We Are Not Such Things by Justine van der Leun Page A

street.
    “Settler, settler!” the mob erupted.

    Evaron, Maletsatsi, and Sindiswa toppled out of the car now, too, yelling frantically. The two women appealed to the crowd in Xhosa, insisting that Amy was a student, a comrade, a member of their ANC-aligned National Women’s Coalition. They were waving around their membership cards like tiny laminated shields. A handsome, broad-faced man tried to grab Maletsatsi’s purse, but she shoved him away. A few days later, her back sore, she went for an X-ray and found that her rib had been fractured.
    Like most colored South Africans, Evaron spoke English and Afrikaans but did not understand Xhosa. He had never even been to Gugulethu before; he didn’t know these streets. He turned to a man standing nearby.
    “What do I do?” he pleaded.
    “They just want the settler,” the man explained. Not Evaron, a colored boy—only that fleeing white woman. It didn’t matter that Amy wasn’t a settler, wasn’t even South African.
    Evaron was too scared to go to Amy, surrounded as she was by the mob. It would have been futile, and he would likely have been attacked, and so he stood back, edging toward the Caltex as Amy began to run. First she ran west, away from the gas station and across the dotted line separating the lanes in the road. She pressed her hand above her eye, felt the warm blood, the way her skull gave way, and she let out a scream.
    Above NY1 at the Caltex is a barren field, strewn with trash and dotted with tufts of dry grass. A team of twelve-year-old boys had been practicing soccer there when they heard a commotion. They sprinted over to the Caltex and stood by the gas tanks, some on their tiptoes, craning their necks. They had grown up in a world steeped in violence, perpetrated by the white government, their black relatives, their black neighbors, the colored gangsters across the way, their parents’ white employers, white strangers, the white and black and colored and Indian cops, white soldiers, bands of black vigilantes, and political leaders of all colors. This pale, wounded lady was certainly a curious display, worth witnessing, but she was not the first person these kids had seen attacked, perhaps not even that day, and she would not be the last. The fact that she was white, however, made the scene particularly memorable; nobody could name the last time a white person had been taken down like this. Not here, in the middle of Gugulethu.

    “There was blood, people throwing stones,” remembered one of the soccer-playing boys, now a grown man. “I can’t say I was happy. I can’t say I was angry.”
    Over at the elementary school, children had just been released from the nursery, and their parents and guardians had arrived to pick them up. Now they stood on the corner, holding babies and toddlers in their arms or by the hands, and they, too, stopped to watch.
    One man, a three-year-old child propped on his hip, briefly surveyed the scene, in which two black women pleaded with a crowd as a mob attacked a young white woman. The crowd was shouting, “Down with white sympathizers!” He watched as if in a dream, until the child cried, pulling him back to reality. He turned and hurried away with the child in his arms. He didn’t feel too cut up about the whole thing.
    “Black people were being murdered by white people, so we weren’t sorry,” he told me years later. He wondered about Amy’s friends, though: “Why would these black people bring a white person here? They knew what was happening in our location.”
    As the mob surrounded Amy, an old man stormed out of his house, shouting at the attackers, demanding that they leave her be. The mob pushed him away, and he stumbled to the sidewalk. A grandmother ordered her children inside and locked the door. Her grandson, then seven, pressed his hands and nose to the plate glass window.
    “She wasn’t really running fast, she was confused,” the grandson remembered twenty years later, sitting in that same