Once the paved road enters McGregor, it is called Voortrekker, or \u201cpioneer,\u201d for the Dutch colonists who travelled inland from the Cape by ox wagon. To the north of the road is the white part of town, with stately Georgian houses and cars in every driveway. To the south, where Snyders grows his pears, the houses are mostly thatched cottages, and the residents are what South Africans call \u201ccolored\u201d: the mixed-race descendants of the Dutch, their Malay slaves, and the indigenous people, the Khoi and the San.<\/p>\n
But, according to a legal claim that Snyders and seventy of his neighbors have launched, all<\/em> of McGregor\u2014and miles of prime farmland surrounding it\u2014rightfully belongs to them. They are the progeny of sixty-seven farmers who purchased property in the area from a local reverend after the British wrested control of the Cape Colony from the Dutch. Snyders set on the table a copy of the deed of transfer\u2014dated 1888, signed by the colonial governor, and noting a payment of a hundred and thirty-seven pounds and ten shillings. Next to it he placed a group photograph of the original farmers, brown men in suits\u2014and one woman\u2014seated in four rows. Snyders pointed out the resemblance between one of the men in the picture, William George Page, and Page\u2019s great-granddaughter, Elizabeth, who was sitting on a rickety bench next to the pear sorters, shooing away a chicken.<\/p>\n \u201cI started my research in 1971,\u201d Snyders said, riffling through a substantial stack of papers. \u201cThe old people who lived here used to come to my house and talk about how their land had been robbed from them, and I was always interested in their stories. Then I went out to the archives in Cape Town: I search, search, search, search!\u201d The claim, which will be submitted to the courts in June, posits that Snyders and his neighbors were dispossessed of twelve thousand acres during apartheid, when eighty-five per cent of South Africa\u2019s arable land came under the control of white farmers. \u201cWe want our land back\u2014that is all,\u201d Snyders said. \u201cThat we can prosper, as in years before.\u201d<\/p>\n Inside, Snyders has a picture of Nelson Mandela hanging next to snapshots of his grandchildren, but he is not a fan of the contemporary version of Mandela\u2019s party, the African National Congress, which has been in power since South Africa\u2019s first democratic elections, in 1994. He was disgusted with former President Jacob Zuma, who, after nine singularly unprincipled years in office, stands accused of sixteen counts of corruption, fraud, and racketeering. Snyders was frustrated by \u201cload shedding,\u201d the daily periods without electricity imposed by South Africa\u2019s state-owned power utility, whose leaders had been compelled that week to appear before a parliamentary commission investigating corruption. \u201cPoliticians, they\u2019re just there to steal!\u201d Snyders said. \u201cWe believe in: Grow something! Work with your hands! Not sitting on your ass and talking a lot of crap in Parliament.\u201d He was encouraged, though, by a new position taken up under President Cyril Ramaphosa, who came to office in 2018: a proposed amendment to the constitution that would allow for land to be expropriated without compensating its owners, which Snyders hopes will help with their case.<\/p>\n By his own admission, Snyders is not a \u201cworldly gentleman.\u201d He blames the droughts that have been plaguing McGregor partly on global warming, and partly on the influx of gays and lesbians into the village. \u201cThat\u2019s why it\u2019s not raining anymore, as a punishment,\u201d he explained. But his understanding of land reform in South Africa is not so different from that of another impressionable septuagenarian, the President of the United States. Last August, Trump tweeted his concern about \u201cthe South Africa land and farm seizures and expropriations and the large scale killing of farmers.\u201d Trump was responding to a report he\u2019d seen on Fox News, in which Tucker Carlson warned, inaccurately, that Ramaphosa had already begun \u201cseizing land from his own citizens without compensation because they are the wrong skin color.\u201d In truth, the matter is far from settled: the proposal has been fiercely debated in Parliament, on social media, and at dinner tables across the country since it was first announced, after the A.N.C.\u2019s 2017 convention. The Pan South African Language Board, which tracks the incidence of words on social media, named \u201cexpropriation without compensation\u201d the term of the year in 2018. The issue has been a significant factor in campaigns for South Africa\u2019s elections, on May 8th: the opposition party, the Democratic Alliance, argues that, if the amendment is passed, it will further erode the nation\u2019s already faltering economy and give undue power to a tainted government.<\/p>\n To Snyders, it\u2019s very simple. \u201cAll the white people in McGregor know: they are on other people\u2019s land. It belongs to us.\u201d Gesturing toward his garden, he said, \u201cThis is a small piece of land. What could we do with a whole farm? If we are successful with our land claim, I must buy Mr. Ramaphosa a case of whiskey!\u201d Elizabeth Page pointed out that Ramaphosa doesn\u2019t drink. Snyders shrugged. \u201cIf this thing happens, it will be a turnover just like this,\u201d he said, snapping his fingers. \u201cI will come to your door, and I will say, \u2018Look here, my Lady Girlie, you are on my<\/em>property.\u2019\u00a0\u201d<\/p>\n Before it was called McGregor, the village where Snyders lives was named Lady Grey; there is an art gallery by that name on Voortrekker Street. Lady Grey was the wife of Sir George Grey, a governor of the Cape Colony in the eighteen-fifties. As the colonists opened mines and built farms, Grey saw in the black population a source of disposable workers. He vowed that they would be \u201cmarched into the colony under their European superintendents, unarmed and provided only with implements of labor,\u201d and \u201cmarched out of the colony in the same manner when employment ceases.