along NY1, she passed the brown-brick Shoprite Center. She continued over a small overpass that stretches above the N2 highway and connects the northern corners of Gugulethu to the rest of the world. On that day, as rush hour neared, traffic was congested on NY1, which offers only a single slender northbound lane and a single slender southbound lane, hemmed in between sidewalks. After the turnoff, Amy followed a small truck down NY1.
    She drove past the shoulder-high grass on the outskirts of Gugulethu. She slowed down as she went by the police barracks contained behind razor wire, past the long municipal buildings that comprised the elementary school. Now there was traffic. She edged nearer to the Caltex service station laid out on the corner of NY1 and NY123. The station was positioned just off the road, its six pumps sheltered by a red cement overhang and set next to a low gray-brick building where the cashiers worked behind bulletproof glass.
    A quarter mile past the Caltex sat the Gugulethu police station. Amy planned to drop the women near the police station, where she could safely turn around and go off to Athlone with Evaron. But just before Amy reached the Caltex, the truck in front of her stopped short. She pressed the brake.
    “Ride, ride,” Evaron said.
    “I can’t.” Amy gestured before her