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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 vol-
untarily sell their land to the govern-
ment 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 sev-
enteen 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 Free-
dom Fighters—a “radical, left, and anti-
capitalist and anti-imperialist move-
ment.” The E.F.F.’s position is that all
South African land—as well as all banks
and mineral rights—should be nation-alized to rectify economic inequality.
Malema’s campaign billboards ad-
vertise 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 Afri-
can journalist Debora Patta that he iden-
tified 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 un-
derclass 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 dis-
turb 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 doc-
umentary has emerged in which a cru-
sading blonde from a foreign land
comes to South Africa to investigate
the move toward expropriation with-
out 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 ac-
tions of mainstream politicians.” As
evidence, she cites Malema’s rhetoric,
but also the A.N.C.’s push for a con-
stitutional amendment. “I look around
at these persecuted whites living in
gated communities,” Hopkins con-
cludes, 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 sim-
ilar story in her documentary “Farm-lands,
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