\u201d In 1894, Prime Minister Cecil John Rhodes named a bill for Grey, which restricted Africans to segregated regions of the Cape and limited the amount of land they could hold. Tembeka Ngcukaitobi, who is a judge and the author of \u201cThe Land Is Ours,\u201d a history of dispossession and resistance by black lawyers, told me that the law forced the Xhosa, the cattle herders who made up most of the colony\u2019s black populace, to give up their traditional livelihood. \u201cThe wealth of Africans at the time was measured in cattle, and the reduction of hectares you could keep reduced the number of cattle you could graze,\u201d he said. \u201cThey had to be pushed off their land and deprived of cattle to make them dependent on the new economy imposed on them\u2014the wage economy.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The Glen Grey Act was the first piece of legislation to enshrine in law the residential separation of the races. It was also the basis for the notorious Natives Land Act of 1913, which in its final form allocated a mere thirteen per cent of all arable land to the black majority. This land was held in \u201cnative reserves,\u201d under the authority of African chiefs. There were no individual property rights on the reserves, so no land could be sold\u2014which meant that black people could make no money from their assets.<\/p>\n In 1948, the Afrikaner National Party came to power and began instituting ever more elaborate systems of racial categorization, determining who could live where and with whom: nonwhite South Africans were pushed to the peripheries of cities and towns, and were divided, based on their tribal background, into ten rural regions, called Bantustans. This policy enabled the government to declare that there was no black majority in South Africa, only a collection of disparate ethnic groups. More than three and a half million people were removed from their homes in rural areas. Their land was expropriated without compensation and sold at low prices to white farmers. Under apartheid, eighty-five per cent of South African land was reserved for whites, who made up some seventeen per cent of the population. (As of 2011, when the last census was taken, the country was seventy-nine per cent black, nine per cent white, and nine per cent colored.)<\/p>\n David Jansen with a portrait of his mother, who died when he was a teen-ager. After her death, the Jansens were among the millions of South Africans who were forced off their land so that whites could occupy it. Photograph by Pieter Hugo for The New Yorker<\/span><\/p>\n David Jansen, a neighbor of Gabriel Snyders\u2019s, was born the year before apartheid began, and he spent his childhood raising cattle with his parents outside town. He now lives above a shop, and pays a white man on the other side of Voortrekker Street to keep his three cows in the yard at night; every day he grazes them in the bush on the edge of town. One afternoon, he took me into the mountains, where he was brought up, in a small brick house that his mother had inherited from her parents. He grew up playing outside, where there was nothing but open land for the family\u2019s cattle to graze. When Jansen was in his early teens, his parents died, and he moved into town with his older brother to attend school. Around that time, the brothers started noticing fencing going up around their parents\u2019 land. The mayor told them that they had no right to their property, and that their house would be dismantled. They could continue to graze livestock there only if they paid rent. \u201cThey asked us for money\u2014but we didn\u2019t have money, you must understand,\u201d Jansen said. \u201cThe mayor flattened the house to the ground.\u201d He pointed out a pile of bricks grown over with fynbos plants\u2014the remnants of his home\u2014and showed me the tree that marks the graves of his parents and his grandparents. It was all behind a wire fence, which he was afraid to pass.<\/p>\n The remnants of Jansen\u2019s childhood home. After his family was evicted, he said, \u201cthe mayor flattened the house.\u201d Photograph by Pieter Hugo for The New Yorker<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The A.N.C. was concerned with land from the beginning; the Party was formed largely in reaction to the Glen Grey Act and the laws that followed. When the A.N.C. took power, in 1994, it saw land reform as the \u201ccentral and driving force of a program of rural development\u201d meant to redress centuries of injustice. There would be a land-claims court to adjudicate restitution for anyone who had been dispossessed of property; in order to avoid conflict, a \u201cwilling seller, willing buyer\u201d policy would be instituted, in which landowners were asked to voluntarily sell their land to the government so that it could be restored to those with legitimate claims. A system of tenure reform would secure formal property rights for people who had lived for decades in places that they could not legally own. And, finally, the A.N.C. pledged to redistribute thirty per cent of the country\u2019s farmland within five years. Twenty-five years later, it has managed roughly eight per cent. White South Africans own seventy-two per cent of the land held by individuals in the country. Ngcukaitobi told me, \u201cLand represents, in the most graphic way, racial inequality in South Africa\u2014still. The ownership of land as entrenched in 1913 has not changed.\u201d<\/p>\n The failure of land reform is one of the reasons that South Africa is among the most unequal societies on earth. Unemployment is at thirty-seven per cent. Only thirteen per cent of South Africans earn more than six thousand dollars a year. The education system is in shambles: nearly eighty per cent of nine- and ten-year-olds fail simple tests of reading comprehension. To add to the woes of South Africans, some seventeen billion dollars disappeared from state coffers under Jacob Zuma, and is still being pursued by the courts.<\/p>\n All of this helps explain the rise of a politician named Julius Malema\u2014Juju to his supporters. Malema, the former head of the African National Congress Youth League, was first a prot\u00e9g\u00e9 of Zuma\u2019s and then an antagonist, railing against Zuma\u2019s \u201cself-seeking greed\u201d and calling him a thief. After being expelled from the A.N.C., Malema founded his own political party, the Economic Freedom Fighters\u2014a \u201cradical, left, and anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist movement.