The sun beat down on their ground. It drank their water and licked its lips while charring their trees. What did the farmers do when the town’s main dam ran dry? They planted more trees. And when lesser farmers couldn’t produce enough to stay afloat? They bought their farms, too, and planted more trees. In the dying stages of life, when the only thing raining down was sunlight, three families wanted more.           
            Because they thought there was more. Beneath the caked, crackly skin of the writhing land, far below, were boreholes still to drain. Hidden in the surrounding mountains were streams still flowing, with current strong enough to catch the attention of those who would suck them dry. Pipes were laid to divert water into private reservoirs.
            It was the gold rush of their lifetime. Avocados were their emeralds of the earth, destined for export containers in transit to Europe, where they’d be received by a suite of distributors. Foreign currency flowed back to the rural South African farmers, and in the case of one family here, their bank accounts in London. 
            If Cape Town and Johannesburg are the doorways to South Africa, the first stop on the way to elegant wine farms and khaki-themed safaris, then Tzaneen was the old kitchen beneath the entertaining space; it’s where the less glamorous folk prepared food for the party. Hidden just beyond a valley, the region was home to prolific farms; where swollen tomatoes burst out of the ground, rich avocados tanned on branches, creamy macadamia nuts dangled in happy bunches, and orange orchards glowed like an amber sunset. 
            From up high, where their helicopters scavenged for water, the region still looked green. Smatters of rain kept it looking that way. But much like the country, ravaged by undercurrents of violence and caustic discourse, the beauty captured from the sky belied the reality.  
            I saw it coming. Because I was from the poorest of the three families, the only one not blinded by the success. When I was done studying, I didn’t melt into my father’s farming business, like all good men in Tzaneen are supposed to. No, I fled to New York and became a CFO. The South African psyche’s lust for guts and gore was a mental assault too much for me to withstand. Headline after headline in the global papers sank the country like a game of Battleship.  And still, when I came home every year, after conquering sixteen-hour flights and five-hour drives, there they were, family and old friends, living a lifestyle I would never be able to recreate.
            Before it turned into tragedy, we laughed. We sat at lookout points, gazing out at green vistas, identifying farms belonging to relatives and families we’d known for decades, pointing out spectacular blocks of trees planted in the distance. Gin and tonics laced with ice-blocks chimed in the hands of adults leaning back in camping chairs, while the newest generation ran amok collecting grasshoppers and trapping frogs. As beautiful as the view was, nobody could pretend that the town dam snaking across the image like a dying snake wasn’t unsettling. Thirty years ago, it shone like a silver Leviathan stretching across the landscape. Seeing it reduced to a messy brown smear on a canvas made us all drink a little bit more. To handle the mental hardship, we did what South Africans always do in times of hardship: we joked, about the coming water fights and about who was the most useless farmer. Little did we know, some of the most vicious battles would be against the same people we sat at those outlook points with. When I think about it now, it makes sense that it would play out that way, because nobody else in the town had anything to lose. Salaries were already meaningless; it was only the farmers who were prospering. It had become an all-or-nothing town. Maybe it had always been that way.
            This is how it unraveled.
            March 2018. A government tender to raise the dam wall is awarded. The contractor first destroys the wall, and then runs away with the rest of the money – par for the course in South Africa. The farmers have private sources of water, so appear to be unconcerned. Muddy water sputters out of household taps as pipes draw from the last layer of water in the dam. My family, and others, switch over to boreholes completely. My father’s order for an additional nine thousand avocado trees, an order he could only have fulfilled by aligning himself with a new export company, is ready.
            By mid-2018, the Mackentire family complete their own Ghengis-Khan expansion, adding an additional nine hundred acres of planted avocado trees to their existing three thousand. My father points out that they’ve been farming for decades, and that Lenny Mackentire inherited two thousand acres of working farmland. Lenny’s three boys run the show now. Pink-faced, whiskey-drinking, sports-loving men with buzz cuts, most days they’re in the field before the sun rises and in bed by 8pm. Their nine hundred acres of expansion have all been done on land rented back from tribes who were awarded land in the government’s redistribution scheme. Nobody knows how the Mackentires secured the leases so quickly, as the process is usually encumbered by government approval and tribal in-fighting. Whispers surface that due process wasn’t followed properly; some say the legality surrounding the execution of some big leases could be challenged in court. But, because the town is off the radar, and the only people aware of the holes in the contracts are family friends – all scrambling to secure leases of their own – the issue lies dormant.
            By August of 2018, Leonardo Abascal and his two sons have added one thousand acres of macadamias to the south side of their farm, Valley Place. The new development sweeps up an embankment like a green rash. Leonardo likes to tell everyone he comes from dirt. His parents left Spain and ended up in South Africa as poor farmers, barely getting by. After studying botany, Leonardo came to work in Tzaneen, where he grew an export company and eventually acquired a significant amount of farming land to grow avocados on. When I saw those avocados in Wholefoods, in New York, I realized the Abascals were the wealthiest of the three families, finally solving a petty mystery. While most of the farmers were confined to European markets, Leonardo’s footprint knew no limits. He believed in survival of the fittest, unequivocally, and because he came from nothing, possessed an unstoppable confidence when it came to innovation and adaptation. He wasn’t as unsophisticated as the rest of the farmers, but took great pleasure in pretending to be. I remember him telling me, with a wry smile on his face, “At one point in his life, every boy should live in Africa, but bank in London.” Bank in London, he did. 
            “Dad, do you really want to expand, now, at seventy?” I asked my father, late in September of 2018. 
            “Why not?” he said, matter-of-factly. “Anyone who doesn’t have volume just won’t make it.”
