“Rhoda, I find it difficult to leave your country. South Africa is in my heart and I am definitely coming back in 1994 to be part of the elections. Will you read my essay on Women and Democracy before I leave? I value your advice.”

“Sure. Let’s meet tomorrow before you leave and I’ll read your essay. Amy, the townships are ungovernable and white health workers have been attacked, so promise me you will not go to Guguletu today.”

“I promise. I am far too busy clearing my office and I need to rush home to do some last-minute packing. Going into the townships is out of the question! See you at lunch tomorrow before I go.”

That was the end of a two hour conversation the day before Amy was due to leave. But that was also the end of an eight-month conversation about women and democracy, the struggle, Codesa, about love and romance, about Julia, my daughter, about Melanie, her land-lady, and Solange her daughter, with whom Amy was very close.

That day I intended taking my two Swedish guests into the township, despite my warnings to Amy. Fortunately, my one guest fell ill and asked whether we should not go to Kirstenbosch instead, the botanical gardens. So there we went. When we returned around 17h30, the phone rang and I was told that Amy was bludgeoned to death by a group of marauding PAC youth, shouting “One Settler, One bullet.”

The one day Amy decided not to go into the townships, she was killed mercilessly. While packing her books in her office and saying good-bye to all the friends she had made during her one year on a Fullbright Scholarship, her close friends, Evan and Maletsatsi and another, returned to her office after having hitch-hiked a lift for about 30-40 minutes, and failed, they begged her just to drop them off on NY1. “You do not have to take us to our individual homes just drop us off on the Guguletu Main Road.”

Contrary to her decision, she then took them to NY1, when the hapless incident took place. Amy did it because she forgot that she was white, because she loved those friends. In the short space of time that Amy was here, she had more black friends than I had. She knew where all the clubs were in the townships. She would go and dance and party with her friends. She loved the beach; she ran marathons; she played hard but worked equally hard. She was the model student, researching, following all the leads, taking advice, writing essays, volunteering to organize and help with conferences, writing up notes of conferences, and generally monitoring the debates at Codesa and the negotiations between the political parties prior to 1994.

I was kept abreast of debates on women’s rights and the Constitution; discussions about abortion versus rights to bodily integrity, pro-life versus pro-choice; customary law versus rights to equality; customs versus modernity; formal versus substantive rights to equality; public versus private violence translated as, domestic violence. Those were heady days and what was happening in the theme committees were all relayed to me by Amy as I was supervising her thesis, yet too busy to keep in touch with all the streams of dialogue that went on between the various parties and constituencies. She told of how the IFP women came in at the 11th hour, demanding that customary law be subservient to the equality clause.

Amy had worked for the National Democratic Institute in America, monitoring transitional states and while working there she met a number of South Africans at a conference on democracy, amongst others, Bridgitte Mabandla, who invited her to come and work with Dullah Omar’s Community Law Centre, on the Gender Project.

When Amy came, she avoided me, clearly having been warned by the women in the struggle that while “Rhoda was a feminist, she was far too critical of the movement.” Many times when I tried to befriend her, Amy was cool towards me. I was not too bothered by this, because it was typical of white American or European students, who came to South Africa, to romanticize our country until they lived here for some time and discovered the belly of the beast for themselves. The belly of the LEFT beast was often the mirror image of the belly of the RIGHT.

So, one day as I was sitting in my office minding my own business, I looked up and there was Amy Biehl. “I have done some work on women and democracy for some months and no one is able to help me or read my work, or respond to the issues raised, or give me advice.”

“Sure,” said I, took her essay and promptly started reading it in her presence, took a red pen, underlined things that needed to be revised, and started asking questions, directing her to relevant literature, and advising her to speak with a number of politicians across the racial and party political lines.

Amy was gobsmacked. This Rhoda, more sinned against than sinning, “is the first person within the movement to take her work seriously and to give her critical comment.” Who is this Rhoda? Why is she so vilified, when so efficient? Why is she called a bourgeois western feminist, when her roots are firmly embedded in District Six, where she was born? Thus, began a close and deep friendship that few people, except my daughter understood. Amy began confiding in me about her boyfriend and her family, about her South African family she stayed with, and about her feelings of The Movement.

Once, very homesick, I advised her to invite her American boyfriend to Paris and to meet him halfway. Amy had a ball and when she returned I organized a lunch for her with all the UWC girl-friends and we prized personal details from her, as only girls can do, about her reunion with her boyfriend!!! Blushingly, Amy opened up and told us all the salacious intricacies of her romance, knowing that she could trust us.

As a white middle class American woman, Amy had to navigate her stay very carefully through the murky waters of racial and gender politics, anti-Americanism within the movement, class differences, the turbulent politics of the early ‘90s, and I was one of the few she could confide in and bare her soul to. She felt hurt when she was told by comrades, “You Americans want to take over” when she just honestly offered her services to help with conferences or seminars. By then she thought she was a comrade and that her origins were no longer an issue. By the time she was due to leave, she was ready to reconnect with her family whom she was longing for, but she had also planted very deep roots within South Africa and when she said to me, the day she was brutally murdered, “I cannot leave your country; South Africa is deeply etched in my heart,” my daughter, Julia and I found it difficult to make meaning of those heartwarming words that came to take on a brutal significance as she lay covered in a sheet on that cold Guguletu pavement. To this day, those words have come to haunt me.

And when I saw her body on television that night, wrapped in a sheet, and the smashed-in window perpetrated by blood-thirsty youth, I wondered whether her deep love for SA, translated into her words, “I cannot leave your country” meant exactly that. Did Amy become the sacrificial lamb of the ANC calling for Operation Barcelona? Shocked by the consequences, such a deadly call to “ungovernability” could wreak, the ANC called off Operation Barcelona. The ANC, of course, secretly “rejoiced” that it was PAC and not ANC youth that were responsible for the dastardly deed.

The lesson for political parties was, never incite angry mobs with slogans if one is not prepared to take responsibility for the actions taken in that name or if one has not thought seriously about the consequences. This is a lesson that political parties across the world refuse to learn, not to speak of South Africa!

Rhoda Kadalie