Amy's Story
Throughout her adult life, Amy Biehl was an activist
for democracy and human rights. She attended Stanford University
and wrote an honors thesis on Namibian independence. After graduating,
she worked for the National Democratic Institute, an organization
supporting emerging democracies around the world.
By the time she was 26, she had travelled to Namibia,
Ivory Coast, Malawi, Burundi, and Kenya. She left the Institute
in 1992 to study women's roles in the creation of a new South
African constitution, supported by a Fulbright Scholarship.
South Africa was changing rapidly at that time,
two years after the release of Nelson Mandela, and on the verge
of democratic elections. The country's first all-race elections
marked the end of apartheid, the policy of racial separation and
oppression that had dominated South African life for nearly fifty
years.
On August 25, 1993, Amy drove friends
home to the black township of Guguletu. While in the township,
she was stoned and stabbed to death by local youths who had just
attended a Pan Africanist Congress rally condemning whites' involvement
in perpetuating racial inequality.
Of Amy's death, Nelson Mandela said, "She made our
aspirations her own and lost her life in the turmoil of our transition."
