Bright Life, Dark Death

By DAVID VAN BIEMA

AMY BIEHL DID NOT GIVE HER LIFE TO Africa, as she had planned. Instead Africa took her life -- not the democratic continent she had dreamed of and worked to achieve, but the one she thought she saw beyond, the Africa of hatred and futility.

Last week Biehl, 26, a Fulbright scholar dedicated to hastening South African democracy, became the first American victim of the pitiless violence that has accompanied the country's slow transformation. Her nationality was not significant to the teenagers who knifed her repeatedly in the head: her skin color was reason enough. But her murder was another indication that the violent, sometimes anti-white rhetoric adopted by some political groups is finding expression in action. The death of an idealist is not the death of idealism, but it sent a chilly message to those who hope that good intentions are a universal language.

She was a radiant girl who fell in love with cultural diversity in high school among Santa Fe's Hispanics and Native Americans and was drawn in college toward the possibilities of black sovereignty in Africa. "She wanted to make a difference," says classmate Katie Bolich. "She was so committed." Biehl wrote her honors thesis at Stanford University on Chester Crocker, the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State who helped bring independence to Namibia. In 1989 she traveled there and developed a close friendship with Namibian President Sam Nujoma.

When her Fulbright took her to Cape Town, she immersed herself in black South African culture. "She wanted to live among the people," says Bolich. Soon after arriving last fall, she was speaking Xhosa, dancing to the local jazz and spending nights with friends in the townships. Says Melanie Jacobs, her roommate, who is mixed-race: "She was color-blind and completely at home with us." At the University of the Western Cape, African National Congress legal expert and executive member Dullah Omar guided her research on women's issues and voter education. But her interests pulled her back to the townships, where the real work of instilling democracy will be done.

Last Wednesday Biehl was preparing to leave Cape Town. She was to fly back to Stanford on Friday to begin doctoral studies. As she had done for months, Biehl offered some fellow students a lift back to their homes in the black townships. They piled into Biehl's mustard-colored Mazda, the one with the bumper sticker reading OUR LAND NEEDS PEACE. Around 5 p.m., as she drove into the township of Guguletu, a group of teenagers hurled stones at the car. Trapped behind another vehicle, Biehl was a sitting target for the brick that shattered her windshield. She and her friends ran for a nearby gas station, but her assailants were faster. "We tried to tell them that she was just another student," says Sindiswa Bevu, who was in the car. "But some didn't listen." When the murder was done and Bevu asked why, one of the killers replied, "Because she's a settler."

That meant because she was white. There was confusion as to exactly which black political organization her killers were aligned with. On Wednesday the Cape townships swarmed with members of the Congress of South African Students, a group affiliated with Nelson Mandela's African National Congress. In support of a national black teachers' strike, some of its members had initiated a campaign of violence and arson. But the "settlers" remark and a shirt allegedly worn by one of the attackers pointed toward the Pan-Africanist Students' Organization, a wing of the Pan-Africanist Congress, which coined the motto "One Settler, One Bullet," and the police arrested two teenage P.A.S.O. members. When informed of Biehl's death, P.A.S.O. president Tsietsi Telite said unrepentantly, "The youths and students are so angry and frustrated that when they see someone they identify with the dispossessing classes, anything can happen -- and could happen again."

A spokesman for the Pan-Africanist Congress in Johannesburg reacted differently, calling the crime an "abominable terrorist act." Cape Town's A.N.C. director dissociated his organization from the murder, and his group's national executive moved to rein in its own members' use of racist rhetoric and inflammatory slogans. As if to underscore the emptiness of such pledges, gunmen firing assault rifles on Friday wounded eight people -- whites and mixed-race -- traveling by luxury-bus from Cape Town to Johannesburg.

In Newport Beach, California, the Biehl family has been deluged with faxes and telephone calls from friends and advisers in different schools, from the White House, from Namibia, from Biehl's South African friends. In these she is repeatedly referred to as a "sister." The loving condolences are inspiring, says Amy's mother Linda. "She was part of something. They're a kind of reconstruction of the world she lived in." A world of forgiving, compassionate people, a place that has yet to be reconciled with the world in which she died.

With reporting by Peter Hawthorne/Cape Town and Adrian J.W. Maher/Los Angeles