Download We Are Not Such Things: The Murder of a Young American, a South African Township, and the Search for Truth and Reconciliation AudioBook Free
Justine vehicle der Leun reopens the murder of a American woman in South Africa, an iconic circumstance that telephone calls into question our knowledge of truth and reconciliation, devotion, justice, competition, and class. The storyplot of Amy Biehl is well known in South Africa. The 26-year-old white American Fulbright scholar was brutally murdered on August 25, 1993, through the final, fiery times of apartheid by the mob of young black men in a township outside Cape Town. Her parents' forgiveness of two of her killers became symbolic of the reality and reconciliation process in South Africa. Justine vehicle der Leun made a decision to introduce the storyplot to a American audience. But as she delved into the circumstance, the prevailing narrative began to unravel. Why didn't the eyewitness studies acknowledge who wiped out Amy Biehl? Were the men convicted of the murder actually accountable for her death? And then Vehicle der Leun learned another brutal crime committed on the same day, in the same area. The true history of Amy Biehl's loss of life, it turned out, was not only a tale of forgiveness, but also a reflection of the complicated history of a troubled country. We Are Not Such Things is the result of Vehicle der Leun's four-year research into this odd, knotted tale of injustice, violence, and compassion. The bizarre twists and converts of this circumstance and its aftermath - and the storyplot that emerges of what happened on that fateful day in 1993 and in the decades that used - get together in an unsparing bank account of life in South Africa today. Vehicle der Leun immerses herself in the lives of her topics and paints a stark, moving family portrait of an township and its residents. We come to understand that the issues at the heart of her research are widespread in range and powerful in resonance. We Are Not Such Things shows how reconciliation is impossible without an acknowledgment of days gone by, a lesson as relevant to America today as to a South Africa still fighting the long darkness of its history.
