He isn’t sure if he’d fallen asleep. His laptop is in screensaver mode, a logo bouncing off the edges, like some infinite game of snooker. Could he, could they, the Land Collective, change the direction of this violence? He looks around the room. A hint of dawn light is just discernible through the curtains. He taps the keyboard and is back where he was, a blank screen waiting for the words that might reach those who have unleashed this wave of chaos.

His boots, discarded by the doorway to the room, are still covered with ash from the squatter camp. He starts to type.

I have just returned from HILL VIEW. My boots are covered in ash, my clothes are smelling of smoke from the fires that have left thousands of our FELLOW AFRICANS homeless tonight. Our BROTHERS and SISTERS from Mozambique have paid a high price for this FOOLISHNESS. This chaos is just what the LANDOWNERS AND THEIR MINISTER FRIENDS want. They want us to fight among ourselves. They want us to believe that the problem is the Mozambicans. But they are POORER than we are. They are the POOREST OF THE POOR. That is why they come here, working for NOTHING. They are POWERLESS. They are our comrades in this NEW STRUGGLE for our land. The police ARRESTED A MOZAMBICAN BROTHER but they had NO PROOF that he was involved in the murder of Lesedi Motlantshe. They want people to think this is a struggle between South Africans and Mozambicans. But it is not. This is a struggle between those who WORK THE LAND and those who want to sell it to POLITICIANS AND THEIR RICH FRIENDS OVERSEAS. It is OUR LAND, it belongs to ALL South Africans. This violence must STOP NOW.

7

The photograph, in its simple black frame, had hung on the wall outside her parents’ study for as long as Lindi Seaton could remember. She must have walked past it a million times. In the mornings, the sun glinted off the glass, obscuring the picture and reflecting a shard of light across the narrow hallway. It was only in the afternoon, as the sun moved over the house, that you could actually see the figures in the photograph – they emerged from the glare one by one, a slow and gentle revelation of their collective history, a curtain parting before a new act in a play.

This wasn’t just another of the many family portraits that jostled for attention: it was a picture that said something about the Seatons. It took pride of place among all the other framed photographs that had been bumped and knocked so often that the wall looked like a particularly careless example of crazy paving. This one photograph – taken in South Africa in the mid-eighties – was a kind of visual shorthand. It said, ‘This is who we are.’