\u201d The E.F.F.\u2019s position is that all South African land\u2014as well as all banks and mineral rights\u2014should be nationalized to rectify economic inequality.<\/p>\n Malema\u2019s campaign billboards advertise him as a \u201cson of the soil,\u201d but he drives a Mercedes-Benz and wears a seventeen-thousand-dollar Breitling watch. In 2009, fending off accusations of corruption, he told the South African journalist Debora Patta that he identified with the underprivileged. \u201cI am the poor,\u201d he said. \u201cIf you are going to define richness on the basis of material clothes and cars, then that\u2019s something else.\u201d Targeting South Africa\u2019s vast underclass for votes, the E.F.F. criticizes the A.N.C., but it demonizes South African whites. \u201cEven under the so-called democracy, you are subjects, you are servants of white people,\u201d Malema said, at a rally in 2016. \u201cI am here to disturb the white man\u2019s peace. The white man has been too comfortable for too long.\u201d Malema concluded, \u201cWe are not calling for the slaughtering of white people, at least for now.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. But, white minority, be warned: we will take our land\u2014it doesn\u2019t matter how.\u201d The E.F.F. is currently the third-largest party in Parliament, with six per cent of the vote.<\/p>\n Malema\u2019s provocations fuel zealots eager to frame what is happening in South Africa as part of an international \u201cwhite genocide.\u201d A mini-genre of documentary has emerged in which a crusading blonde from a foreign land comes to South Africa to investigate the move toward expropriation without compensation, and relates it to the ghastly phenomenon of plaasmoorde<\/em>\u2014a term that translates literally as \u201cfarm murders\u201d but encompasses all forms of violence inflicted on farmers during home invasions. In \u201cPlaasmoorde: The Killing Fields,\u201d the British right-wing gadfly Katie Hopkins asserts, \u201cWhites are being systematically cleansed from the land by black gangs. Black gangs are supported by the language and actions of mainstream politicians.\u201d As evidence, she cites Malema\u2019s rhetoric, but also the A.N.C.\u2019s push for a constitutional amendment. \u201cI look around at these persecuted whites living in gated communities,\u201d Hopkins concludes, mournfully, \u201cand I wonder if apartheid ever really went away. It seems the only thing that has shifted is who has the power.\u201d The young alt-right Canadian Lauren Southern tells a similar story in her documentary \u201cFarmlands,\u201d asking whether there is a \u201cwhite genocide going on right now\u201d in South Africa, where the \u201cgovernment\u2019s anti-white rhetoric is now being realized in legislation to take white land.\u201d<\/p>\n Ernst Roets, the deputy head of the Afrikaner civil-rights organization AfriForum, appears in Hopkins\u2019s film, and is a favorite of the right-winginternational media; he has discussed expropriation on Tucker Carlson\u2019s show. When I visited him at his headquarters, in an office plaza outside Pretoria, he was wearing glasses and a blue shirt with the AfriForum logo stitched along the pocket, which gave him the look of an I.T. specialist. \u201cAfrikaners are the villains of South Africa, because of our history,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n They are the remnants of a ruling class\u2014the descendants of the employees of the Dutch East India Company, who arrived in the late seventeenth century, and now constitute about sixty per cent of South Africa\u2019s four and a half million white citizens. The National Party, which instituted apartheid, was established specifically to secure their interests. In those days, their language\u2014Afrikaans, a creole sometimes referred to as Low Dutch\u2014was imposed on nonwhites. The 1976 Soweto Uprising\u2014in which some twenty thousand students marched, and several hundred were killed by the police\u2014was held to protest the mandatory use of Afrikaans in schools. Now Afrikaans both unites and divides the country; it is the basis of a white-identity movement, but it is also the first language of three-quarters of colored South Africans. Moenier Adams, a musician from the Cape Flats, the sprawling region outside Cape Town where hundreds of thousands of black and colored South Africans were forcibly resettled under apartheid, has a song that describes the language he grew up speaking as a \u201chistory book without a cover, of a white guy looking for a brown-skinned lover.\u201d<\/p>\n Traditionally, there has been friction between whites of English descent and Afrikaners. \u201cI think that tension has lessened as a result of current government policies,\u201d Roets said. \u201cWhite English and white Afrikaans people are sort of pushed together into one bigger group with common concerns.\u201d They are united, he thinks, by a shared sense of siege. \u201cPolitical leaders\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. actively and continuously vilify white farmers in particular and even go as far as romanticizing violence against them,\u201d Roets writes, in his book \u201cKill the Boer\u201d\u2014a phrase, meaning \u201ckill the farmer,\u201d that is also the refrain of a song Julius Malema and his supporters sometimes sing at rallies. AfriForum\u2019s Web site declares that its mission is to insure that \u201cAfrikaners\u2014who have no other home\u2014are able to lead a meaningful and sustainable existence, in peace with other communities,\u201d but the organization is increasingly broadening its messaging to advocate for \u201cminority rights.\u201d Roets recently co-produced \u201cDisrupted Land,\u201d a documentary, in English, which argues that white colonists arrived in the Cape at the same time as Bantu-speaking black groups, giving them equal claim to the land. (Robert Edgar, a professor emeritus of African history at Howard University, told me that mainstream historians reject this idea. \u201cThat one has been around since the nineteenth century\u2014the myth of the empty land,\u201d he said. \u201cBantu-speaking groups would have been well established in that area several centuries before the Dutch showed up.