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    We Are Not Such Things: A Murder in a South African Township and the Search for Truth and Reconciliation
    Unavailable
    We Are Not Such Things: A Murder in a South African Township and the Search for Truth and Reconciliation
    Unavailable
    We Are Not Such Things: A Murder in a South African Township and the Search for Truth and Reconciliation
    Audiobook17 hours

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

    Written by Justine van der Leun

    Narrated by Laurel Lefkow

    4/5

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    Unavailable in your country

    Unavailable in your country

    About this audiobook

    A ‘MAKING A MURDERER’ set in South Africa – a gripping true-crime story of murder and the justice system in the shadow of apartheid

    ‘Gripping, explosive . . . crafts a close sense of place that rivals the work of Katherine Boo’ New York Times

    In 1993, in the final, fiery days of apartheid, a 26-year-old white American activist called Amy Biehl was murdered by a group of young black men in a township near Cape Town. Four men were tried and convicted of the murder and sentenced to eighteen years in prison. A few years later they had been freed. Two of the men were subsequently employed by Amy’s parents to work at a charity set up in her memory. The men grew close to the Biehls. They called them ‘Grandmother’ and ‘Grandfather’.

    Justine van der Leun, an American writer living in South Africa, set out to tell this twenty-year story, 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 crime actually responsible? And could it be that another violent crime committed on the same day, in the very same area, was connected to the murder of Amy Biehl?

    ‘Beautifully written and carefully observed …a Truman Capote-style detective story in which Van der Leun rummages for clues through the detritus of modern South Africa’ Financial Times

    ‘Deeply researched and thought-provoking . . . an engaging take on a murder that might have derailed democracy’ Economist

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins Publishers
    Release dateJun 30, 2016
    ISBN9780008191085
    Unavailable
    We Are Not Such Things: A Murder in a South African Township and the Search for Truth and Reconciliation

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    Reviews for We Are Not Such Things

