There is a good paved road that runs into McGregor, a pastoral village at the foot of South Africa’s Riviersonderend Mountains, but it stops at the edge of town. When the road was cleared and paved, in the nineteen-twenties, the plan was to keep going through the mountains toward Cape Town, but that project, like many other public works that followed, was abandoned before completion. Consequently, McGregor has a sleepy, almost otherworldly feel. Summers are long, winters are mild, and the soil is fertile: fences along the dusty roads crawl with hot-pink Zimbabwe creeper and orange Cape honeysuckle. The sun is so strong that, when clouds go by, the sky turns not gray but almost white.

There are a handful of flourishing vineyards in the vicinity, but even small plots teem with growth. On a half acre behind his house, a seventy-year-old retiree named Gawie Snyders grows pumpkins, onions, green beans, lettuces, grapes, stone fruit, and roses. “I am a farmer without a farm,” Snyders, a voluble man with brown skin and a bald head, declared one afternoon, looking at his garden. “I know how to prune apricots, peaches, plums—you name it. I worked on a contract basis: forty people on a truck and I prune your farm. That is how I make my money. I harvest your farm.” He was sitting at a picnic table, surrounded by chickens, a litter of puppies, several neighbors, and two men he employs to help with his crops: they were sorting through plastic buckets of pears harvested from Snyders’s half-dozen fruit trees. “They are not working hard now,” he grumbled, gesturing toward the workers. “They are looking at you, because they have never seen a white woman sitting next to me. It’s apartheid, my girl—apartheid never dies. Apartheid will be with us for a very long time.”

Once the paved road enters McGregor, it is called Voortrekker, or “pioneer,” for the Dutch colonists who travelled inland from the Cape by ox wagon. To the north of the road is the white part of town, with stately Georgian houses and cars in every driveway. To the south, where Snyders grows his pears, the houses are mostly thatched cottages, and the residents are what South Africans call “colored”: the mixed-race descendants of the Dutch, their Malay slaves, and the indigenous people, the Khoi and the San.

But, according to a legal claim that Snyders and seventy of his neighbors have launched, all of McGregor—and miles of prime farmland surrounding it—rightfully belongs to them. They are the progeny of sixty-seven farmers who purchased property in the area from a local reverend after the British wrested control of the Cape Colony from the Dutch. Snyders set on the table a copy of the deed of transfer—dated 1888, signed by the colonial governor, and noting a payment of a hundred and thirty-seven pounds and ten shillings. Next to it he placed a group photograph of the original farmers, brown men in suits—and one woman—seated in four rows. Snyders pointed out the resemblance between one of the men in the picture, William George Page, and Page’s great-granddaughter, Elizabeth, who was sitting on a rickety bench next to the pear sorters, shooing away a chicken.

“I started my research in 1971,” Snyders said, riffling through a substantial stack of papers. “The old people who lived here used to come to my house and talk about how their land had been robbed from them, and I was always interested in their stories. Then I went out to the archives in Cape Town: I search, search, search, search!” The claim, which will be submitted to the courts in June, posits that Snyders and his neighbors were dispossessed of twelve thousand acres during apartheid, when eighty-five per cent of South Africa’s arable land came under the control of white farmers. “We want our land back—that is all,” Snyders said. “That we can prosper, as in years before.”

The remnants of Jansen’s childhood home. After his family was evicted, he said, “the mayor flattened the house.” Photograph by Pieter Hugo for The New Yorker

Inside, Snyders has a picture of Nelson Mandela hanging next to snapshots of his grandchildren, but he is not a fan of the contemporary version of Mandela’s party, the African National Congress, which has been in power since South Africa’s first democratic elections, in 1994. He was disgusted with former President Jacob Zuma, who, after nine singularly unprincipled years in office, stands accused of sixteen counts of corruption, fraud, and racketeering. Snyders was frustrated by “load shedding,” the daily periods without electricity imposed by South Africa’s state-owned power utility, whose leaders had been compelled that week to appear before a parliamentary commission investigating corruption. “Politicians, they’re just there to steal!” Snyders said. “We believe in: Grow something! Work with your hands! Not sitting on your ass and talking a lot of crap in Parliament.” He was encouraged, though, by a new position taken up under President Cyril Ramaphosa, who came to office in 2018: a proposed amendment to the constitution that would allow for land to be expropriated without compensating its owners, which Snyders hopes will help with their case.

By his own admission, Snyders is not a “worldly gentleman.” He blames the droughts that have been plaguing McGregor partly on global warming, and partly on the influx of gays and lesbians into the village. “That’s why it’s not raining anymore, as a punishment,” he explained. But his understanding of land reform in South Africa is not so different from that of another impressionable septuagenarian, the President of the United States. Last August, Trump tweeted his concern about “the South Africa land and farm seizures and expropriations and the large scale killing of farmers.” Trump was responding to a report he’d seen on Fox News, in which Tucker Carlson warned, inaccurately, that Ramaphosa had already begun “seizing land from his own citizens without compensation because they are the wrong skin color.” In truth, the matter is far from settled: the proposal has been fiercely debated in Parliament, on social media, and at dinner tables across the country since it was first announced, after the A.N.C.’s 2017 convention. The Pan South African Language Board, which tracks the incidence of words on social media, named “expropriation without compensation” the term of the year in 2018. The issue has been a significant factor in campaigns for South Africa’s elections, on May 8th: the opposition party, the Democratic Alliance, argues that, if the amendment is passed, it will further erode the nation’s already faltering economy and give undue power to a tainted government.

To Snyders, it’s very simple. “All the white people in McGregor know: they are on other people’s land. It belongs to us.” Gesturing toward his garden, he said, “This is a small piece of land. What could we do with a whole farm? If we are successful with our land claim, I must buy Mr. Ramaphosa a case of whiskey!” Elizabeth Page pointed out that Ramaphosa doesn’t drink. Snyders shrugged. “If this thing happens, it will be a turnover just like this,” he said, snapping his fingers. “I will come to your door, and I will say, ‘Look here, my Lady Girlie, you are on my property.’ ”

Before it was called McGregor, the village where Snyders lives was named Lady Grey; there is an art gallery by that name on Voortrekker Street. Lady Grey was the wife of Sir George Grey, a governor of the Cape Colony in the eighteen-fifties. As the colonists opened mines and built farms, Grey saw in the black population a source of disposable workers. He vowed that they would be “marched into the colony under their European superintendents, unarmed and provided only with implements of labor,” and “marched out of the colony in the same manner when employment ceases.” In 1894, Prime Minister Cecil John Rhodes named a bill for Grey, which restricted Africans to segregated regions of the Cape and limited the amount of land they could hold. Tembeka Ngcukaitobi, who is a judge and the author of “The Land Is Ours,” a history of dispossession and resistance by black lawyers, told me that the law forced the Xhosa, the cattle herders who made up most of the colony’s black populace, to give up their traditional livelihood. “The wealth of Africans at the time was measured in cattle, and the reduction of hectares you could keep reduced the number of cattle you could graze,” he said. “They had to be pushed off their land and deprived of cattle to make them dependent on the new economy imposed on them—the wage economy.”