\u201d) In the past decade, AfriForum\u2019s membership has shot up from nine thousand to more than two hundred thousand.<\/p>\n Roets does not deny that apartheid was a moral catastrophe. \u201cEveryone agrees it was a horrible system,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019m sure it\u2019s less than one per cent within the white community that thinks otherwise.\u201d But he believes that the goal of land reform should be to reward people with provable legal claims, not to alleviate the lingering damage of South Africa\u2019s racial history. \u201cIt\u2019s wrong to say that dispossession happened to all<\/em> black people or that it was committed by all<\/em>white people across the entire surface of South Africa,\u201d he told me. \u201cOf course, then people say, \u2018Oh, so you\u2019re pro-apartheid.\u2019 No! We are free-market people.\u201d On his bookshelf, Roets had a bust of Ronald Reagan. \u201cWe want the state to be small and out of the way. Apartheid was a big-government system.\u201d<\/p>\n Roets dismisses the term \u201cwhite genocide.\u201d \u201cFarming is an occupation\u2014you can\u2019t have a genocide against an occupation,\u201d he said. But, he argues, \u201cthere is<\/em> a large-scale killing of farmers.\u201d AfriForum has verified fifty-four murders of farmers in 2018. The police count sixty-two, of whom forty-six were white. These killings constitute only two-tenths of one per cent of the homicides in South Africa. But to Roets and his constituents they represent part of a politically motivated strategy to push white people off a continent that they have inhabited for hundreds of years. \u201cIn the vast majority of farm attacks the attackers have stated that they were primarily motivated by the intention to rob,\u201d he writes. But he asserts that they are also influenced by \u201chate speech, land reform, labor disputes, racism.\u201d He has pleaded his case before the United Nations, and to politicians in Australia, the United States, and Germany, hoping that they will press the A.N.C. to address farm murders and to abandon plans for expropriation without compensation.<\/p>\n In \u201cFarmlands,\u201d Lauren Southern warns of a coming race war\u2014\u201can ever more realistic bloody future in South Africa.\u201d She interviews Jeanine Ihlenfeldt, a third-generation white farmer in the Eastern Cape, whose father, Schalk Featherstone, was shot to death by a black former employee in 2015. The camera follows Ihlenfeldt as she weeps in her father\u2019s living room, the site of his murder. Southern suggests that the attack was a straightforward act of politically motivated racial hatred. She neglects to mention that the murderer was previously convicted of stealing a pickup truck from Featherstone and spent time in jail for the crime. \u201cIt was just retribution: \u2018You put me in jail for stealing your bakkie, I\u2019m going to kill you,\u2019\u00a0\u201d Ihlenfeldt told me. The perpetrator was on tik<\/em>\u2014South African meth\u2014at the time of the killing; he had stabbed his girlfriend to death a few days earlier. (He is currently serving a life sentence.)<\/p>\n Gawie Snyders with a portrait of his grandparents. He and seventy neighbors are working to claim their entire town. Photograph by Pieter Hugo for The New Yorker<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cI felt exploited,\u201d Ihlenfeldt said of Southern\u2019s film, when we met in February. Ihlenfeldt, a fifty-four-year-old mother of two with short white hair, told me that she was interviewed under false pretenses. \u201cAnother farmer phoned me to say he\u2019s got this Canadian chickie doing a documentary about the drought\u2014can he bring her to me? Hence, I was in my farm boots and my shorts, to go and show them the effect of the drought on the farm, and Lauren sat down and said, \u2018Tell me about your dad.\u2019 Completely caught me off guard.\u201d<\/p>\n We met in the town of Graaff-Reinet, near the farm where Ihlenfeldt grew up, and to which she had returned after her father\u2019s murder. Ihlenfeldt and her husband, Pete, do not think her father\u2019s killing was politically motivated, but they are convinced that there is no future for them\u2014or for white people in general\u2014in South Africa. \u201cMy son spent four years at university, but because he\u2019s white he doesn\u2019t get the job,\u201d Ihlenfeldt said. \u201cOur kids are saying now, \u2018I want to get out of this country,\u2019 because of entitlement.\u201d Ihlenfeldt was referring to Black Economic Empowerment legislation, which rewards companies that hire black employees and penalizes those that don\u2019t. \u201cThe only way is to leave,\u201d she said. \u201cMiddle-income people, the tax base, they\u2019re leaving every day.\u201d<\/p>\n South Africa is still a place in which it is highly advantageous to be white. The average white person there earns five times as much as the average black person. (In McGregor, people of color cross to the white side of Voortrekker Street every day, to tend gardens, clean houses, build fences. White people are rarely seen on the colored side.) Yet many whites feel that their status is threatened. In the past two decades, according to estimates, some four hundred thousand more whites have left the country than have moved in.<\/p>\n The Ihlenfeldts may follow. After seeing Southern\u2019s film, a German legislator contacted them with an offer. \u201cHe\u2019s part of this committee that\u2019s been tasked to look into farm attacks and get farmers to Germany,\u201d Pete said. \u201cIf we arrive tomorrow with the clothes on our back, politicians there will give us asylum. They\u2019ll give us a safe house for six weeks. They\u2019ll feed us. They\u2019ll clothe us. They\u2019ll try to find us jobs.\u201d Peter Dutton, Australia\u2019s minister of Home Affairs, has expressed the intention to do something similar; in March, 2018, he announced that, owing to the \u201chorrific circumstances\u201d faced by white South Africans, his department would give \u201cspecial attention\u201d to any of them seeking to immigrate to a \u201ccivilized country like ours.\u201d (The statement was condemned by Human Rights Watch, and an Australian senator said, \u201cThe bloke is an out-and-out racist.