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e among the millions of South Africans who were forced off their land so that whites could occupy it.Y PIETER HUGO
T
here is a good paved road that
runs into McGregor, a pastoral
village at the foot of South Af-
rica’s Riviersonderend Mountains, but
it stops at the edge of town. When the
road was cleared and paved, in the nine-
teen-twenties, the plan was to keep going
through the mountains toward Cape
Town, but that project, like many other
public works that followed, was aban-
doned before completion. Consequently,
McGregor has a sleepy, almost other-
worldly 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 vol-
uble 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 peo-
ple on a truck and I prune your farm.
That is how I make my money. I har-
vest your farm.” He was sitting at a pic-
nic table, surrounded by chickens, a lit-
ter of puppies, several neighbors, and
two men he employs to help with his
crops: they were sorting through plas-
tic buckets of pears harvested from Sny-
ders’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—apart-
heid never dies. Apartheid will be with
us for a very long time.”
Once the paved road enters Mc-
Gregor, it is called Voortrekker, or “pi-
oneer,” for the Dutch colonists who trav-
elled 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 Af-
ricans call “colored”: the mixed-raceA REPORTER AT LARGE
BROKEN GROUND
In South Africa, a fiercely debated program of land reform
could address racial injustice—or cause chaos.BY ARIEL LEVY
Fact Levy South Africa 05_13_19.L [Print]_9508344.indd 45 5/3/19 7:51 PM