As she sits barefoot on a stool outside her mud-walled house, 50-year-old Albertina Zulu's eyes are blank and downcast.
She faces an eviction order; she has no ground to plow; she has three young children to feed, and since August her husband has laid buried a few hundred feet from her door."After my husband died, they said we must dig him up and move him from this farm," she says. "I cannot sleep at night when I think about it."
Albertina Zulu is one of thousands of black farm workers and sharecroppers in South Africa being pressured by white farm owners to leave the land where they have worked and lived, in some cases all their lives.
Pistol-packing land owners, backed by sheriffs and police still tuned to the apartheid era, are trying to evict black tenants because they suspect new land-reform legislation will force them to surrender land to farm workers.
Some tenants are fighting back: cutting fences, stealing or crippling livestock and threatening to murder farmers who carry out evictions.
The conflict undermining the harmony in South Africa's majestic countryside touches on the fundamental fears of blacks and whites.
Blacks wonder if they have won democracy only to be condemned to be paupers in their own country. Whites wonder if their rights to property will be tossed aside, their prosperity squandered by a vengeful black majority.
Less than 15 percent of the population, whites now own more than 80 percent of the farmland, the result of 350 years of white encroachment that stripped indigenous black communities of their property.
"There is a real fear among farmers that this is just the thin edge of the wedge, that eventually farmers will be forced to hand over their land to regular laborers," said Kobus Kleynhans, chief director of the South African Agricultural Union, which represents most white commercial farmers.
In some cases, whole families have been dumped by the side of the road and their huts pulled down or burned.
Albertina Zulu said the new owner of the farm on which she lives has come regularly and shouted at her. Once, she said, he kicked over her buckets when he saw her collecting water from a stream and then took them away.
Other black farm workers in the same area said white farmers have suddenly refused them permission to plow fields their families have tilled for years or refused to let a tenant's cattle graze on the farm.
Land redistribution is a basic plank of President Nelson Mandela's government. Some public land can be transferred to non-whites, and the state is helping others purchase privately. In cases where apartheid edicts resulted in black communities being forcibly removed from traditional lands, they may apply for restitution or compensation.
The bill covering sharecroppers is due to be enacted in February. While it does not expropriate land, it opens the way for tenant-farming families to purchase plots with government aid if they can show their families have been using it for more than a generation as payment for part-time labor.
White farmers say that only a minority of laborers fit that definition and that they simply are getting rid of people occupying their farms illegally. In many instances, they say, laborers have stopped working for them but refuse to move on.
"They reckon it's an ANC government, so everything is now theirs," said J.M. Naude, who this year paid $135,000 for the timber-growing land where Albertina Zulu lives.