\u201d)<\/p>\n Pete Ihlenfeldt hopes to see foreign intervention in South Africa. \u201cI think they should back us, to stop the farm murders,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n \u201cHow?\u201d Jeanine asked sharply. There are some twenty thousand homicides a year in South Africa. Would foreign forces guard only the white farms? \u201cIt\u2019s not a genocide,\u201d she said, shaking her head. \u201cYou must understand: Afrikaans culture is completely different from English. They are far<\/em> right\u2014that\u2019s why they love that word, \u2018genocide.\u2019\u00a0\u201d<\/p>\n Neither of the Ihlenfeldts believed that there was a link between the attacks and the proposed amendment. \u201cIt\u2019s two completely separate issues,\u201d Jeanine said. \u201cThis land story is about the election.\u201d<\/p>\n Pete interjected, \u201cThey\u2019re doing this to get votes. What\u2019s the word?\u201d<\/p>\n Jeanine replied, dryly, \u201cBribing.\u201d<\/p>\n The A.N.C. has never lost a national election, but it is slipping. In the last nationwide municipal elections, support for the Party fell to its lowest level since 1994, as it lost control of three important metropolitan areas\u2014Johannesburg, Nelson Mandela Bay, and the City of Tshwane. The D.A. won twenty-six per cent of the national vote by promising centrist policies and technocratic good government. At the same time, the E.F.F., Malema\u2019s group, threatened from the left. \u201cThe A.N.C. had an operating theory that the rural areas were going to keep them in power\u2014that they need to cozy up to the chiefs while hammering away at the white farmers,\u201d Ruth Hall, a political scientist at the University of the Western Cape, told me. \u201cBut now, in the urban areas, it\u2019s losing votes to the E.F.F. hand over fist.\u201d To compete, it has embraced expropriation without compensation.<\/p>\n Ramaphosa, who previously served as Zuma\u2019s Deputy President, has mixed incentives. Before entering the government, he was an anti-apartheid leader and a trade unionist, strongly allied with Mandela; he is also a businessman who built a fortune of half a billion dollars, much of it during his time with the A.N.C. Ramaphosa declined to be interviewed for this article, as did the current Deputy President, David Mabuza, who chairs the Inter-Ministerial Committee on Land Reform. A person who has discussed the issue with Ramaphosa told me, \u201cCyril doesn\u2019t believe in expropriation without compensation. He got stuck with it. For a state President coming into an ailing economy, taking over the reins from a dysfunctional kleptocrat, and then having to go on a world road show to convince investors to come into the country\u2014while at the same time saying, \u2018Expropriation without compensation\u2019? It\u2019s a nightmare!\u201d<\/p>\n In South Africa, voters elect a party to lead Parliament, which then determines which of its members will become the President. The most recent A.N.C. convention, in 2017, was chaotic: it was unclear until the last minute whether Ramaphosa or his opponent, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma\u2014one of Jacob Zuma\u2019s ex-wives\u2014would head the Party. \u201cRamaphosa got in by a whisker, and then the Zuma camp said, \u2018By the way, we have a resolution about land expropriation without compensation,\u2019\u00a0\u201d Hall said. \u201cIt ended up at midnight with fisticuffs, and the conference was at risk of collapsing on this issue. Ramaphosa\u2019s election would have been null and void. So he got in, but he was given the poison chalice.\u201d<\/p>\n Ramaphosa appointed Hall and nine other scholars and business leaders to serve on an advisory panel on land reform; they are rushing to prepare a report on the future of the issue. \u201cThe irony of this whole debate is that the property clause explicitly made provision for expropriation, \u201d Hall said. In the South African constitution, codified in 1996, Section Twenty-five holds that the government can expropriate private property \u201cfor a public purpose or in the public interest\u201d if it provides compensation that is \u201cjust and equitable.\u201d For a quarter of a century, the A.N.C. has theoretically been empowered to claim any property it saw fit, and to set compensation at zero.<\/p>\n But the courts have persistently interpreted \u201cjust and equitable\u201d to mean \u201cmarket-based\u201d\u2014with the exception of a single ruling, made by Tembeka Ngcukaitobi, who is a judge in the Land Claims Court. That case involved a speculator who bought a plot, in 1999, knowing that there was a claim against it, made by a tenant farmer whose family had been working the land since 1946 without title. (After the Natives Land Act allocated the majority of farmland to whites, it was common for black farmworkers to labor without pay in exchange for being allowed to remain in their homes.) In 2016, when the tenant won his suit for the land, the speculator asked for compensation, amounting to more than ten times what he\u2019d paid for the property. Ngcukaitobi ruled against him, arguing that the tenant had already \u201cpaid\u201d for the land with his work. \u201cMy point was that we need a shift in standards, not based in the fundamentalism of the market,\u201d Ngcukaitobi told me. \u201cIt is mandated under the constitution\u2014our job is to work out what justice and equity demand. We have to take into account history. We are not dealing with the price of a box of chocolates.\u201d The ruling was overturned on appeal, but Ngcukaitobi\u2019s logic was rooted in the constitution as it stands\u2014which, he says, makes the proposed amendment unnecessary.<\/p>\n Vuyo Mahlati, the chair of Ramaphosa\u2019s advisory panel, and the president of the African Farmers Association of South Africa, a union with three hundred thousand members, thinks that the Land Claims Court cannot solve the problem alone. \u201cThe judges are saying to us, \u2018The courts are already overburdened on land reform,\u2019\u00a0\u201d she said. \u201cAnd if you are a poor community, or a farmer without resources, you cannot rely on your case\u2014on your rights\u2014being fought for.