We Are Not Such Things: The Murder of a Young American, a South African Township, and the Search for Truth and Reconciliation

by Justine van der Leun

Overview

A gripping investigation in the vein of the podcast Serial—a summer nonfiction pick by Entertainment Weekly and The Wall Street Journal

Justine van der Leun reopens the murder of a young American woman in South Africa, an iconic case that calls into question our understanding of truth and reconciliation, loyalty, justice, race, and class.

“Timely . . . gripping, explosive . . . the kind of obsessive forensic investigation—of the clues, and into the soul of society—that is the legacy of highbrow sleuths from Truman Capote to Janet Malcolm.”—The New York Times Book Review

“A masterpiece of reported nonfiction . . . Justine van der Leun’s account of a South African murder is destined to be a classic.”—Newsday

The story of Amy Biehl is well known in South Africa: The twenty-six-year-old white American Fulbright scholar was brutally murdered on August 25, 1993, during the final, fiery days of apartheid by a mob of young black men in a township outside Cape Town. Her parents’ forgiveness of two of her killers became a symbol of the Truth and Reconciliation process in South Africa. Justine van der Leun decided to introduce the story to an American audience. But as she delved into the case, the prevailing narrative started to unravel. Why didn’t the eyewitness reports agree on who killed Amy Biehl? Were the men convicted of the murder actually responsible for her death? And then van der Leun stumbled upon another brutal crime committed on the same day, in the very same area. The true story of Amy Biehl’s death, it turned out, was not only a story of forgiveness but a reflection of the complicated history of a troubled country.

We Are Not Such Things is the result of van der Leun’s four-year investigation into this strange, knotted tale of injustice, violence, and compassion. The bizarre twists and turns of this case and its aftermath—and the story that emerges of what happened on that fateful day in 1993 and in the decades that followed—come together in an unsparing account of life in South Africa today. Van der Leun immerses herself in the lives of her subjects and paints a stark, moving portrait of a township and its residents. We come to understand that the issues at the heart of her investigation are universal in scope and powerful in resonance. We Are Not Such Things reveals how reconciliation is impossible without an acknowledgment of the past, a lesson as relevant to America today as to a South Africa still struggling with the long shadow of its history.

Praise for We Are Not Such Things

“Moving . . . a very necessary and occasionally confounding account of a small slice of post-apartheid, post-Mandela South Africa, a country that has largely been forgotten in the international maelstrom of terrorism and mass migration. It is a story of frustrated expectations, broken dreams, endemic greed and corruption, but also indomitable human spirit, told against the backdrop of one of the world’s most beautiful natural settings.”—Minneapolis Star Tribune

“This suspenseful and engrossing story calls into question the simplicities people yearn for when justice is sought for a vicious crime. Justine van der Leun shows how a powerful desire for reconciliation can in fact obscure the truth, a truth we need in order to establish the equity and justice that all people deserve.”—Piper Kerman, author of Orange Is the New Black

“What an achievement! This absorbing account of the pursuit of the truth about an infamous and symbolic crime is consummate in its reach and penetration.”—Norman Rush, author of Mating

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780812994506
Publisher:	Random House Publishing Group
Publication date:	06/28/2016
Pages:	544
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.60(d)

About the Author

Justine van der Leun, after graduating with a degree in journalism from New York University in 2003, spent three years working as an associate editor and writer at O, The Oprah Magazine, before becoming a full-time freelance writer and editor with a focus on narrative nonfiction. She is the author of the travel memoir Marcus of Umbria: What an Italian Dog Taught an American Girl about Love. She and her husband live in Ethiopia.

Erin Bennett is an Earphones Award-winning narrator and a stage actress who played Carlie Roberts in the BBC radio drama Torchwood: Submission. She can be heard on several video games. Regional theater appearances include the Intiman, Pasadena Playhouse, Arizona Theatre Company, A Noise Within, Laguna Playhouse, and the Getty Villa. She trained at Boston University and the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art.

