The fact that Amy Biehl had been killed by some of the people she wanted to help struck a special note of horror, even in a country where political murder has become commonplace. Black South African leaders denounced the atrocity. “Wrong is wrong, whoever perpetrates it,” said Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the Nobel peace laureate. But among young black radicals. there seemed to be a chilling lack of remorse. Biehl’s attackers shouted the slogans of the militant Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC), which sees “one settler, one bullet” as the answer to the country’s problems. After two teenage members of the PAC’s student organization were arrested in connection with the killing, a spokesman for the group, Tsietsi Telite, told reporters: “The youths and students are so angry and frustrated that when they see someone they identify with the dispossessing class, anything can happen–and could happen again.”
Senior leaders of the PAC tried unsuccessfully to persuade local newspapers not to print Telite’s warning. The PAC and the more moderate African National Congress, led by Nelson Mandela, know that Biehl’s killing hurts their cause. But they have little control over the young “comrades,” many of whom think Mandela sold out to the whites in return for holding the country’s first nonracial elections next April.
Amy Biehl tried to reason with her attackers. “She was so confident,” one of hey friends, Anna Wang, told The Argus, a Cape Town newspaper. “She always said, ‘I know these people, I love them.’ When [the mob] first started chasing her, she tried to talk to them.” Biehl was killed only two days before she planned to leave South Africa to begin doctoral studies at Rutgers University in New Jersey. Her friends and family said she would not have blamed her attackers. Had she lived, she “would have been here to explain to those kids their hate was built up by the apartheid system,” said Melanie Jacobs, her roommate in Cape Town. “Amy taught me the youth are not responsible for their anger.”
But they were responsible for killing Biehl, and in Guguletu, the township where she died, many blacks were deeply stricken. Some helped police find the two suspects. COMRADES COME IN ANY SKIN COLOR, said placards carried in a memorial parade. At a church service, one black woman prayed: “Oh Lord, we call upon you to bring down a flag of peace. Our children are dying, including the white one killed last night.” The question is whether the more militant “children” of South Africa will allow apartheid to be dismantled peacefully.
