Who Owns South Africa?
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/05/13/who-owns-south-africa
A fiercely debated program of land reform could address racial injustice—or cause chaos.
By Ariel Levy May 6, 2019
avid 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
There is a good paved road that runs into McGregor, a pastoral village at the foot of South Africa’s Riviersonderend Mountains, but it stops at the edge of town. When the road was cleared and paved, in the nineteen-twenties, the plan was to keep going through the mountains toward Cape Town, but that project, like many other public works that followed, was abandoned before completion. Consequently, McGregor has a sleepy, almost otherworldly feel. Summers are long, winters are mild, and the soil is fertile: fences along the dusty roads crawl with hot-pink Zimbabwe creeper and orange Cape honeysuckle. The sun is so strong that, when clouds go by, the sky turns not gray but almost white.
There are a handful of flourishing vineyards in the vicinity, but even small plots teem with growth. On a half acre behind his house, a seventy-year-old retiree named Gawie Snyders grows pumpkins, onions, green beans, lettuces, grapes, stone fruit, and roses. “I am a farmer without a farm,” Snyders, a voluble man with brown skin and a bald head, declared one afternoon, looking at his garden. “I know how to prune apricots, peaches, plums—you name it. I worked on a contract basis: forty people on a truck and I prune your farm. That is how I make my money. I harvest your farm.” He was sitting at a picnic table, surrounded by chickens, a litter of puppies, several neighbors, and two men he employs to help with his crops: they were sorting through plastic buckets of pears harvested from Snyders’s half-dozen fruit trees. “They are not working hard now,” he grumbled, gesturing toward the workers. “They are looking at you, because they have never seen a white woman sitting next to me. It’s apartheid, my girl—apartheid never dies. Apartheid will be with us for a very long time.”
Once the paved road enters McGregor, it is called Voortrekker, or “pioneer,” 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 “colored”: the mixed-race descendants of the Dutch, their Malay slaves, and the indigenous people, the Khoi and the San.
But, according to a legal claim that Snyders and seventy of his neighbors have launched, all of McGregor—and miles of prime farmland surrounding it—rightfully 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—dated 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—and one woman—seated in four rows. Snyders pointed out the resemblance between one of the men in the picture, William George Page, and Page’s great-granddaughter, Elizabeth, who was sitting on a rickety bench next to the pear sorters, shooing away a chicken.
“I started my research in 1971,” Snyders said, riffling through a substantial stack of papers. “The 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!” 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’s arable land came under the control of white farmers. “We want our land back—that is all,” Snyders said. “That we can prosper, as in years before.”
The remnants of Jansen’s childhood home. After his family was evicted, he said, “the mayor flattened the house.”
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’s party, the African National Congress, which has been in power since South Africa’s 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 “load shedding,” the daily periods without electricity imposed by South Africa’s state-owned power utility, whose leaders had been compelled that week to appear before a parliamentary commission investigating corruption. “Politicians, they’re just there to steal!” Snyders said. “We believe in: Grow something! Work with your hands! Not sitting on your ass and talking a lot of crap in Parliament.” 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.
To Snyders, it’s very simple. “All the white people in McGregor know: they are on other people’s land. It belongs to us.” Gesturing toward his garden, he said, “This 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!” Elizabeth Page pointed out that Ramaphosa doesn’t drink. Snyders shrugged. “If this thing happens, it will be a turnover just like this,” he said, snapping his fingers. “I will come to your door, and I will say, ‘Look here, my Lady Girlie, you are on my property.’ ”
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 “marched into the colony under their European superintendents, unarmed and provided only with implements of labor,” and “marched out of the colony in the same manner when employment ceases.” 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 “The Land Is Ours,” 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’s black populace, to give up their traditional livelihood. “The 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,” he said. “They had to be pushed off their land and deprived of cattle to make them dependent on the new economy imposed on them—the wage economy.”
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 “native reserves,” under the authority of African chiefs. There were no individual property rights on the reserves, so no land could be sold—which meant that black people could make no money from their assets.
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.)
David Jansen, a neighbor of Gabriel Snyders’s, 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’s 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’ 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. “They asked us for money—but we didn’t have money, you must understand,” Jansen said. “The mayor flattened the house to the ground.” He pointed out a pile of bricks grown over with fynbos plants—the remnants of his home—and 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.
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 “central and driving force of a program of rural development” 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 “willing seller, willing buyer” 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’s 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, “Land represents, in the most graphic way, racial inequality in South Africa—still. The ownership of land as entrenched in 1913 has not changed.”
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.
