Mother-to-Mother and Amy Biehl 10-9-09

October 9, 2009

It is amazing – within a 24 hour period how many different powerful experiences and events I am exposed to. Yesterday I was staying in beautiful home in a Black South African township on the outskirts of Cape Town named Gugulethu. This township had some notoriety in the 1990s when a white American Fulbright scholar named Amy Biehl was working to register Black voters to vote for the first time in South Africa, in the election that ultimately put Nelson Mandela in charge of the country. She was in a van in Guguletu when a crowd of youth attacked the bus and ultimately beat, stabbed and killed her. This happened blocks from where we were staying and the news was all over the world for a period of time. Last night several of us from the Collective Narrative Practices course went to see an acclaimed play based on this incident called Mother to Mother. It was a powerful one-woman performance focused on the mother of the boy who was part of the stabbing. She did a wonderful job portraying such a full range of emotions including the grief for the mother of the woman whom her son killed as well as grief for herself and her son. I especially enjoyed sharing this evening with the African woman my age, Florence, the owner of the B&B where we are staying who was also greatly moved by the performance. Florence teaches nursing students and is very interested in learning more about Nonviolent Communication. We are talking about ways for her to come to the New York Intensive Residential Training in NVC.

For some more info about the Amy Biehl case, one place you can read is:
http://www.myhero.com/myhero/hero.asp?hero=a_biehl
I do find it an inspiring story – especially reading about how the parents of Amy Biehl supported dialogue, amnesty and reconciliation with the boys involved in the killing, two of whom now work dedicatedly for the Amy Biehl Foundation (see www.amybiehl.org) her parents created to support these goals in the world.
Some questions that are sometimes not asked about this event. Would there have been world-wide attention if she had not been a person of such privileged background (and being young and photogenic didn't hurt either)? Amy had so many choices about where she could be and how she could live her life. How about the “killers?”