You cannot take farmland from the most ingenious farmers in the history of the world (whites), give it to those who starve routinely on the greatest farmland history has ever known (blacks), and expect anything different.
Michael Zulu trundles a wheelbarrow along the track to his farm homestead, where chickens peck at the carpet and skinny cats curl sleeping amid the bird droppings.
He’s the farmer now, not just a tractor driver for a white farmer named Engelbrecht, like he used to be.
But he has a shirt full of holes, the roofless ruins of a dairy and a stretch of farmland whose only crop is cow manure, bagged up and stacked against a wall as a substitute for firewood.
There’s no electricity on his farm, just an hour’s drive southeast of Johannesburg. The fences and phone lines have been stolen, along with the dairy’s roof and fittings. He has to fetch dirty pond water for drinking and washing and set out rickety rabbit traps for meat.
To him, it comes down to one wrong turn: He applied to get a farm under South Africa’s land reform program.
“I thought I’d be much better off. But I think it was better with Mr. Engelbrecht. We lived high with Mr. Engelbrecht. We got money from him and we could look after our children.”
The land program had noble intent: redressing the wrongs of apartheid, when blacks were denied access to farmland, and lifting black rural people out of grinding poverty by buying farms from willing(?!) white owners and giving them to blacks.