\u201d<\/p>\n Ngcukaitobi disputed this. \u201cOn land, we are underworked<\/em>,\u201d he said. \u201cWe have very few cases of land restitution. The majority of the cases have to do with eviction!\u201d The court, which Ngcukaitobi said was devised to \u201cmanage the transfer of land from white hands to black hands,\u201d was instead being used mostly to evict black squatters and tenants. He agreed that part of the problem was that white farmers had more money to hire lawyers, but he also blamed the incompetence of the government commission charged with finding and validating land claims. \u201cIt is dysfunctional, hobbled by administrative inefficiency, and quite frankly by corruption,\u201d he said. \u201cThat<\/em> is the problem\u2014the collapse of institutions. But, instead of accepting their own fault, they have blamed the constitution.\u201d<\/p>\n Charles Back, a third-generation farmer, was beaten by thieves and left for dead. Afterward, he posted a message on social media, saying, \u201cI want it to be known that this attack was not politically divisive in any way.\u201d Photograph by Pieter Hugo for The New Yorker<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Proponents of expropriation without compensation say that it can help break deadlocks when the government needs to purchase land in order to return it to someone with a proven claim. Under the \u201cwilling seller, willing buyer\u201d model, landowners have an incentive to drive up prices indefinitely, Hall said: \u201cWe have what\u2019s called a landowner veto. The state just carries on more and more above market price to induce people, and I think it\u2019s impractical for the state and the taxpayer to be held over a barrel.\u201d The bill under consideration is more targeted than most people realize, she added. \u201c\u00a0\u2018Expropriation without compensation\u2019 is obviously a populist kind of terminology that people have grasped on to. But the bill says that, when the state expropriates, it can provide no compensation only under these five circumstances: purely speculatively held land; land that has been abandoned; publicly owned land; land that has been donated; farms with labor tenants. It\u2019s quite limited.\u201d<\/p>\n But speculatively held land is still someone\u2019s property. It will be difficult to secure foreign investment\u2014which the South African government is actively soliciting\u2014if the world is afraid to buy property that can become valueless at the whim of a government with a long history of corruption. Mosiuoa (Terror) Lekota, who was imprisoned with Nelson Mandela for resisting apartheid and was present when the constitution was drafted, told me, \u201cWhen we got to Section Twenty-five, we enunciated step by step what we needed to do to solve problems, and the first point we made is that no one may be deprived of their property. That is important to protect all of us\u2014not just whites!\u201d Lekota, a former chairman of the A.N.C., left the Party in 2008 and formed his own, the Congress of the People. \u201cWe cannot support anyone who wants to promote racial differences or cultural hostilities: we are constitutionalists. South Africa cannot become a great nation that can take its place among nations of the world unless we merge and bind together into one.\u201d<\/p>\n The government\u2019s current examination of land reform is not limited to the question of expropriation; it is also attempting to reckon with climate change, drought, and urbanization. \u201cIt is not just about farms,\u201d Mahlati said. \u201cIt\u2019s about cities, where eighty-three per cent of the urban population\u2014mainly black\u2014resides on two per cent of the land.\u201d She framed expropriation without compensation not only as a moral issue but also as a financial necessity. The government currently has a backlog of 1.4 billion dollars\u2019 worth of approved claims waiting to be paid out. \u201cThese are all legitimate cases that have been verified, proven\u2014but the government has to buy that land,\u201d Mahlati said. \u201cAnd the problem now is that the budget of the state is becoming less and less.\u00a0\u201d<\/p>\n Hall told me, \u201cWe have to deal with the structural inequality in this country. I think that this is all an opportunity to get things right. We have a property system that works for only about forty per cent of our population. Most of our people are living in informal settlements, in back-yard shacks. They\u2019re living as farmworkers on privately held land that they don\u2019t own. They\u2019re living in communal areas with forms of traditional government, without any kind of secured property right. We have a new generation coming of age, and young people are saying, \u2018We don\u2019t accept being locked out of the cities, kicked off the farms, and pushed into ghettos.\u2019 Something is going to have to give.\u201d<\/p>\n In February, 2018, Parliament held public hearings on land reform. Mahlati recalled, \u201cOne guy, a farmer, who went to the hearings, he said, \u2018My cattle have no grazing area. I am on this small piece of land; it\u2019s overcrowded. And around me there\u2019s land owned by white farmers. Some of it is not even used\u2014the guy goes overseas most of the time, while I\u2019m sitting here. I\u2019ve had enough.\u2019\u00a0\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Charles Back is a sixty-two-year-old third-generation white farmer. He owns six farms in South Africa; Fairview, in Paarl, where he grew up, is the best known. Fairview wines are sold at most upscale liquor stores in South Africa, and at many in the United States; its cheeses are distributed in little wrapped wedges on South African Airlines flights.<\/p>\n Back lives at Fairview, in a Cape Dutch house built on a hilltop in 1693. One night last year, he was asleep in bed when six black assailants broke in. He awoke when one of them hit him in the head with a crowbar. \u201cI fought back physically as much as I could, until I couldn\u2019t fight back anymore,\u201d Back, who was a paratrooper in the South African special forces in his youth, said, standing in front of his house, with a view of his farm spreading toward the mountains. While three of the men were busy removing flat-screen televisions from walls\u2014\u201cThat\u2019s quite a business, but they brought tools,\u201d Back said\u2014the others beat him and left him for dead, rolled up in a carpet. \u201cMy eye has been completely reconstructed,\u201d he told me. \u201cIt was buggered\u2014my retina detached, the socket smashed. I had to get seventy-four staples in my head.