UMass Magazine Online

Fall 2002

Departments

Around the Pond

Features

Around the Pond

Martyrdom's extraordinary legacy
"Amy's Magic: Living Reconciliation"

Judson Brown




	SHARING THIER MAGIC: Ntobeko Peni, Linda Biehl and former Chancellor Williams.

A world seemingly engulfed in terror and counterterror, war and threats of war, clearly needs to be reminded of an alternative – the power of forgiveness as a force for personal transformation and social and political change.

The story of the martyrdom of Amy Biehl, a 26-year-old American Fulbright scholar murdered in South Africa in 1993, and of the growth of the Amy Biehl Foundation, provides a compelling case in point.

Amy’s parents, Linda and the late Peter, started the foundation in 1994 as a vehicle to carry on their daughter’s commitment to community development, social reconciliation and reconstruction in South Africa.

The story has become well-known to many in the university community ever since then-Chancellor Marcellette G. Williams met the Biehls in Cape Town, South Africa, in 2001 and decided that the university, as a part of its commitment to what Williams calls "living values," ought to become a partner in the work of their foundation.
The foundation sponsors some two dozen different programs in education, health and safety, environment, arts and music, employment, enterprise development and recreation in the impoverished black townships around Cape Town.

Linkages between the foundation and a growing number of university departments – including hotel, restaurant and travel administration, plant and soil sciences, education and fine arts – are being forged. Some of these are building on a variety of pre-existing ties between the university and South Africa.

The Biehls first visited the university in November 2001, then again in March of this year. Shortly after the last visit, Peter Biehl died. Linda Biehl has continued the work.

The third and the latest retelling of the Biehl story for a local audience occurred in late June in a publicly staged "conversation" entitled "Amy’s Magic: Living Reconciliation" between Linda Biehl and two of her daughter’s killers, who have since become – in the astonishing turnabout that forgiveness makes possible – her friends and her colleagues.

The event, hosted by Williams in the Massachusetts Room at the Mullins Center, drew 75 people including many university faculty with active interests in South Africa.

Seated in comfortable chairs in the spotlight were Linda Biehl and two slight, somewhat bashful looking young men – Easy Nofemela, 30, and Ntobeko Peni, 28. Peni turned out to be soft-spoken and introspective. Nofemela was animated and expressive.

Nofemela and Peni had been part of a mob of some 80 black youth in Guguletu township outside Cape Town who, fired up after attending a meeting of the radical anti-apartheid Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), stoned a car that Amy Biehl was driving, then stabbed her to death. The Stanford graduate was within days of finishing up a 10-month stint working on a voter education project based at the University of the Western Cape.

Whatever personal shock and anger Linda and Peter Biehl might have felt at the murder of their daughter, their public position was to see her killers as themselves victims of violence – the violence of apartheid. The couple successfully advocated for amnesty for four of the perpetrators, including Peni and Nofemela, before the country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1997.

Nofemela and Peni, originally sentenced to 18 years in prison for the crime, but released on amnesty after four and a half years, are now employed by the foundation. Nofemela is a coordinator for sport at four after-school programs in Cape Town townships. Peni is a coordinator of entrepreneurial skill development for township youth.

Peni recalled days of rage and desperation. He described how he and Nofemela and other black youths had been totally committed to armed struggle against all white people as set forth by the PAC, which stipulated that there could be "no cooperation between the oppressor and the oppressed." PAC had declared 1993 to be "the year of the Great Storm."

PAC members were involved in numerous massacres of white citizens and in various acts of civic sabotage "because we wanted [whites] to feel what we were feeling," Peni said.

He himself had taken part in the looting and burning of bread trucks that used to come into his township, he said. Ironically, one of his first jobs with the Biehl Foundation was to guard from attack trucks delivering bread made at the Community Baking Trust in Cape Town. One of the foundation’s most successful economic development projects, the bakery today employs 90, or about half the total payroll of the foundation, Linda Biehl noted.

Peni described poignantly the identity crisis he went through as, in response to the compassion and friendship offered to him by the Biehls, his values and his outlook underwent a sea change.

"You believe in certain principles and you become somebody else," he said, "then you step out of those principles, and you are somebody else again."

Both Nofemela and Peni said that without their personal relationship with the Biehls – whom Nofemela referred to as makhula and tamkhula, words in their native language of Xhosa for grandmother and grandfather – they never would have succeeded in turning their lives around.

"If you had seen me when I got out of prison. I was thin and lost," Peni said. "Today, I’m back on track."

Asked how it had been possible emotionally for her and her husband to advocate for amnesty for their daughter’s murderers, Linda Biehl attributed it to Amy’s own profound and persuasive commitment to social justice.

"She pushed me from the time she was little," said Biehl, who had brought up four children, run an art gallery and had a brief late-blooming in upscale retail management before tragedy struck. "She was that kind of kid."

It seems that Amy had a premonition of her own death. Linda Biehl said she remembered Amy once saying to her, as she was circling obituaries in the Mail and Guardian, a South African newspaper, that when whites die in South Africa they get a full obituary, but when blacks die, they are just a number.

"She said she’d rather be a number than a name."

[top of page]

Clearly in focus

LOMBARDI: more images

Comings & Goings

Go Forth!

Martyrdom's extraordinary legacy

Martyrdom: Larger Image

studying war, seeking peace

Staub: larger image

A whole new level of study

Information technology gets a minor

Keeping count

Lemurs -

Godfrey: Larger Image

Gardens in space and other astronomical wonders

Gardens: larger image

Cleaning up our act

Fossella: Larger image

Score Board