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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 gov-
ernor, and noting a payment of a hun-
dred 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 rick-
ety bench next to the pear sorters, shoo-
ing away a chicken.
“I started my research in 1971,” Sny-
ders 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.”
Inside, Snyders has a picture of Nel-
son Mandela hanging next to snapshots
of his grandchildren, but he is not a fan
of the contemporary version of Man-
dela’s party, the African National Con-
gress, 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 cor-
ruption, fraud, and racketeering. Sny-
ders was frustrated by “load shedding,”
the daily periods without electricity im-posed by South Africa’s state-owned
power utility, whose leaders had been
compelled that week to appear before
a parliamentary commission investigat-
ing corruption. “Politicians, they’re just
there to steal!” Snyders said. “We be-
lieve 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 po-
sition taken up under President Cyril
Ramaphosa, who came to office in 2018:
a proposed amendment to the consti-
tution that would allow for land to be
expropriated without compensating its
owners, which Snyders hopes will help
with their case.
By his own admission, Snyders is
not a “worldly gentleman.” 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. “That’s why
it’s not raining anymore, as a punish-
ment,” he explained. But his under-
standing of land reform in South Af-
rica is not so different from that of
another impressionable septuagenar-
ian, the President of the United States.
Last August, Trump tweeted his con-
cern about “the South Africa land and
farm seizures and expropriations and the
large scale killing of farmers.” Trump
was responding to a report he’d seen
on Fox News, in which Tucker Carl-
son warned, inaccurately, that Rama-
phosa had already begun “seizing land
from his own citizens without compen-
sation because they are the wrong skin
color.” 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 coun-
try since it was first announced, after
the A.N.C.’s 2017 convention. The Pan
South African Language Board, which
tracks the incidence of words on social
media, named “expropriation without
compensation” the term of the year in- The issue has been a significant
factor in campaigns for South Africa’s
elections, on May 8th: the opposition
party, the Democratic Alliance, argues
that, if the amendment is passed, it will
further erode the nation’s already fal-
tering economy and give undue power
to a tainted government.
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.’”B
efore it was called McGregor, the
village where Snyders lives was
named Lady Grey; there is an art gal-
lery 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 im-
plements 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 col-
ony’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 cat-
tle 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 res-
idential 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. Therew
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