\u201d He smiled. \u201cIt\u2019s funny, you go in and out of consciousness while it\u2019s happening\u2014sort of a wobbly thing. It\u2019s actually kind of a euphoric state. And then I remember them tying me up. While I was lying there, one guy came back to me and he lifted my hair and I just put on an Oscar-worthy performance: I died. I consciously acted that scene.\u201d Then he passed out.<\/p>\n When he came to, he managed to wiggle out of the rug. He could hear that the men were still in the house. \u201cI thought, I have to get out of here\u2014what if they come back? It\u2019s quite difficult to stand up when you are tied up. So I rolled under the bed,\u201d he said, and laughed. \u201cAnd then hop, hop, hop\u2014I hopped down the passage.\u201d He opened the door quietly, hoping not to be noticed. \u201cThen I hopped up the hill.\u201d As Back told the story, he walked me up the steep incline he followed that night toward his driveway. \u201cI saw there was chaos, pandemonium in the house: they didn\u2019t know what had happened to me.\u201d He pointed at a ditch that had been dug when his staff was doing work on a pipe. \u201cAnd then I fell into this bloody hole! I actually lay here and I laughed.\u201d Later, he watched footage of that night captured by security cameras, and saw that when his assailants went looking for him they walked right past the ditch. \u201cI didn\u2019t see them, they didn\u2019t see me.\u201d<\/p>\n Eventually, he was able to untie himself. When he\u2019d gathered some strength, he pulled himself out, sprinted to his car, and drove to the home of an employee, who rushed him to the hospital. \u201cWhile they were stitching me up, I was thinking, I\u2019m not going to allow this thing to go to waste. You don\u2019t get beaten up and left for dead and not do<\/em> something with it. The biggest problem with South Africa is polarization: when you are a white person and you are attacked by a black person, people exploit the opportunity. I thought, I\u2019m not going to allow that.\u201d He decided to post something on social media. \u201cI wanted to say, \u2018It\u2019s common criminality. It\u2019s not about politics. It\u2019s not racially motivated. It\u2019s not about land. It\u2019s just opportunistic people attacking a soft target. That\u2019s it.\u2019\u00a0\u201d His attackers, who are now in prison, were Namibians, former employees of a security company that Back once used to guard his farm.<\/p>\n He went to work the next morning still wearing his bloody shirt, with gauze wrapped around his head and his eye swollen shut. Back said that he had a running joke with the millennials on his staff: \u201cI always tell them, \u2018You sneeze and you say you need to work from home.\u2019 So, first thing, I went to the office where all the social media and marketing take place to show them, \u2018This is what dedication looks like.\u2019\u00a0\u201d Then he asked for help with his post. It read, in part, \u201cI want it to be known that this attack was not politically divisive in any way, but that these were just three common gangsters motivated by their own self-interests. I believe in the values that this country was built on, and continue to hope for harmony and peace.\u201d The post was viewed by 1.6 million people. \u201cThousands of messages!\u201d he said. \u201cNot one negative comment.\u201d He was unaware that the photograph the millennials posted\u2014of Back bruised, bandaged, and bloodied\u2014was lifted and used in Katie Hopkins\u2019s documentary.<\/p>\n Back has been engaged in his own version of land reform for decades. \u201cI tried to make homeowners of my staff,\u201d he told me. \u201cIt was easy at my farm in Malmesbury. It was adjacent to a township\u201d\u2014the exurban residential areas designated for black people during apartheid. \u201cI bought plots and gave the title deeds to people. Whoever worked for me got a house.\u201d Things haven\u2019t gone as smoothly in Paarl. Across the road from the Fairview complex, Back bought a thirty-seven-acre parcel of land\u2014Fair Valley, he calls it\u2014and gave it to his workers as a collective. \u201cTwenty years later, we\u2019re still struggling to get the land divided,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s held up by government red tape.\u201d<\/p>\n A man named Awie Adolf, who has worked for Back for thirty-seven years, took me to see Fair Valley, where eight houses and a melon patch sit on the edge of a large tract of land bordered by towering gum trees. There are thirty-four families in the Fairview Farmworkers Cooperative who are waiting for houses, but unless they subdivide the property they aren\u2019t permitted to build any more. Adolf described their attempts to engage the municipal government: \u201cYou come to that person, he sends you to that one, he sends you to that one\u2014there is no one person who can say, \u2018This is how you do this thing.\u2019 That\u2019s why we struggle so long. It is very frustrating. I want my own home. I don\u2019t want to depend on Charles every time. I have four children. I want to know they can have my house when I\u2019m gone. I can\u2019t fight out of my grave.\u201d He did not think expropriation without compensation would solve anything. \u201cThe old government steals the land from us. These people now also want to steal. They will take the land and do the same as the old government: steal and steal.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Traditionally, the Democratic Alliance\u2014the official opposition party of South Africa\u2014has been regarded as a party for white liberals. But, in 2015, Mmusi Maimane became the first black leader of the D.A. He aspires to someday become the first non-A.N.C. President of post-liberation South Africa. He is thirty-eight and photogenic, a devout Christian who grew up in Soweto and is married to a white woman. He was wearing a ring embossed with the Hebrew word chai<\/em>, meaning \u201clife,\u201d and a map of Africa. \u201cMy wife got this for me after I lost my wedding ring\u2014well, after it was expropriated without compensation,\u201d he said, at a caf\u00e9 in Cape Town, a block from his office in Parliament.