All of this helps explain the rise of a politician named Julius Malema—Juju to his supporters. Malema, the former head of the African National Congress Youth League, was first a protégé of Zuma’s and then an antagonist, railing against Zuma’s “self-seeking greed” and calling him a thief. After being expelled from the A.N.C., Malema founded his own political party, the Economic Freedom Fighters—a “radical, left, and anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist movement.” The E.F.F.’s position is that all South African land—as well as all banks and mineral rights—should be nationalized to rectify economic inequality.
Malema’s campaign billboards advertise him as a “son of the soil,” 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. “I am the poor,” he said. “If you are going to define richness on the basis of material clothes and cars, then that’s something else.” Targeting South Africa’s vast underclass for votes, the E.F.F. criticizes the A.N.C., but it demonizes South African whites. “Even under the so-called democracy, you are subjects, you are servants of white people,” Malema said, at a rally in 2016. “I am here to disturb the white man’s peace. The white man has been too comfortable for too long.” Malema concluded, “We are not calling for the slaughtering of white people, at least for now. . . . But, white minority, be warned: we will take our land—it doesn’t matter how.” The E.F.F. is currently the third-largest party in Parliament, with six per cent of the vote.
Malema’s provocations fuel zealots eager to frame what is happening in South Africa as part of an international “white genocide.” 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—a term that translates literally as “farm murders” but encompasses all forms of violence inflicted on farmers during home invasions. In “Plaasmoorde: The Killing Fields,” the British right-wing gadfly Katie Hopkins asserts, “Whites are being systematically cleansed from the land by black gangs. Black gangs are supported by the language and actions of mainstream politicians.” As evidence, she cites Malema’s rhetoric, but also the A.N.C.’s push for a constitutional amendment. “I look around at these persecuted whites living in gated communities,” Hopkins concludes, mournfully, “and I wonder if apartheid ever really went away. It seems the only thing that has shifted is who has the power.” The young alt-right Canadian Lauren Southern tells a similar story in her documentary “Farmlands,” asking whether there is a “white genocide going on right now” in South Africa, where the “government’s anti-white rhetoric is now being realized in legislation to take white land.”
Ernst Roets, the deputy head of the Afrikaner civil-rights organization AfriForum, appears in Hopkins’s film, and is a favorite of the right-wing international media; he has discussed expropriation on Tucker Carlson’s 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. “Afrikaners are the villains of South Africa, because of our history,” he said.
They are the remnants of a ruling class—the 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’s 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—Afrikaans, a creole sometimes referred to as Low Dutch—was imposed on nonwhites. The 1976 Soweto Uprising—in which some twenty thousand students marched, and several hundred were killed by the police—was 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 “history book without a cover, of a white guy looking for a brown-skinned lover.”
Traditionally, there has been friction between whites of English descent and Afrikaners. “I think that tension has lessened as a result of current government policies,” Roets said. “White English and white Afrikaans people are sort of pushed together into one bigger group with common concerns.” They are united, he thinks, by a shared sense of siege. “Political leaders . . . actively and continuously vilify white farmers in particular and even go as far as romanticizing violence against them,” Roets writes, in his book “Kill the Boer”—a phrase, meaning “kill the farmer,” that is also the refrain of a song Julius Malema and his supporters sometimes sing at rallies. AfriForum’s Web site declares that its mission is to insure that “Afrikaners—who have no other home—are able to lead a meaningful and sustainable existence, in peace with other communities,” but the organization is increasingly broadening its messaging to advocate for “minority rights.” Roets recently co-produced “Disrupted Land,” 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. “That one has been around since the nineteenth century—the myth of the empty land,” he said. “Bantu-speaking groups would have been well established in that area several centuries before the Dutch showed up.”) In the past decade, AfriForum’s membership has shot up from nine thousand to more than two hundred thousand.
Roets does not deny that apartheid was a moral catastrophe. “Everyone agrees it was a horrible system,” he said. “I’m sure it’s less than one per cent within the white community that thinks otherwise.” 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’s racial history. “It’s wrong to say that dispossession happened to all black people or that it was committed by all white people across the entire surface of South Africa,” he told me. “Of course, then people say, ‘Oh, so you’re pro-apartheid.’ No! We are free-market people.” On his bookshelf, Roets had a bust of Ronald Reagan. “We want the state to be small and out of the way. Apartheid was a big-government system.”
Roets dismisses the term “white genocide.” “Farming is an occupation—you can’t have a genocide against an occupation,” he said. But, he argues, “there is a large-scale killing of farmers.” 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. “In the vast majority of farm attacks the attackers have stated that they were primarily motivated by the intention to rob,” he writes. But he asserts that they are also influenced by “hate speech, land reform, labor disputes, racism.” 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.
