George Alagiah is presenter of BBC News at Six, Britain’s most watched news programme. That role followed ten years as a foreign correspondent, covering the 9/11 attacks on New York, the genocide in Rwanda, civil wars in Liberia, Afghanistan and Sierra Leone, and Nelson Mandela’s presidency. He’s won numerous awards, including The Royal Television Society and Amnesty International among others. Before the BBC he worked in print journalism. In 2008 he was awarded an OBE for services to journalism.

Also by George Alagiah

A Home from Home: From Immigrant Boy to English Man

A Passage to Africa

For Frances

PROLOGUE

The old woman, her face etched with the lines of experience and hardship, retied the cloth around her head. She’d just used it to wipe the sweat from her neck and arms. It was a blisteringly hot day in South Africa’s Mpumalanga Province on the distant eastern fringe of the country. There was no shade, not on this side of the fence.

She looked back at the compound and could see the shape of the marula tree about five hundred metres away. It had been there long before they’d put up the fence, a landmark to aim for at the end of the day. The way her eyes were troubling her, these days, she could no longer see the huts beyond the tree, but she knew they were there – just as they had been in her father’s time and his father’s before that.

So it had come to this. Her family had survived the amabhunu, the Afrikaners, who had claimed the land for themselves. It was the ‘law’, they’d said. The umlungu, the white man, had told her father he could stay on the land, and his children as well, but he must work for his keep. Tch! How they worked!

Then Mandela and his people had come and said the land would be given back to its rightful owners.

‘Ah! But this is a good day,’ her father had said.

Next, a government man from Nelspruit came, and he told all the workers they must get together, form a co-op-something and the government would help them buy some land. So the men did this thing, and signed a paper.

‘Ah! But this is a good day,’ her father had said.

They worked hard but the money was little. They went to see the bank man, but he said the signed piece of paper was no good; he would not borrow her father and the other men any money. And then another government man came from Nelspruit. He told the men the land was not productive or what-what, and now a new owner was coming. He was from another country.

Then a machine came with some men from outside who built the fence. They said everyone must move to a new village.