It is easy to love when they are strangers and you do not know what they have done. It is easy to love when they are family and you know what they have done, but you cannot ignore the fact that the same blood courses through your veins. It is easy to love when they are your friends and you have picked them despite their transgressions. But what about strangers whose transgressions you are aware of? How do you love past evil to see the good, the humanity?
As a world and a nation we are struggling with this question right now. The United States government has killed a murderer; someone who has negatively affected countless lives throughout the world. We have killed the man who some people see as our nation’s biggest enemy. But, we have also killed someone’s son. Someone’s father. Someone’s uncle. We have killed a man who was once a little boy crying in his mother’s lap. Obviously something went very wrong between then and now, but we must remember who that person was for so many. He was a man made of flesh and bones, emotions, experiences, passions, and hardships, not unlike the man who ordered his death, our president. I am not saying that we should have given Osama a hug and had a heart to heart with him and everything would have been all right. What I am saying is that our actions should be done with love and reflect the humanity of our ‘enemies.’ Where was the love in the actions of our government?
Okay, let’s take this down to a personal level, to the level of two murderers walking into a room and sitting down across from you.
Easy Nofemela and Ntobeko Peni walked into Melikaya’s office and quietly made their way to the front of the room as we cleared our cards from the floor. Once Ntobeko opened his mouth we all knew who they were. Red flags were going off in my head left and right as they talked about their military training in the townships with the PAC (Pan-Africanist Congress) rebels. Ntobeko described as a sixteen year old leaving his house after everyone else had gone to sleep to be trained in firearms handling and run secret operations that ended in the death of white police officers and Afrikaners. They were being trained to take back their country.
1993, when Easy and Ntobeko were still in their teens, was declared “The Year of the Great Storm” by PAC leaders. This meant that the violence was to be taken into white communities to bring attention to the plight of the blacks and show that they were willing to do anything for their freedom. The justification for attacking unarmed civilians was that “soft civilians” were the primary beneficiaries of apartheid and the PAC was bound to take that freedom away. It was in August of that year that Amy Biehl was killed.
The drill was that when you saw a delivery truck entering the townships you flagged it down and, if it stopped, tell the driver to remove their personal belongings and set the truck alight without removing any of the cargo. If the truck did not stop then it was stoned to a stop and immediately set alight without the decency to the driver. That day it was a Cocoa-Cola truck and a young white girl driving the car behind it was in the wrong place at the wrong time. After the Coke truck was stopped Amy’s car was attacked. As she ran to find help in a nearby gas station, she was brought to the ground and stabbed to death by young PAC members. She was stabbed to death by Easy and Ntobeko.
Amy was a twenty six year old American Fulbright Scholar living in Cape Town. She was taking classes at the University of the Western Cape and working to register voters for the upcoming elections. Not much older than I am now, Amy was here for some of the same reasons I am: to experience a new culture and make a difference in the life of at least one person in this country. She was killed in Gugulethu, the township that my service site is in, while driving two friends home because she was in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong skin colour. What makes her that much different than I am today?
After being sentenced to eighteen years of prison, Easy and Ntobeko were both granted amnesty from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. This was possible only because of the testimony of Mrs. Linda Biehl, Amy’s mother. Against all odds, the Biehl family did what they believe Amy would have wanted. They forgave, both publicly and down to their deepest core, the men who killed her and began to see the situation from the side of the freedom fighters struggling to be recognized as human beings in their own country. This stunning act of forgiveness soon led to the establishment of the Amy Biehl Foundation, an organization based in Cape Town that teaches classes and runs after school programs in schools throughout the townships, where both Easy and Ntobeko are now employed.
So there I was, eighteen years after Amy’s death, sitting across from two of her killers. Questions were streaming through my head. How have they forgiven themselves for what they did enough to work hand in hand with their victim’s parents? Who am I to judge them for turning to violence when I have never been in any circumstance like theirs? How do I love them while knowing the evils that those hands and hearts have perpetrated?
There it was. My biggest question. How do I love these killers? These charismatic men, both fathers to daughters of their own, sitting in front of me were no longer defined as PAC members or freedom fighters. They were fathers, sons, and productive members of society. In that realization I found my answer. I love them because of all of the children they have positively impacted through their work with the Amy Biehl Foundation. I love them because of their position as father, son, and uncle. I love them because they are human beings who are broken.
The real question is: if I can rationalize loving a killer because of their humanity, why do I struggle so much to love the average, everyday people with their own unique set of flaws I find myself surrounded by?
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