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-
aid- nment
.
esent when
,
,
e
and
ne
t
l of us—not
y in
al hostilities:
a
an
ns of the
-
m is not limited to
it is also
limate
It
Mahlati said.
ee
—
o per cent
n
y as a- s
th
laims waiting to be paid
ases that
t the
”
w is
e to deal with
y about
Most
e
y held
ms of
y
kind of secured property right. We have
a new generation coming of age, and
young people are saying, ‘We don’t ac-
cept 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 farm-
ers. Some of it is not even used—the
guy goes overseas most of the time,
while I’m sitting here. I’ve had enough.’”C
harles 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 Air-
lines 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 Af-
rican 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 con-
sciousness 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 diffi-
cult 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 no-
ticed. “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 ona 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 him-
self. When he’d gathered some strength,
he pulled himself out, sprinted to his
car, and drove to the home of an em-
ployee, who rushed him to the hospi-
tal. “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 prob-
lem with South Africa is polarization:Fact Levy South Africa 05_13_19.L [Print]_9508344.indd 53 5/3/19 7:51 PM