‘You look like shit,’ came the reply. ‘Whatever you were up to, I hope it was fun. You should eat something. Let me fix you a couple of eggs.’

Anton felt his stomach churn. ‘Listen, I don’t need a fucking mother, I need a coffee.’

A couple of minutes later Saleh arrived with the coffee and placed a large tumbler of fresh orange juice next to it. They smiled at each other. Anton looked at the juice the way he used to look at cough medicine when he was a kid and downed it in one long gulp. Then he turned to the screen again.

He found nothing in the international press about the incident at the orange farm. In his experience rural affairs only twitched the interest of foreign correspondents if the fortunes of white farmers were at stake. They rarely, if ever, departed from this central theme. The plight of an ageing black foreman didn’t register on the Richter scale of news judgements. So when it came to land and how it was distributed there was always the story of the lone white farmer to fall back on – the one who heroically stands up to thugs but, in the end, abandons the fight and joins the growing numbers heading for the departure gate and a life of bilious exile overseas.

There had been plenty of crime on South Africa’s vast commercial farms in the years since democracy. The farmers who owned them, still almost exclusively white, had had the misfortune to be both isolated and relatively rich, certainly in comparison to the poverty all around them. They were sitting ducks. Hundreds had been killed. The murders were the collateral of botched robberies by gangs of increasingly frustrated youths for whom the great promise of freedom had been as beguiling as a strip-tease but, ultimately, just as unsatisfying.

There was a mention on the website of a provincial farming magazine in South Africa. In this version, the incident at Meyer’s farm had been reduced to nothing more than an advice column on the need to supervise farm labourers. There was an interview with a representative from De Kok and Sons, suppliers of farming equipment, fertilisers and pesticides. The spokeswoman said the company had decided – in the light of events at the Meyer farm – to have another look at the instructions that went with their products. They were thinking of making them simpler, perhaps using cartoon characters and pictures to illustrate what needed to be done.

‘We know some of the employees find it difficult to read,’ she was quoted as saying.

He still had the Land Collective website open and clicked back to it. What a contrast! There were the names of the foreman and some of the farm labourers. It even named the brand of pesticide and how the petrol might have been mixed with it. It was like an online training session on how to replicate the sabotage.