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Editorial Reviews

…where [We Are Not Such Things] is gripping, explosive even, is in the kind of obsessive forensic investigation—of the clues, and into the soul of society—that is the legacy of highbrow sleuths from Truman Capote to Janet Malcolm…[van der Leun's] is deeply compelling as a sleuth and social observer. The book becomes a page turner once she is on the job, whether with Easy or another unforgettable character—a Buddhist vegetarian ex-militant—at her side. The reader leaves it, as one does any well-wrought mystery, with precisely the author's own sense that truth resides in the failure to find it.

The New York Times Book Review - Mark Gevisser

05/16/2016
Van der Leun (Marcus of Umbria) focuses this tour-de-force depiction of modern South Africa on the 1993 death of Amy Biehl, a white American grad student and anti-apartheid activist living in Cape Town who was murdered by a mob as apartheid fell. The narrative follows Van der Leun as she uncovers a series of discrepancies surrounding Biehl’s murder and the subsequent truth and reconciliation commission for Biehl’s killers. Amid the suspense of her investigation, Van der Leun skillfully weaves in glimpses into contemporary South Africa, delving into issues such as the systemic disenfranchisements caused by apartheid, the colonial legacies of the British and the Dutch, rampant police brutality, government ineptitude, and the myriad issues that the country now faces in a fractured system. With a strong voice and exact vocabulary, Van Der Leun expertly juxtaposes the lives of white elites with the grim reality of the black township. Van Der Leun succeeds in telling a complex, nuanced, and perhaps ultimately unknowable story that will captivate all readers. (July)

Publishers Weekly

We Are Not Such Things overturns the conventional narrative of [Amy] Biehl’s murder by trying to establish what actually happened, and by examining its effects, over two decades, on the people involved. In this way, its publication could not be more timely, given how many young black South Africans are now expressing anger at—and betrayal by—the Mandela project. . . . Where [Justine van der Leun’s] book is gripping, explosive even, is in the kind of obsessive forensic investigation—of the clues, and into the soul of society—that is the legacy of highbrow sleuths from Truman Capote to Janet Malcolm. . . . [Van der Leun] can write superbly, and . . . she crafts a close sense of place that rivals the work of Katherine Boo. . . . She is deeply compelling as a sleuth and social observer: The book becomes a page turner. . . . The reader leaves it, as one does any well-wrought mystery, with precisely the author’s own sense that truth resides in the failure to find it.”—The New York Times Book Review

“Extraordinary . . . Justine van der Leun’s account of a South African murder is destined to be a classic. . . . Van der Leun stays with the story, all of it, and crafts a narrative both fuller and more intimate than the one the world was told. She takes nothing away from Amy, whose murder was horrific. But she impresses upon the reader that no one life or death is worth more than another. For this, and for writing a masterpiece of reported nonfiction, she deserves our plaudits and our awe.”—Newsday

“Engaging . . . part whodunnit and part travelogue . . . a deeply researched and thought-provoking book . . . with some penetrating insights.”—The Economist

“[Van der] Leun probes the characterization of [Amy] Biehl as a martyr to the cause of black South African liberation, and examines the murder, the trials, and the afterlives of witnesses, detectives, and the accused. She displays exquisite insights into the inner lives of those involved, the erasure of shameful histories, and the stresses of absolution without accountability.”—The New Yorker

“A 1993 killing sheds light on the complexities of modern South Africa.”—The New York Times Book Review, Editors’ Choice

“Unforgettable . . . a gripping narrative that examines the messiness of truth, the illusory nature of reconciliation, [and] the all too often false promise of justice.”—The Boston Globe