<\/p>\n The D.A. firmly opposes expropriation without compensation. \u201cWhy was Section Twenty-five put in the constitution in 1996? It was put there because it needed to insure that South Africans who could not own land before could finally own land,\u201d Maimane said. \u201cWhy are we now trying to undermine that in 2019? I\u2019ll tell you how it happened: Liberation movements always do the same thing. They get to a point where they need to force people to believe that they need to be liberated some more\u2014and the government needs more power to do it. Models that have done this same exercise have achieved outcomes like Zimbabwe.\u201d In 2000, the Zimbabwean President, Robert Mugabe (whom Archbishop Desmond Tutu once described as \u201ca cartoon figure of an archetypal African dictator\u201d), began rapidly expropriating farmland held by whites\u2014about seventy per cent of the national total\u2014and redistributing it to his political cronies and supporters. Agriculture, which had provided Zimbabwe\u2019s leading exports, disintegrated, and the economy followed suit.<\/p>\n Maimane began his political career as a member of the A.N.C. \u201cAs a Sowetan, pre-1994, politics were racial: you had to have a party that was against the system that oppressed the race, and that was the A.N.C.\u201d But Maimane lost faith in the Party\u2019s ability to govern under Zuma. \u201cThe corruption within the A.N.C. became firmly in place, and I knew without doubt that this was an irredeemable organization.\u201d He is not convinced that Ramaphosa represents a marked departure. \u201cMost people tend to become baffled by the Cyril Ramaphosa who says he is committed to international markets, et cetera. But he is frankly as much a part of the A.N.C. as anyone, and frankly he will do what the A.N.C. wants him to do.\u201d<\/p>\n A pair of baristas approached and asked to take selfies with Maimane\u2014his face is ubiquitous in Cape Town and Johannesburg, appearing on D.A. campaign posters, above the slogan \u201cA job in every home.\u201d Maimane posed, then continued, \u201cFirst, there\u2019s no need for a constitutional amendment\u2014there never was. Second, rather than empower the state we should be capacitating our courts to make decisions on compensation: create the budget allocation so that more people can hear cases so we can create enough case law to adjudicate quickly. If we get that right, we will be able to get to a point where people will actually know<\/em> what is just and what is equitable, so you don\u2019t have farmers holding the state for ransom. Third, expropriation without compensation already happens in this country\u2014it just happens to black people. Because it\u2019s black people who don\u2019t have title.\u201d<\/p>\n The Democratic Alliance has been comparatively effective in places where it holds power. According to the think tank Good Governance Africa, fifteen of the country\u2019s twenty best governed municipalities are run by the D.A., either alone or in coalition. But, while the Party has begun attracting more middle-class black voters, it has struggled to appeal to voters loyal to the A.N.C. There is little chance that Maimane\u2019s party will win the majority in the forthcoming elections, and if the A.N.C. wins it will likely have to follow through on some kind of expropriation. But previous efforts at redistribution have had dubious outcomes. Zuma\u2019s land-reform minister, presumably intending to highlight the failures of earlier administrations, announced that ninety per cent of reform projects in the past quarter century had failed. Ben Cousins, a scholar at the University of the Western Cape and the lead author of a recent study on South African land-reform policy commissioned by Parliament, contests this statistic. \u201cThere\u2019s no data to support that\u2014it\u2019s a thumb-suck,\u201d he said. \u201cIn about fifty per cent of projects, beneficiaries have their lives improved. And the beneficiaries are poor people. Even modest success makes a difference.\u201d<\/p>\n But, without access to irrigation, machinery, and training, new farmers are bound to struggle. And South Africa\u2019s agrarian potential is limited: only about eleven per cent of the country\u2019s land is arable, and less than two per cent is currently set up for irrigation. Every year is hotter and drier than the one before. Many black South Africans who are offered land prefer to be bought out, rather than give up their lives in the city to take up a risky and isolating venture.<\/p>\n In some respects, the focus on land is an attempt to return to the era of the Glen Grey Act, when an entire economy\u2014an entire society\u2014could be molded by redistributing land. But the wage economy is now inextricably in place. Ultimately, Maimane argued, education and employment are the most meaningful focus for the future of South Africa. Even Cousins, who calls himself an \u201cagrarianista,\u201d admits, \u201cThe big question is employment. We have to find ways of including more people in the economy, or we are going to face another popular uprising at some point.\u201d<\/p>\n At the caf\u00e9, Maimane, who had recently attended a vigil for the victims of farm attacks, said, \u201cThe race war is on in South Africa. The great difficulty is that it\u2019s got political dividends for parties who want to mobilize behind it in a simplistic, reductionist manner, and that\u2019s simply not going to build the nation we want. Not to be too M.L.K. about it, but my children are mixed-race. They must come of age in a country in which they are citizens not because of the color of their skin.\u201d Like many others in South Africa, Maimane believes that the country urgently needs to reckon with the economic legacy of colonialism and apartheid. But, he concluded, \u201cit\u2019s a Marxist construct to say the means of production are within the land. Land becomes a catchall to say, \u2018There\u2019s still too many of us left out.\u2019 But maybe land is not the solution.\u201d\u00a0\u2666<\/p>\n<\/div>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/05\/image-13-300x225.png\")
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