The New Yorker – May 13, 2019

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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 pe- ripheries of cities and towns, and were divided, based on their tribal back- ground, 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 expropri- ated 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 noth- ing 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 at- tend school. Around that time, the broth- ers 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,” Jan- sen 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.

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he 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 fol- lowed. When the A.N.C. took power, in 1994, it saw land reform as the “cen- tral and driving force of a program of rural development” meant to redress centuries of injustice. There would be a land-claims court to adjudicate

The remnants of Jansen’s childhood home. After his family was evicted, he said, “the mayor flattened the house.”

Fact Levy South Africa 05_13_19.L [Print]_9508344.indd 47 5/3/19 7:51 PM

The New Yorker – May 13, 2019