Slain Student’s Efforts to Heal South Africa Recalled

In an outpouring of grief, friends and students attending a memorial service Thursday for a white Fulbright fellow who was dragged from her car and stabbed to death by a black mob recalled her remarkable compassion and commitment to the plight of South Africans.

Hundreds of mourners joined in a rendition of the freedom song “Senzenina,” or “What Have We Done,” during the service for Amy Elizabeth Biehl, a 26-year-old Newport Beach woman who was killed Wednesday in nearby Guguletu township.

The slaying, apparently racially motivated, rocked the University of the Western Cape, where Biehl had studied for the past 10 months. She had developed voter education programs for South Africa’s first multiracial election next year and had worked on behalf of the African National Congress.

Biehl had been driving three black colleagues back to their township Wednesday when their car was surrounded by dozens of black youths. The mob pelted the car with stones before pulling Biehl from the driver’s seat and hitting her in the face with a brick. She was then stabbed in the head.

Two black teen-agers, ages 17 and 18, were arrested Thursday and were said to be members of the student arm of the militant Pan Africanist Congress. Police said more arrests were expected.

When one youth at the mob scene was asked why Biehl had been singled out, he reportedly replied: “Because she is a settler,” meaning she was white.

During Thursday’s memorial service, Evarson Orange, one of the passengers in the car, recalled that Biehl laid her head in his lap after the attack and eventually collapsed in his arms. The passengers then carried her back to the car and tried to rush her to the police station. She died shortly after arriving.

About 1,000 people, from university officials to members of student organizations and the African National Congress, attended the one-hour service before boarding buses and cars for a five-mile procession to the location where Biehl was attacked. There, about 300 staged a peaceful protest, some carrying placards reading: “Amy Fought for Women’s Rights” and “Comrades Come in All Colors.”

Rhoda Kadalie, head of the university’s gender program, said Biehl considered herself fortunate that she had not been a victim of violence but confided that she feared she might lose her life in South Africa.

“I warned her about going into the townships, and she would dismiss me as a nagging old woman,” Kadalie said. “Amy had a premonition that she would die. . . . She kept on saying how lucky she was that nothing had happened to her all the time she was here but it was all too good to be true. She had a feeling that something would happen before she left.”

Biehl had been scheduled to arrive in Newport Beach Saturday before heading to New Jersey to attend Rutgers University. Biehl’s parents moved to Newport Beach from New Mexico in 1985, the same year she began attending Stanford University.

In speaking with Biehl’s parents by telephone Thursday, Kadalie told them their daughter showed no fear when the stoning began.

“She was always surrounded by loving and committed black people, never thinking for a moment that she could come to symbolize the enemy,” Kadalie said.

At Stanford University on Thursday, a former professor of Biehl and one of her advisers met the press to describe her as a “highly regarded undergraduate scholar” who held much promise.

Her thesis on South African elections, said African history professor Kennell Jackson, was “in the top one-tenth of one percent” of undergraduate honors theses and is still requested by political scientists, government and United Nations officials.

“The thing that interests me about all this is that, had the people who killed her stopped and talked to her for five minutes, they would have realized that she was the wrong type of human being to do this to, and how race is a very deceptive thing,” Jackson said in an interview. “It’s a very inaccurate lens through which we view people.”

Michael McFaul, a research associate at the university and a consultant for the National Democratic Institute in Washington, said: “The irony of her death is that here is someone who was so committed to peaceful change, and she’s killed in trying to do that.”

At the National Democratic Institute, Biehl spent two years as a program assistant working on South and East African political issues. She was particularly interested in the role women are playing in South Africa’s political transition.

“What she used to tell me . . . the women there seem to have a lot of good things to contribute and yet they never got the chance,” said Thoko Banda, a friend she met in Washington. “She would say if there’s anything she could do to help the women to know this, she would.

“The continent would be a much better place if only the government would realize that women should be allowed to get involved.”

A White House representative called the Biehl family in Newport Beach on Thursday morning expressing the condolences of President Clinton. A spokesman with the State Department also called family members to say that Nelson Mandela, president of the African National Congress, would soon send his regrets by telegram.

The slain woman’s father, Peter Biehl, recalled that his daughter often complained that whites killed in racial violence in South Africa received more publicity than blacks who were slain.

“It’s kind of ironic that she’s getting all this attention now,” he said. “She’d probably be very embarrassed.”

Times staff writers Mark Platte, Jeffrey A. Perlman and the Associated Press contributed to this report. Dizon reported from Orange County and Heard reported from South Africa.