I received this ebook for free from NetGalley for review. I am not obligated to post a positive review nor has my review been influenced in any way by NetGalley. I am just obligated to alert the reader. Consider yourself alerted.

There is a story in South Africa that is held up by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission-

In the last days of apartheid, a young white woman helping orphans by the name of Amy Biehl is brutally murdered in a crowd of African liberation fighters outside of Cape Town. Her car, filled with her friends, is surrounded, she is pulled out of the car, beaten with rocks, and finally stabbed in the heart. Great crowds witness the event, but no one does anything about it.

Four men are convicted for her murder.

Her parents travel to South Africa, reach out to two of the murders, Easy and Ntobeko, forgive them, raise them as their own children, and start a foundation for Amy to help combat violence. Amy is held up as a hero throughout all of South Africa post apartheid.

It is a wonderful story of reconciliation and hope.

In We Are Not Such Things by Justine van der Leun, the question is asked- Did this really happen this way or is it simply a propaganda story? For four years Van der Leun interviewed as many players as she could find to get to the truth of the story about Amy. She not only interviews the main players, but interviews witnesses, and friends of Amy. She gives an extensive history of South Africa, apartheid, and what it was like in the 90s for Africans and for white people in South Africa. She looks at race relations and a deep history of institutional racism. You will know about South Africa, Amy's story, and apartheid by the time you are done reading this.

I will state that I received a galley proof, so what I read may not be the final proof that the general public reads. I state this because there were times I became a bit frustrated while reading the book. I was frustrated because in the middle of a story, she will go into a history aspect of South Africa or apartheid. For example, she finally gets ahold of Easy to interview him, he starts telling his story, and right in the middle of it, she goes into history for about 2-3 ebook pages, and then comes back to the story. The history was important, but it interrupted the flow of the narrative to the point of distraction. There were quite a number of instances of this happening.

There is also a lot of information. In the print form, according to Amazon, the book is 544 pages. On my ebook version it was 413 pages. This is a long book that is so extensively researched that it might be too researched. This isn't a complaint about the information as it is interesting, but it comes to a point where it may have been a bit too extensive, if that makes sense. I felt it could have been edited down just a bit with the story made just a bit tighter.

Personally, I did not have a great knowledge about this story, but from the book I learned how important this story is to the narrative of South Africa and how poking one's nose into it to ask questions about it, could fire up a group of people. I can imagine the reaction to this book will be similar to when The Spitting Image by Jerry Lembcke looked at the myth of Vietnam Vets being spit on after returning from war. Lembcke finds that no interviewed vets had this happen to them or witnessed it ever happening to their friends. It just became true as the myth grew. Van der Leun asks the difficult questions to get to the truth to a story that has a lot of myth around it.

I rated this a high 3.5 stars. Excellent information, but simply too much of it. ( )

I recently spent a week in South Africa, and found myself wanting a little more insight into the country. I was familiar with Mandela and Tutu and had even studied the post-apartheid Truth & Reconciliation Commission briefly, but those are all high-level, international-scale perspectives. I wanted something more personal.

What I found was this book. When I stumbled onto it, I knew nothing about Amy Biehl, a white American activist who was brutally murdered in South Africa in 1993. Her parents started a foundation in her name, and publicly embraced the TRC process, eventually reconciling and working closely with two of the men convicted of Amy's murder.

Twenty years later, [a:Justine van der Leun|3388535|Justine van der Leun|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1464458982p2/3388535.jpg] decided to write Amy's story, and ended up as a quasi-investigative journalist, digging beyond published facts and public stories to try to get at buried memories and forgotten connections. She was in many ways more successful than I would have imagined she could be, and some of what she uncovered is fascinating and moving and thought-provoking. At the same time, the foreshadowing of her findings was a little heavy-handed; the first half is full of "little did I know then..."-type teasers that, cumulatively, I found annoying and distracting. Nonetheless, I appreciated her thoroughness: she spent literally years visiting some of the people involved on a frequent basis. It's clear that some of the characters grew to trust her so much that they gave her unprecedented access, not only to their impressions, memories, and opinions, but to their current experiences. The latent anthropologist in me loved the slices of Xhosa cultural traditions and language, and I even ended up on YouTube to try to learn how to pronounce Xhosa correctly (hint: it involves a click of the type you might make to "giddyup" a horse -- I recommend this YouTube video if you'd like to hear it yourself).

Recommended for world travelers, for those interested in other cultures or in South Africa particularly, for true crime aficionados, and for anyone interested in the problematized social constructs of truth, justice, guilt, and the like. In some ways, the poignant lack of easy answers in this book may illuminate the complexity of America's own race issues, their prominence recently heightened by the tragedies of Treyvon Martin, Sandra Bland, and too many others.

I received a copy of this ebook from the publisher in exchange for my honest review. Thanks! ( )

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. ( )

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. ( )

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.
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