    4/5

    26 ratings8 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Thank you Justine for making this come alive for me. I lived close to the church in Kenilworth where the 2nd massacre took place. Thank you.
    • 1/5
      It’s not often that I give up on a book but I just couldn’t make it through this one. I threw in the towel at page 140 so feel like I gave it the old college try. I chose it because 1) I wanted to learn more about South Africa and 2) The description said that it was in the vain of the podcast Serial. I believe that if I would have slogged through it, I would have ended up learning more about South Africa. However, I don’t think it was like Serial. If it was, I wouldn’t have been able to put it down.I think the premise of the book was a good idea. It’s about Amy Biehl a white woman who was murdered by a mob in South Africa and how her mother was able to forgive her daughter’s murderers. This book suffered from being in need of some serious editing. It’s repetitive and disjointed. I had trouble following the timeline and the repetition made me bored. This book has a lot of positive reviews out there, both on Amazon and in magazines so I am in the minority in my opinion. I would say proceed with caution before picking this book.
    • 3/5
      Amy Biehl was a 26-year-old White American who was brutally murdered by a mob in Gugulethu Township near Cape Town, SA in 1993. This murder became notorious because of the victim’s race, because the four men convicted of her murder were eventually released by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), and especially because the victim’s parents forgave their daughter’s murderers. Justine van der Leun’s original intent was to write the story that served as such a strong justification for the power of reconciliation. Along the way, however, she encountered so many unanswered questions and inconsistencies that she seems to have become lost in all the details. After finishing this lengthy and exhaustive account, one is left with no clearer picture of what actually happened and a strong sense that the truth, indeed, is unknowable. Van der Leun should be applauded for her effort to answer multiple questions and uncover new facts through meticulous research and interviewing. The TRC was charged to forgive crimes that occurred under apartheid if the perpetrators “could prove that their misdeeds were politically motivated.” Amy’s murderers complied with this requirement and thus were released from prison. However, van der Leun’s research suggests that the motives for Amy’s murder were considerably more muddled. The mob that assembled that day was not particularly political despite some participants being affiliated with political organizations. In the final analysis, van der Leun was forced to conclude that the crime may have been motivated by “bloodlust” and that Amy may have been targeted because she “represented the oppressor, and her white face was all that was wrong with the country, and she was killed." The mob’s cry of “one settler, one bullet” clearly could be heard at the time of her murder.The four murderers’ admissions of guilt and political motivation were necessarily self-serving. In fact, “the distinction between pure-hearted freedom fighters and local street gangster was not always so delineated in South Africa.” Another key question was the actual guilt of the convicted men. One is left with considerable doubt about this issue. The eyewitnesses disagreed. Easy Nofemala was somewhat of a celebrity in the township, so may have been targeted by the anonymous witness only because she knew who he was. This, despite evidence that his brother may have dealt the death blows. Was Easy protecting his brother, who was now disabled? Although van der Leun spent an inordinate amount of time with Easy and, in fact, learned to admire his many likeable traits, she never was able to clarify his guilt. Van der Leun, however, did uncover another brutal beating by the same mob that was never reported. Despite finding its victim, this lead and her interview with the victim added little of substance to the story.Another of van der Leun’s original aims was to explain the motivations of Amy’s parents in forgiving her murderers. She depicts them as affluent and socially vested Americans. They established a foundation in Amy’s name to solidify her legacy as a heroine devoted to the liberation of oppressed people. Amy’s mother is depicted as devoted to the foundation (she even hired two of the alleged murderers to work for it), but eventually seems to have become disenchanted with the whole exercise. Ironically, Amy was in Gugulethu that day, not for heroic humanistic reasons, but for the quite mundane offer of a ride home to two friends who lived there. She did this in spite of multiple warnings of rioting that day. The book succeeds in relating the vast gulf that exists between Blacks and Whites in South Africa as well as the historical background for these inequities. Apartheid was a brutal legacy of British and Dutch colonial rule. It manifested in contemporary South Africa as extreme police brutality and racially motivated governmental ineptitude. Van der Leun immerses herself in the life of the township evoking the grim lives that her interviewees experienced. The book reads like a detective story, but unfortunately does not serve up a satisfying conclusion. Instead van der Leun chases every possible lead, most of which go nowhere. Her writing often is repetitious and includes far too much detail of her own personal experience. Indeed, one wonders if she may have become too close to Nofemala, his friends and family, thus losing all important objectivity. It seems like the book could have been much more effective—and shorter—if a ruthless editor put in more time on revisions.
    • 4/5
      An engrossing multilayered narrative of the 1993 brutal murder of American Amy Biehl, an Anti-Apartheid activist, in a South African township and the complicated web of forgiveness, truthfulness, and justice implied by the Truth and Reconciliation Program. The author spent fours researching the book, leaving so stone unturned as she diligently puts together the facts in case, the often contradictory accounts by those involved with the political and economic complexities of South Africa then and now. As I delved into the book, I once again reminded how complicated and maybe undiscoverable the truth can be in catastrophic times and war, as behavior and actions are often dictated by the best decision to be made at the moment. While the narrative stalls at times with a little too much repetition there is no doubt that this is a powerful story of racism, economic denial, and the oppression of poverty. I recommend this book to history lovers and those interested in social and economic change. I received a copy of this book from NetGalley and the publisher in exchange for an honest review.#BoodAdvocatesUnite#readingandreviewingchallenge