In “Farmlands,” Lauren Southern warns of a coming race war—“an ever more realistic bloody future in South Africa.” 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’s 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. “It was just retribution: ‘You put me in jail for stealing your bakkie, I’m going to kill you,’ ” Ihlenfeldt told me. The perpetrator was on tik—South African meth—at the time of the killing; he had stabbed his girlfriend to death a few days earlier. (He is currently serving a life sentence.)
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
“I felt exploited,” Ihlenfeldt said of Southern’s 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. “Another farmer phoned me to say he’s got this Canadian chickie doing a documentary about the drought—can 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, ‘Tell me about your dad.’ Completely caught me off guard.”
We met in the town of Graaff-Reinet, near the farm where Ihlenfeldt grew up, and to which she had returned after her father’s murder. Ihlenfeldt and her husband, Pete, do not think her father’s killing was politically motivated, but they are convinced that there is no future for them—or for white people in general—in South Africa. “My son spent four years at university, but because he’s white he doesn’t get the job,” Ihlenfeldt said. “Our kids are saying now, ‘I want to get out of this country,’ because of entitlement.” Ihlenfeldt was referring to Black Economic Empowerment legislation, which rewards companies that hire black employees and penalizes those that don’t. “The only way is to leave,” she said. “Middle-income people, the tax base, they’re leaving every day.”
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.
The Ihlenfeldts may follow. After seeing Southern’s film, a German legislator contacted them with an offer. “He’s part of this committee that’s been tasked to look into farm attacks and get farmers to Germany,” Pete said. “If we arrive tomorrow with the clothes on our back, politicians there will give us asylum. They’ll give us a safe house for six weeks. They’ll feed us. They’ll clothe us. They’ll try to find us jobs.” Peter Dutton, Australia’s minister of Home Affairs, has expressed the intention to do something similar; in March, 2018, he announced that, owing to the “horrific circumstances” faced by white South Africans, his department would give “special attention” to any of them seeking to immigrate to a “civilized country like ours.” (The statement was condemned by Human Rights Watch, and an Australian senator said, “The bloke is an out-and-out racist.”)
Pete Ihlenfeldt hopes to see foreign intervention in South Africa. “I think they should back us, to stop the farm murders,” he said.
“How?” Jeanine asked sharply. There are some twenty thousand homicides a year in South Africa. Would foreign forces guard only the white farms? “It’s not a genocide,” she said, shaking her head. “You must understand: Afrikaans culture is completely different from English. They are far right—that’s why they love that word, ‘genocide.’ ”
Pete was unconvinced. “When you see the brutality of what they’re doing to the farmers—raping a woman and burning her with an iron and shooting her kneecaps—these are brutal attacks on white people. It’s always color against color.” Plaasmoorde has terrified whites for decades. In 1999, J. M. Coetzee published “Disgrace,” perhaps the most celebrated novel by a white South African, which centers on an attack committed not far from the Ihlenfeldts’ farm.
Neither of the Ihlenfeldts believed that there was a link between the attacks and the proposed amendment. “It’s two completely separate issues,” Jeanine said. “This land story is about the election.”
Pete interjected, “They’re doing this to get votes. What’s the word?”
Jeanine replied, dryly, “Bribing.”
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—Johannesburg, 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’s group, threatened from the left. “The A.N.C. had an operating theory that the rural areas were going to keep them in power—that they need to cozy up to the chiefs while hammering away at the white farmers,” Ruth Hall, a political scientist at the University of the Western Cape, told me. “But now, in the urban areas, it’s losing votes to the E.F.F. hand over fist.” To compete, it has embraced expropriation without compensation.
Ramaphosa, who previously served as Zuma’s 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, “Cyril doesn’t 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—while at the same time saying, ‘Expropriation without compensation’? It’s a nightmare!”
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—one of Jacob Zuma’s ex-wives—would head the Party. “Ramaphosa got in by a whisker, and then the Zuma camp said, ‘By the way, we have a resolution about land expropriation without compensation,’ ” Hall said. “It ended up at midnight with fisticuffs, and the conference was at risk of collapsing on this issue. Ramaphosa’s election would have been null and void. So he got in, but he was given the poison chalice.”
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. “The irony of this whole debate is that the property clause explicitly made provision for expropriation, ” Hall said. In the South African constitution, codified in 1996, Section Twenty-five holds that the government can expropriate private property “for a public purpose or in the public interest” if it provides compensation that is “just and equitable.” 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.
