Amy Biehl’s Last Home : A Bright Life, a Tragic Death, and a Journey of Reconciliation in South Africa

Authors

Steven D. Gish

Files

Description

In 1993, white American Fulbright scholar Amy Biehl was killed in a racially motivated attack near Cape Town, after spending months working to promote democracy and women’s rights in South Africa. The ironic circumstances of her death generated enormous international publicity and yielded one of South Africa’s most heralded stories of postapartheid reconciliation. Amy’s parents not only established a humanitarian foundation to serve the black township where she was killed, but supported amnesty for her killers and hired two of the young men to work for the Amy Biehl Foundation. The Biehls were hailed as heroes by Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, and many others in South Africa and the United States—but their path toward healing was neither quick nor easy.

Granted unrestricted access to the Biehl family’s papers, Steven Gish brings Amy and the Foundation to life in ways that have eluded previous authors. He is the first to place Biehl’s story in its full historical context, while also presenting a gripping portrait of this remarkable young woman and the aftermath of her death across two continents.

Copyright Statement

Amy Biehl's Last Home © 2018 by Ohio University Press is licensed under Creative Commons License CC BY-NC-ND. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Language

eng

ISBN

9780821446348

Publication Date

6-13-2018

Publisher

Ohio University Press

City

Athens

Keywords

Amy Biehl, South Africa, apartheid, post apartheid reconciliation, democracy, women’s rights, racial violence, Cape Town, Fulbright scholar, humanitarian foundation, forgiveness, amnesty, restorative justice, Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, reconciliation, racial healing, international relations, American history, South African history, cross-cultural relations, Steven Gish, biography, tragedy, activism, human rights, social justice, philanthropy, forgiveness and redemption, global awareness

Disciplines

African History | African Studies | Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonial Studies

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.

Recommended Citation

Gish, Steven D., "Amy Biehl’s Last Home : A Bright Life, a Tragic Death, and a Journey of Reconciliation in South Africa" (2018). Ohio University Press Open Access Books. 84.
https://ohioopen.library.ohio.edu/oupress/84