    • 4/5
      I received a free advance e-copy of this book from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. I had a special interest in this book as I had been to South Africa on a medical humanitarian mission in 2003. South Africa is a beautiful and exotic country. It is a place where clock time seems to mean nothing. Everyone seems to always to be late. I also had the feeling that it was not safe for a white person to go out alone anywhere in South Africa. The author paints us a true picture of South Africa, a story of forgiveness and an attempt at reconciliation in a complicated and very troubled country. There appears to be corruption no matter what race is in control. The whites control the majority of the wealth and there will probably always be discrimination, racial prejudice, and injustice. What is the truth about the death of Amy Biehl? We probably will never know. It is obvious that the author did a great deal of research before writing this book. Even though Daniel’s story wasn’t directly related to the Amy Biehl story it gives the reader a better understanding of how things work in South Africa and that some events seem to be ‘swept under the carpet.’ The only criticism I have of this book is that it seemed to get bogged down in detail at times. I do feel that this is a story that everyone should read in order to get a better understanding of South Africa, a very complicated and still very troubled country.
    • 4/5
      Between 3.5 and 4 stars. I won a copy of this book from Goodreads. This isn't something I would typically read but I enjoyed it and I learned a lot. The author was thorough in her research and it definitely read more like a novel than a non-fiction book. It did get a little confusing when it jumped around from 1993 to the late 90s/early 2000s and present day. There were also a lot of people to keep track of - I would have found an appendix with a guide to who was who and also definitions of some of the Xhosa and South African terms very helpful. The story is fascinating and I think even those who don't typically like this genre will find this book very interesting.
    • 4/5
      4.5 starsI belong to the Newest Literary Fiction Goodreads group, and our monthly buddy reads are usually (you guessed it) new lit fic. For July, however, our moderator challenged us to read as many non-fiction books from our TBR lists as we could find room for. Although at last count I had 97 non-fiction books waiting to be read, I had been moving them to the bottom of my list; they sounded interesting, but, really, reading non-fiction is too much work. I don't want to have to learn anything during my pleasure reading time (said in that lovely teenage whine we parents all adore). Nevertheless, I decided to accept the challenge, at least to the extent of reading one book, and picked up Justine van der Leun's We Are Not Such Things. The title was taken from one of the defendants at the Amy Biehl murder trial in South Africa:"STATE LAWYER : You see what I am going to suggest to you, Mr. Nofemela, is that the attack and brutal murder of Amy Biehl could not have been done with a political objective. It was wanton brutality, like a pack of sharks smelling blood. Isn’t that the truth?EASY NOFEMELA : No, that’s not true, that’s not true. We are not such things."I had originally added this book to my TBR list for several reasons. As a lawyer, I was interested in the criminal justice process in South Africa in light of my recent research into personal freedoms in Africa and the Middle East. I remembered the Amy Biehl murder on the news. Given the current breakdown in race relations in the United States and the call for reparations for institutionalized racism, I wanted to see how South Africa, once the most openly racist nation in the world, handled that issue, and having handled a case involving a white South African years ago, I wondered whether the assumptions made about him were based in fact. While van der Leun addressed all of these questions, she did so not as a pedant, but by incorporating them within a well-written and very engaging story centered around real people: the black men convicted of murdering Amy and their relationships with each other, their communities, and (surprisingly) Amy's parents.The narrative flowed back and forth in time and among points of view, but its non-linearity was not confusing. Instead, it brought into stark relief a point too many of us forget in the heat of an apparent injustice: there is no single "true" account of any human drama. Witnesses focus on and remember different things; observations and memories may change over time as different interpretations arise or motives are exposed. Along the way, I did manage to learn a few facts about South African culture and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.My only complaint was van der Leun's decision to devote three of the final chapters to Daniel de Villiers, a white man attacked by a black mob on the same day as Amy's murder. In the book's opening chapter, van der Leun implied that de Villiers's experience radically altered the "truth" surrounding Amy's death:"After months of frenzied searching, I had finally found an old and ruined man who had also been in Gugulethu on that August 25, 1993, though few remembered him. Nobody had ever told his account of that day, nor made the chilling links between what had happened to him and what had happened to Amy Biehl five hours and a quarter mile away. The old man knew something about brutal mobs and racial violence, and he was the final piece in the jigsaw I had been painstakingly piecing together for two years."Even after three chapters, I failed to see any meaningful connection between de Villiers and Amy, so I ended the book resenting van der Leun's change in focus and momentum (not a good place for an author to leave a reviewer). Van de Leun lost half a star for this misstep, but overall, she successfully suppressed my bias against non-fiction (for now, at least).I received a free copy of We Are Not Such Things from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.
    • 5/5
      This is a chilling story of murder and racism in South Africa. A tour-de-force. A stunning journalistic look at the injustices that sadly prevail. I was captivated by both the story and the prose. It is a great read of a sad story. I highly recommend this book.