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I asked after Arthur Mitchell.

‘He and his wife live in Perth,’ I was told. ‘With their daughters.’

‘How are they?’ I asked.

A long silence.

‘Nobody here has been in touch with them for years.’

The silence continued another moment or two, the distance between these people and Arthur …

‘He was trying to force them off the land,’ the old man told me. ‘If they cannot collect firewood from Normandale, they have no means to light their stoves. If they cannot walk through his land to the river, they have no access to water. They have been on that land five generations. They have nowhe…

Mitchell bought Normandale because it was wedged between his vegetable farm and his cattle farm and it was no longer controlled by a white proprietor. He told me that he bought the place in order to keep the tenants confined to Langeni and to prevent new black families from moving onto the land.

…

In the mid-1990s, South Africa’s new democratically elected parliament passed several statutes that offered black people on white-owned farmland security of tenure. In response, many white farmers began destroying the fixed structures on their land.

‘When an old man dies,’ the owner of a large c…

It was the darkness inside him that allowed me into his story. He could not blow his son’s killers to pieces. And the police had arrested nobody. When I came along he saw an opportunity. He would expose a little of himself to me and I would expose his enemy to the world. ‘I have done no wrong,’ he …