Too often in talk about what happens after violence do people pay serious attention to the way people memorialize the lost. Memorials can be powerful (like the now iconic Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC), macabre (the Rwanda churches), a miss (for me, the Berlin Holocaust Memorial was a disappointment) or tragic.
In this last category, I would place the pictured spot. At the right, you can make out a black cross with a square at the middle. It marks the place where Amy Biehl, in South Africa on a Fulbright, was stoned and stabbed to death in 1992. The four men responsible were later convicted, but applied for and received amnesty from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
Biehl’s parents turned their grief and rage over their daughter’s murder into something positive. They created a foundation and funded a bakery that provides jobs for locals. These are acts of immense courage and humanity, especially since both Biehls spend much of their time in South Africa working on these projects.
So perhaps the question of a static memorial is frivolous. Yet we were all taken aback by this sight — the cross propped against a fence, outside a gas station where residents line up for cooking gas.
Memorials can be sites of powerful emotion and the building of community (the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial); they can be spaces of reflection and connection with the lost (the gardens outside the Rwanda Genocide Museum serve this purpose beautifully); they can remind us of the distant, but desperate circumstances of the struggle.
But like this, a memorial reminds us that even the greatest sacrifices can be pushed aside in the press of the new. Or that what we consider an act of generosity and sacrifice — Biehl’s decision to work for an end to apartheid — can be so permanently misunderstood.
Even as I write that, I hear a response — why should the death of one white American be memorialized when the death of millions of non-white South Africans have not been? But I think the answer to that is not that there should not be a Biehl memorial, but that there should be many, many more memorials, to so many of the people who fought for an end to injustice.
In writing this entry, I came across this public service ad created by the Amy Biehl foundation — very strong and right on the issues facing the “new” South Africa.
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