Van der Leun stays with the story, all of it, and crafts a narrative both fuller and more intimate than the one the world was told. She takes nothing away from Amy, whose murder was horrific. But she impresses upon the reader that no one life or death is worth more than another. For this, and for writing a masterpiece of reported non fiction, she deserves our plaudits and our awe.
Van der Leun obsessively immerses herself in the case, combing court transcripts and police records, tracking down witnesses and friends and far-flung associates. Of the dozens of sources she finds, she grows especially close to convict-turned-advocate Easy Nofemela, who emerges as one of the most compelling figures in a story steeped in extraordinary characters and circumstances. And We Are Not Such Things—the title is taken from Nofemela’s pained response to a prosecutor’s portrayal of him and his codefendants as 'sharks smelling blood'—is an extraordinary book, if sometimes also an exhausting one: a dense and nuanced portrait of a country whose confounding, convoluted past is never quite history.
[We Are Not Such Things] could not be more timely, given how many young black South Africans are now expressing anger at — and betrayal by — the Mandela project, which they say provided nothing more than a shimmering rainbow that screened a deeper entrenchment of inequality ... where her book is gripping, explosive even, is in the kind of obsessive forensic investigation — of the clues, and into the soul of society — that is the legacy of highbrow sleuths from Truman Capote to Janet Malcolm ... she crafts a close sense of place that rivals the work of Katherine Boo — although her work is at the other extreme to Boo’s, because of van der Leun’s presence within it. In a way that is increasingly fashionable, We Are Not Such Things is a personal quest, sometimes too much so.
...[a] gripping and mournful account of reconciliation — and its lack — in post-apartheid South Africa ... The book recreates the murder in the manner of Gabriel García Márquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold, probing events from the perspective of numerous participants and witnesses ... Perhaps the book’s only flaw is that at more than 500 pages it is a touch long. But that is a minor quibble. Beautifully written and carefully observed, some readers might actually wish it were longer.
Rather than a heartwarming tale of forgiveness and redemption, Van der Leun has written — perhaps at too great length — a very necessary and occasionally confounding account of a small slice of post-apartheid, post-Mandela South Africa, a country that has largely been forgotten in the international maelstrom of terrorism and mass migration. It is a story of frustrated expectations, broken dreams, endemic greed and corruption, but also indomitable human spirit, told against the backdrop of one of the world’s most beautiful natural settings.
...a deeply researched and thought-provoking book ... Her most puzzling discovery relates to Easy Nofemela, who was found guilty of the murder and subsequently granted amnesty and hired by the foundation. Yet the author finds evidence suggesting he was not even at the scene of the crime. This is an engaging take on a murder that might have derailed democracy.
Van der Leun’s hard-nosed reconstruction of an alternative narrative for the events of that afternoon raises troubling, and still pertinent, questions about the deals that sometimes have to be struck by former enemies when faced with the exigencies of nation-building.
