Biehls Meet Mother of Daughter’s Killer

CAPE TOWN, South Africa —  Evelyn Manqina didn’t need words. Her embrace and tears said it all. After four years of sorrow, it was time for reconciliation.

The mother of a killer was meeting the parents of the slain Amy Biehl for the first time.

Manqina’s son Mongezi was among four men convicted in the brutal 1993 slaying of the 26-year-old Biehl in a black township. On Saturday, Biehl’s parents came to visit her.

In Manqina’s tiny concrete block house, just 200 yards from where the Fulbright scholar from Newport Beach was beaten and stabbed, Linda Biehl broke the ice with a tight hug.

“This is what it is all about,” she said. “This is why Amy was over here, why we keep coming back, because of the heart and soul of the African people. And we just want the races to reconcile, for people . . . on a one-on-one relationship, to make differences.”

Biehl’s killers have requested amnesty from South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, claiming their attack was politically motivated. They face a July 8 hearing in which the Biehls plan to testify.

Linda Biehl told Manqina that she and her husband had been looking forward to the meeting--and that they would not oppose the amnesty applications.

Already misty-eyed, Manqina began to cry.

“It’s a beginning of a new life for us, at our home, to be blessed with your presence here,” she said through her niece, who translated. “We never knew that you would make peace with our family because we know what [my son] did to your family was very sad.

“But knowing all those things, you’ve put them behind . . . now what you are encouraging is love and peace and reconciliation.”

Amy Biehl had been in South Africa working with voter education projects ahead of the country’s first all-race elections. She was killed the day before she was to return home.

She was set upon by a mob shouting the racist slogan of the militant Pan Africanist Congress--”One Settler, One Bullet”--while driving black friends home to Cape Town’s Guguletu black township.

Four members of the congress’ youth wing--Mongezi Manqina, Mzikhona Nofemela, Vusumzi Ntamo and Ntobeko Peni--are serving 18-year jail terms for the murder.

The tension was obvious on Evelyn Manqina’s face as the Biehls walked into her home.

But by the end of the hourlong meeting, everyone was hugging and laughing. They exchanged phone numbers and addresses, with the Biehls saying they want to hear whether Manqina’s son turns his life around if he is released.

“It gives me hope that he has an opportunity now to really achieve something in his life and to be a contributing member of this great new country,” Biehl said.

The Biehls also gave Manqina a photo of their family at Christmas two years ago. They had heard that Manqina had said she would feel sorry for them over the holidays.

As they left, the Biehls, who have three other adult children, said they understood how the killing had taken place.

They said the Manqinas were just ordinary people whose son went bad--a story all too familiar a continent away.

“It’s liberating to forgive,” Peter Biehl said later. “We can sleep at night, and we feel totally at ease. You can’t do that if you’re harboring hate and anger.”