“Compelling . . . [van der Leun] has a resident’s wry familiarity with the jangling contradictions of a country in which shopping malls sit side by side with shantytowns, while retaining an outsider’s unsentimental perspective on its ongoing racial tensions, and a bracing scepticism about the rhetoric of liberation. [Her] hard-nosed reconstruction of an alternative narrative . . . raises troubling, and still pertinent, questions about the deals that sometimes have to be struck by former enemies when faced with the exigencies of nation-building.”—The Guardian 

From the Publisher

05/15/2016
Befitting its heft, this work by van der Leun (Marcus of Umbria) tells layers of stories. Most significant, it recounts the author's four-year investigation of the 1993 murder of white American activist and student Amy Biehl, set upon by young, black South Africans while driving friends to the township of Gugulethu, mere months before the official end of apartheid. Van der Leun, an American writer living in Cape Town, became captivated by the events surrounding Amy's death, including the Biehls' establishment of a foundation in Amy's memory, their extraordinary mercy and warmth toward two of the men accused of the killing, and the trajectories of the individuals involved. The author's quest to learn the facts of the case leads in many directions, stretching tenuously through bureaucracies of prisons and court records and confronting the often difficult history of South Africa. Built from personal observations against a messy geopolitical backdrop, this stunning portrait of a country is remarkable for the author's immersion in communities where she is utterly foreign in race, education, and economic means yet (mostly) accepted and embraced by those whose accounts she seeks. VERDICT This frequently gripping, occasionally meandering true-crime narrative provides an intimate, intricate depiction of embedded journalism. Lengthy but powerful.—Janet Ingraham Dwyer, State Lib. of Ohio, Columbus

Library Journal

2016-04-18
Unraveling a web of evidence in a notorious murder.After moving to South Africa for her husband's work, van der Leun (Marcus of Umbria: What an Italian Dog Taught an American Girl About Love, 2010) became fascinated by the story of Amy Biehl, an American Fulbright scholar who was brutally murdered—stoned and stabbed—in Cape Town in 1993. Four years later, with apartheid ended, the nation's Truth and Reconciliation program was put in place. This "experiment in restorative justice" offered "release and a clean slate to those, who, upon taking responsibility, fully, and honestly, for their apartheid-era crimes, could prove that their misdeeds were politically motivated." Among those who came forward were two men convicted for Amy's murder, and prominent among those who forgave were Amy's parents. The Biehls set up a foundation in Amy's name to further the study of democracy and gender rights, and they gave jobs to the two men whom they embraced. The author's initial interest was the Biehls, whose gesture made them celebrities in South Africa and the U.S. She wanted to understand how they could forgive—and forge a close relationship with—the murderers. But soon her focus shifted to the crime itself, which seemed to be far more complicated than what she gleaned from official documents. She repeatedly interviewed Easy, the most voluble of the convicted men, retracing the events leading to Amy's death, Easy's youth, and the volatile politics of the time. "I felt like a kid who wants to hear the same bedtime story again and again: for comfort, or to better understand, or maybe hoping that this time some detail would shift to reveal a new, improved tale," she writes. Unfortunately, reiterating the story over and over results in a tedious narrative and revelations less surprising than she implies. The author's vivid details of South Africa's persistent racism, abject poverty, and continuing oppression are undermined by unnecessary repetition.

Kirkus Reviews

Narrator Erin Bennett delivers Justine van der Leun’s research on a vicious killing and its connection to the racial fracture between blacks and whites in Colonial South Africa. The restrictive policy of whites toward blacks eventually became the government-supported system of Apartheid. Bennett’s intelligent delivery keeps the history lesson engaging and the crime as shocking as ever. In 1993, a group of black men attended an anti-Apartheid meeting and were roused to violence. Amy Biehl, a young, white American scholar, who, ironically, was an African National Congress activist, was brutally murdered by the mob. Twenty years later, van der Leun interviewed many of those involved with the case. Bennett’s extraordinary narration captures her revelations of oppression, racial inequality, and gender-based violence, taking listeners deep into the heart of a complex nation. S.J.H. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine

SEPTEMBER 2016 - AudioFile