For the following three hours, he told his story, a string of minutely remembered incidents strung across the length of a century, each about a white landlord, and what he had and had not done. All of Normandale’s landlords had been cruel, he said. Mr Player had paid wages in kind, not in money, and so the family could buy nothing. They built their home from the clay in the river and they paid for the tin roof with their children’s labour.

Mr Steyn was better, Baba Cube said. He paid some of the wages in money. But when he bought Normandale in 1969 he pulled Baba Cube out of school to work on the farm. Had the Cubes resisted, Baba Cube said, Steyn would have evicted them.

‘I do not read and write,’ Baba Cube said. ‘It is the twenty-first century. What can you do in this century if you cannot read and write?’

But the worst landlord of all was the last, Mr Mitchell.

‘His aim was to chase us away,’ Baba Cube said. ‘To abide by his rules was to have no water, no firewood, to watch your cattle being taken off to the pound. He wanted us gone.’