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when you are a white person and you
are attacked by a black person, people
exploit the opportunity. I thought, I’m
not going to allow that.” He decided
to post something on social media. “I
wanted to say, ‘It’s common criminal-
ity. It’s not about politics. It’s not ra-
cially motivated. It’s not about land.
It’s just opportunistic people attacking
a soft target. That’s it.’ ” His attackers,
who are now in prison, were Namib-
ians, former employees of a security
company that Back once used to guard
his farm.
He went to work the next morn-
ing still wearing his bloody shirt, with
gauze wrapped around his head and
his eye swollen shut. Back said that he
had a running joke with the millenni-
als on his staff: “I always tell them, ‘You
sneeze and you say you need to work
from home.’ So, first thing, I went to
the office where all the social media
and marketing take place to show them,
‘This is what dedication looks like.’”
Then he asked for help with his post.
It read, in part, “I want it to be known
that this attack was not politically di-
visive in any way, but that these were
just three common gangsters moti-
vated by their own self-interests. I be-
lieve in the values that this country was
built on, and continue to hope for har-
mony and peace.” The post was viewed
by 1.6 million people. “Thousands of
messages!” he said. “Not one negative
comment.” He was unaware that the
photograph the millennials
posted—of Back bruised,
bandaged, and bloodied—
was lifted and used in Katie
Hopkins’s documentary.
Charles Back employs six
hundred people and owns
some thirty-five hundred
acres of farmland across
South Africa. He is com-
mitted to the land-restitu-
tion process, though he is
unconvinced by recent suggestions
that it ought to encompass claims dat-
ing before the 1913 Natives Land Act.
“You have to draw a line somewhere,”
he said. “That’s like me going back to
Lithuania and saying, ‘I want my grand-
father’s land back.’ ” His grandfather,
who was Jewish, left a shtetl in 1902
to escape the pogroms sweeping the
Russian Empire. “There are certainthings in history that can’t be undone.”
Back has been engaged in his own
version of land reform for decades. “I
tried to make homeowners of my staff,”
he told me. “It was easy at my farm in
Malmesbury. It was adjacent to a town-
ship”—the exurban residential areas
designated for black people during
apartheid. “I bought plots and gave
the title deeds to people. Whoever
worked for me got a house.” Things
haven’t gone as smoothly in Paarl.
Across the road from the Fairview
complex, Back bought a thirty-seven-
acre parcel of land—Fair Valley, he
calls it—and gave it to his workers as
a collective. “Twenty years later, we’re
still struggling to get the land divided,”
he said. “It’s held up by government
red tape.”
A man named Awie Adolf, who has
worked for Back for thirty-seven years,
took me to see Fair Valley, where eight
houses and a melon patch sit on the
edge of a large tract of land bordered
by towering gum trees. There are thirty-
four families in the Fairview Farm-
workers Cooperative who are waiting
for houses, but unless they subdivide
the property they aren’t permitted to
build any more. Adolf described their
attempts to engage the municipal gov-
ernment: “You come to that person, he
sends you to that one, he sends you to
that one—there is no one person who
can say, ‘This is how you do this thing.’
That’s why we struggle so long. It is
very frustrating. I want my
own home. I don’t want to
depend on Charles every
time. I have four children.
I want to know they can
have my house when I’m
gone. I can’t fight out of
my grave.” He did not
think expropriation with-
out compensation would
solve anything. “The old
government steals the land
from us. These people now also want
to steal. They will take the land and
do the same as the old government:
steal and steal.”T
raditionally, the Democratic Alli-
ance—the official opposition party
of South Africa—has been regarded as
a party for white liberals. But, in 2015,
Mmusi Maimane became the first blackleader of the D.A. He aspires to some-
day become the first non-A.N.C. Presi-
dent of post-liberation South Africa. He
is thirty-eight and photogenic, a devout
Christian who grew up in Soweto and is
married to a white woman. He was wear-
ing a ring embossed with the Hebrew
word chai, meaning “life,” and a map of
Africa. “My wife got this for me after I
lost my wedding ring—well, after it was
expropriated without compensation,” he
said, at a café in Cape Town, a block from
his office in Parliament.
The D.A. firmly opposes expropri-
ation without compensation. “Why was
Section Twenty-five put in the consti-
tution in 1996? It was put there because
it needed to insure that South Africans
who could not own land before could
finally own land,” Maimane said. “Why
are we now trying to undermine that in
2019? I’ll tell you how it happened: Lib-
eration movements always do the same
thing. They get to a point where they
need to force people to believe that they
need to be liberated some more—and
the government needs more power to
do it. Models that have done this same
exercise have achieved outcomes like
Zimbabwe.” In 2000, the Zimbabwean
President, Robert Mugabe (whom Arch-
bishop Desmond Tutu once described
as “a cartoon figure of an archetypal Af-
rican dictator”), began rapidly expropri-
ating farmland held by whites—about
seventy per cent of the national total—
and redistributing it to his political cro-
nies and supporters. Agriculture, which
had provided Zimbabwe’s leading ex-
ports, disintegrated, and the economy
followed suit.
Maimane began his political career
as a member of the A.N.C. “As a Sowe-
tan, pre-1994, politics were racial: you
had to have a party that was against
the system that oppressed the race, and
that was the A.N.C.” But Maimane
lost faith in the Party’s ability to gov-
ern under Zuma. “The corruption
within the A.N.C. became firmly in
place, and I knew without doubt that
this was an irredeemable organization.”
He is not convinced that Ramaphosa
represents a marked departure. “Most
people tend to become baffled by the
Cyril Ramaphosa who says he is com-
mitted to international markets, et cet-
era. But he is frankly as much a part
of the A.N.C. as anyone, and franklyhe
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