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.īut, 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. To the north of the road is the white part of town, with stately Georgian houses and cars in every driveway. 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.
Apartheid will be with us for a very long time.” It’s apartheid, my girl-apartheid never dies. “They are looking at you, because they have never seen a white woman sitting next to me. “They are not working hard now,” he grumbled, gesturing toward the workers. 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. I worked on a contract basis: forty people on a truck and I prune your farm. “I know how to prune apricots, peaches, plums-you name it. “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. 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. There are a handful of flourishing vineyards in the vicinity, but even small plots teem with growth. The sun is so strong that, when clouds go by, the sky turns not gray but almost white. 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. Consequently, McGregor has a sleepy, almost otherworldly feel. 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.
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.
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