But the courts have persistently interpreted “just and equitable” to mean “market-based”—with 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’d paid for the property. Ngcukaitobi ruled against him, arguing that the tenant had already “paid” for the land with his work. “My point was that we need a shift in standards, not based in the fundamentalism of the market,” Ngcukaitobi told me. “It is mandated under the constitution—our 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.” The ruling was overturned on appeal, but Ngcukaitobi’s logic was rooted in the constitution as it stands—which, he says, makes the proposed amendment unnecessary.
Vuyo Mahlati, the chair of Ramaphosa’s 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. “The judges are saying to us, ‘The courts are already overburdened on land reform,’ ” she said. “And if you are a poor community, or a farmer without resources, you cannot rely on your case—on your rights—being fought for.”
Ngcukaitobi disputed this. “On land, we are underworked,” he said. “We have very few cases of land restitution. The majority of the cases have to do with eviction!” The court, which Ngcukaitobi said was devised to “manage the transfer of land from white hands to black hands,” 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. “It is dysfunctional, hobbled by administrative inefficiency, and quite frankly by corruption,” he said. “That is the problem—the collapse of institutions. But, instead of accepting their own fault, they have blamed the constitution.”
Charles Back, a third-generation farmer, was beaten by thieves and left for dead. Afterward, he posted a message on social media, saying, “I want it to be known that this attack was not politically divisive in any way.”Photograph by Pieter Hugo for The New Yorker
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 “willing seller, willing buyer” model, landowners have an incentive to drive up prices indefinitely, Hall said: “We have what’s called a landowner veto. The state just carries on more and more above market price to induce people, and I think it’s impractical for the state and the taxpayer to be held over a barrel.” The bill under consideration is more targeted than most people realize, she added. “ ‘Expropriation without compensation’ 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’s quite limited.”
But speculatively held land is still someone’s property. It will be difficult to secure foreign investment—which the South African government is actively soliciting—if 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, “When 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—not just whites!” Lekota, a former chairman of the A.N.C., left the Party in 2008 and formed his own, the Congress of the People. “We 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.”
The government’s 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. “It is not just about farms,” Mahlati said. “It’s about cities, where eighty-three per cent of the urban population—mainly black—resides on two per cent of the land.” 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’ worth of approved claims waiting to be paid out. “These are all legitimate cases that have been verified, proven—but the government has to buy that land,” Mahlati said. “And the problem now is that the budget of the state is becoming less and less. ”
Hall told me, “We 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’re living as farmworkers on privately held land that they don’t own. They’re 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, ‘We don’t accept being locked out of the cities, kicked off the farms, and pushed into ghettos.’ Something is going to have to give.”
In February, 2018, Parliament held public hearings on land reform. Mahlati recalled, “One guy, a farmer, who went to the hearings, he said, ‘My cattle have no grazing area. I am on this small piece of land; it’s overcrowded. And around me there’s land owned by white farmers. Some of it is not even used—the guy goes overseas most of the time, while I’m sitting here. I’ve had enough.’ ”
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.
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. “I fought back physically as much as I could, until I couldn’t fight back anymore,” 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—“That’s quite a business, but they brought tools,” Back said—the others beat him and left him for dead, rolled up in a carpet. “My eye has been completely reconstructed,” he told me. “It was buggered—my retina detached, the socket smashed. I had to get seventy-four staples in my head.” He smiled. “It’s funny, you go in and out of consciousness while it’s happening—sort of a wobbly thing. It’s 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.” Then he passed out.
When he came to, he managed to wiggle out of the rug. He could hear that the men were still in the house. “I thought, I have to get out of here—what if they come back? It’s quite difficult to stand up when you are tied up. So I rolled under the bed,” he said, and laughed. “And then hop, hop, hop—I hopped down the passage.” He opened the door quietly, hoping not to be noticed. “Then I hopped up the hill.” As Back told the story, he walked me up the steep incline he followed that night toward his driveway. “I saw there was chaos, pandemonium in the house: they didn’t know what had happened to me.” He pointed at a ditch that had been dug when his staff was doing work on a pipe. “And then I fell into this bloody hole! I actually lay here and I laughed.” 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. “I didn’t see them, they didn’t see me.”
Eventually, he was able to untie himself. When he’d 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. “While they were stitching me up, I was thinking, I’m not going to allow this thing to go to waste. You don’t get beaten up and left for dead and not do 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’m not going to allow that.” He decided to post something on social media. “I wanted to say, ‘It’s common criminality. It’s not about politics. It’s not racially motivated. It’s not about land. It’s just opportunistic people attacking a soft target. That’s it.’ ” His attackers, who are now in prison, were Namibians, former employees of a security company that Back once used to guard his farm.
