Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, August 28, 1993 TAG: 9308280046
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BARBARA KOH and MELODY PETERSEN KNIGHT-RIDDER/TRIBUNE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
She worked, lived and played with black South Africans. She advised their children. They taught her dances and were her friends.
"We shared a house, we shared a desk, we shared a daughter," said Melanie Jacobs, her mixed-race South African housemate. "Five minutes before she was killed, she was saying, `South Africans are in my heart.' "
On Wednesday, Biehl, a white American who was on a Fulbright scholarship, was attacked by a mob of black youths and stabbed to death while taking three black friends home to a black township near Cape Town. She was the first American killed in South Africa's racial violence.
On Thursday, police arrested two young men in connection with the death of Biehl, 26, of Newport Beach, Calif. The youths, aged 17 and 18, were members of the student wing of the militant Pan Africanist Congress.
Her killers chanted "One Settler. One Bullet," the PAC motto.
Her friends in both countries notes sadly the irony between her colorblind love and her murder because she was white.
"She saw people as individuals," said Kennell Jackson, a professor of African history at Stanford University, from which Biehl graduated with honors in international relations four years ago.
At the South African university for which Biehl was working, a fellow worker spoke of her as a "champion, fighting for the rights of the oppressed people, black people, particularly women."
Biehl's parents' home has been deluged with words of sympathy. Calls came from an aide to President Clinton, the U.S. ambassador in South Africa and the South African ambassador to the United States. Faxes came from around the world. Strangers brought flowers to Linda and Peter Biehl's doorstep. Nelson Mandela sent a telegram.
But nothing could mask her brutal murder at the hands of the people she had worked for years to help.
She lived with Jacobs, 30, and Jacobs' 14-year-old daughter, Solange. The three soon became a family.
"She was my daughter's dad," Jacobs said. "I would say, `Go ask your father.' "
When the three were seen together, it often drew glares.
"Amy's very white, and I'm very black," she said, "In South Africa, you don't hold hands or dance with someone who doesn't look like you."
When she wasn't working, Biehl loved to go out to clubs and dance. Jacobs had taught her "The Jazz," a dance Biehl planned to take back to her friends in the United States. She was to have flown back to the United States on Friday.
Even if Biehl didn't get back from dancing until 4 a.m., Jacobs said, she would be up at 7:30 typing away on research papers.
Biehl's determination and tenacity were traits from childhood.
She took up ballet, swimming, gymnastics, piccolo and flute, and played hand bells in the church choir. Four years after joining Stanford's diving team as a walk-on, she was captain when the team won an NCAA championship.
"Amy always marched to her own drummer, that's for sure," her father said.
In a sixth-grade speech contest, Biehl discussed how she might be the country's first woman president.
Her parents had one rule: If the children wanted to start something, they had to finish.
"I didn't let them quit," Linda Biehl said.
She was quiet and often self-effacing, but in her quiet way she surprised people, said Jackson, her thesis adviser.
For her 120-page thesis on Chester Crocker, U.S. assistant secretary of state for African affairs, and his role in negotiations for Namibian independence, she interviewed Crocker and George Shultz.
"She wasn't meteoric," Jackson added. "She was utterly reliable. She was certainly going to make her mark in the world - and in a nonaggressive way."
It was a way that led her South African friends to love her and learn from her.
"Professionally, ethically and morally - you couldn't fault Amy," said Jacobs, her South African housemate. "She taught me about love and tolerance. This country needs more Amys. Amy had so much to teach us."
Keywords:
FATALITY
by CNB