That was why she was standing in front of her family’s furniture. She wiped the dust from a chair, her father’s chair, the one he’d sat on when he drank his traditional beer, and eased herself down. She was waiting for her son to come back. He had taken the children and their mother to the new location.

She had just shut her eyes when there was a huge noise, a percussive wave that seemed to get inside her head. She had never heard anything like that before. Then she saw the smoke. It was coming from the other side of the compound, from the place where the baas used to live. She heard some of the men there shouting. There was a big commotion. Was this really the place she was born? she wondered. What happened to that world?

That day, in a room in Hillbrow, central Johannesburg, four people – three men and one woman – crowd round a laptop. They are streaming the evening news on SABC, the state-run broadcaster, once the mouthpiece of apartheid and now performing much the same function for the country’s new rulers.

The item they are waiting for is not in the headlines. Halfway through the bulletin the newscaster says there’s been an accident on a farm in Mpumalanga. The pictures show the charred ruins of various farm buildings and vehicles. The reporter says investigators have been sent to the farm but early reports suggest an electrical fault caused a fire.

‘Bullshit!’ says the woman. But one of the others, a man in his thirties, wearing glasses, says, ‘This is good. They’re running scared. They are doing what the old regime used to do.’ They look at each other, the four of them, and smile. Their work has begun.

Just a couple of hours later anyone searching for more details of the incident would discover a link to an unadorned website carrying this anonymous entry:

Today a new struggle has begun. Just over a hundred years ago, in 1913, the Boers passed a law to ROB US OF OUR LAND. Now we must fight for it again. In Mpumalanga Province a MESSAGE HAS BEEN DELIVERED. We did not win our freedom to see the LAND TAKEN AWAY FROM US AGAIN. We, the people of South Africa, will not sit and watch our precious inheritance SOLD TO THE HIGHEST BIDDER. Today in Mpumalanga we fired the first shot in our fight against the NEW COLONIALISM. Let them be warned, those who will SELL OUR LAND TO FOREIGNERS, the people of South Africa are ready to RISE UP AGAIN.

It was signed off, at the bottom of the page, simply as ‘The Land Collective’.