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: “I always tell them, ‘You sneeze and you say you need to work from home.’ So, first thing, I went to the office where all the social media and marketing take place to show them, ‘This is what dedication looks like.’ ” Then he asked for help with his post. It read, in part, “I 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.” The post was viewed by 1.6 million people. “Thousands of messages!” he said. “Not one negative comment.” He was unaware that the photograph the millennials posted—of Back bruised, bandaged, and bloodied—was lifted and used in Katie Hopkins’s documentary.
Charles Back employs six hundred people and owns some thirty-five hundred acres of farmland across South Africa. He is committed to the land-restitution process, though he is unconvinced by recent suggestions that it ought to encompass claims dating before the 1913 Natives Land Act. “You have to draw a line somewhere,” he said. “That’s like me going back to Lithuania and saying, ‘I want my grandfather’s land back.’ ” His grandfather, who was Jewish, left a shtetl in 1902 to escape the pogroms sweeping the Russian Empire. “There are certain things in history that can’t be undone.”
Back has been engaged in his own version of land reform for decades. “I tried to make homeowners of my staff,” he told me. “It was easy at my farm in Malmesbury. It was adjacent to a township”—the exurban residential areas designated for black people during apartheid. “I bought plots and gave the title deeds to people. Whoever worked for me got a house.” Things haven’t gone as smoothly in Paarl. Across the road from the Fairview complex, Back bought a thirty-seven-acre parcel of land—Fair Valley, he calls it—and gave it to his workers as a collective. “Twenty years later, we’re still struggling to get the land divided,” he said. “It’s held up by government red tape.”
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’t permitted to build any more. Adolf described their attempts to engage the municipal government: “You come to that person, he sends you to that one, he sends you to that one—there is no one person who can say, ‘This is how you do this thing.’ That’s why we struggle so long. It is very frustrating. I want my own home. I don’t want to depend on Charles every time. I have four children. I want to know they can have my house when I’m gone. I can’t fight out of my grave.” He did not think expropriation without compensation would solve anything. “The 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.”
Traditionally, the Democratic Alliance—the official opposition party of South Africa—has 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, meaning “life,” and a map of Africa. “My wife got this for me after I lost my wedding ring—well, after it was expropriated without compensation,” he said, at a café in Cape Town, a block from his office in Parliament.
The D.A. firmly opposes expropriation without compensation. “Why 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,” Maimane said. “Why are we now trying to undermine that in 2019? I’ll 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—and the government needs more power to do it. Models that have done this same exercise have achieved outcomes like Zimbabwe.” In 2000, the Zimbabwean President, Robert Mugabe (whom Archbishop Desmond Tutu once described as “a cartoon figure of an archetypal African dictator”), began rapidly expropriating farmland held by whites—about seventy per cent of the national total—and redistributing it to his political cronies and supporters. Agriculture, which had provided Zimbabwe’s leading exports, disintegrated, and the economy followed suit.
Maimane began his political career as a member of the A.N.C. “As 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.” But Maimane lost faith in the Party’s ability to govern under Zuma. “The corruption within the A.N.C. became firmly in place, and I knew without doubt that this was an irredeemable organization.” He is not convinced that Ramaphosa represents a marked departure. “Most 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.”
A pair of baristas approached and asked to take selfies with Maimane—his face is ubiquitous in Cape Town and Johannesburg, appearing on D.A. campaign posters, above the slogan “A job in every home.” Maimane posed, then continued, “First, there’s no need for a constitutional amendment—there 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 what is just and what is equitable, so you don’t have farmers holding the state for ransom. Third, expropriation without compensation already happens in this country—it just happens to black people. Because it’s black people who don’t have title.”
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’s 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’s 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’s 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. “There’s no data to support that—it’s a thumb-suck,” he said. “In about fifty per cent of projects, beneficiaries have their lives improved. And the beneficiaries are poor people. Even modest success makes a difference.”
But, without access to irrigation, machinery, and training, new farmers are bound to struggle. And South Africa’s agrarian potential is limited: only about eleven per cent of the country’s 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.
In some respects, the focus on land is an attempt to return to the era of the Glen Grey Act, when an entire economy—an entire society—could 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 “agrarianista,” admits, “The 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.”
At the café, Maimane, who had recently attended a vigil for the victims of farm attacks, said, “The race war is on in South Africa. The great difficulty is that it’s got political dividends for parties who want to mobilize behind it in a simplistic, reductionist manner, and that’s 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.” 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, “it’s a Marxist construct to say the means of production are within the land. Land becomes a catchall to say, ‘There’s still too many of us left out.’ But maybe land is not the solution.” ♦