            “But there’s no water! How can this possibly work?”
            “I have water.”
            “Where from?”
            “Boreholes. You think I don’t figure out the water situation before committing?”
            “That can only contribute. You need solid rain for this to work. Don’t you?”
            “You’re right Boykie. Start praying,” he said, dismissing me. They’d lived through a drought before, in the nineties. Maybe that’s why he was so cavalier about his chances. Or maybe it’s because he’s a Boer, and when a Boer commits to something, they keep doing it. Finished and klaar.
            He could have stopped. After years of managing multiple businesses, persevering through political strife and droughts, the opportunity to cash out was there. Just take it easy, put your feet up, I suggested. But my father, like the other men, was not interested in stopping. The 2017 ship had washed ashore like the Spanish Armada, carrying loot enough to elevate entire generations. With so much at stake, 2018 turned into an agricultural warzone: families began outbidding each other for farms on the market and, in the shadows of the valley, water licenses were dragged from old files and put under the microscope. Whispers turned into rumbles, and eventually into bar fights when drunk children locked horns.
            Perhaps the sun took great joy in watching this unfold. Tractors ran up and down farms, while humans dug up the earth, piercing its skin and ripping it open, only to plant more trees and stitch it back up. Everything but the big farms turned an anemic yellow color – the sun couldn’t have illuminated the exit sign any brighter.   
            Yes, 2018 starts as the agricultural bull market stretching for even greater heights. The farmers sink millions of dollars into development, hoping for big returns in a few years. At the same time, the rest of South Africa’s economy begins spiraling towards the abyss. Every department run by the government is on the verge of collapse, including Eskom, the nations only supplier of electricity. The farmers buy generators and solar panels, but in the big cities and elsewhere, not every small business can afford one.  Many businesses grind to a halt as they endure load-shedding, a cruel schedule of long periods whereby the power supply is cut. Small businesses go under. The back rooms of every household start to cramp with returning children and destitute adults.   
            Early in 2019, the first high profile lawsuit surrounding water reaches the courts. In October of 2019, the sky pisses on the town for a few minutes. Other than that, not a drop of water falls from the sky for the whole year.  The town dam is completely empty, caked closed and baked whole. Emergency drinking water from a town two hours away is delivered to water stations on a weekly basis.
            Over the holiday season, as Cape Town dances and Johannesburg swarms, oblivious to the hardships of the northern part of the country, the government passes an amendment to the Land Expropriation Act, giving them authority to reclaim land but now to do so without any compensation. They assuage the panic of the farmers by issuing a statement assuring the public it will only be used to redistribute unproductive land. Still, apprehension creeps under every farmer’s door. Tzaneen is in Limpopo, the South African province closest to Zimbabwe, that infamous bastion of famine and land theft. 
            By 2020, private water sources are no longer sufficient to irrigate crops. This is where the Mackentire family finally falters. While my father and Leonardo Abascal let half of their crop die, electing to water the other half properly, the Mackentire’s hire helicopters to spray whatever water they have evenly across all their farms, in the hopes it will tide the trees over into 2021, when rain must surely fall. By the end of the year, all of their trees go into shock and stop carrying any fruit at all. The helicopters attract the attention of a nearby village, who don’t understand how the Mackentire’s have so much water when everyone else walks for miles just to procure enough to drink.
            It. Only. Takes. One. Day. Speak to anyone who was dispossessed in Zimbabwe, and that’s what they’ll tell you. It just takes one day. Limpopo is the least educated province in South Africa, and the poorest. Nowhere will you find the lavish lifestyle of Cape Town, or the industry of Johannesburg. All it has is wildlife and farms, and millions of people living off receding hope. Zimbabwean philosophy drifts across the border like a growing desert, reaching these people first. 
            On October 13^th, 2020, a few hundred people from a nearby village walk up to the Mackentire farmhouse. They demand water. The Mackentire boys say no. All three are found in a state that only their mother can identify them.   
            Within a matter of hours, the remaining families are in a state of flux. These boys represented the pinnacle of farming. Hard workers, salt-of-the-earth people who never flashed their wealth or turned their nose up at anyone. I’d attended two of their weddings.
            The news reaches me in New York shortly thereafter – it swirls in my guts like bile.
            “Dad, fucking send your money overseas and COME. Wake the fuck up! I TOLD YOU THIS WOULD HAPPEN!” I yell, panicked.
            Silence.
            “I’m seventy. I’m not leaving. I’ll die here.”
            “And what about me?”
            “Live your life, Boykie. I gave you every chance you need.”
            “They’ll come for the water on Evergeen Place. They’ll–”
            “They already have. I didn’t stop them.”
            “Really?”
            “Yes.”
            “What will you do now?”
            “I’ll stop farming. We’ll cut back. I always told you, we’ll be fine. Even if we lose everything, I’ll grow some vegetables and I’ll shoot animals for meat. I grew up riding my bicycle and eating fruit from our backyard. We had nothing. I’m not scared of having nothing again.”
            When they come for Leonardo Abascal’s water, he’s waiting. The reservoir sits on the top of a small hill, in the center of Valley Place, its water shining like a jewel from afar. Leonardo watches from the outlook point high up on the farm. When the reservoir is surrounded, people scaling its walls with his own ladders and rope, large plastic containers in hand, Leonardo and his sons set out in different directions, with a flaming torch each, and set the entire farm alight. Within twenty-four hours, every farm he owns is scorched earth. The Abascals now live in Switzerland. Their daughter, my best friend, visits me often.  
            What happened in Tzaneen seems isolated. For now, perhaps, it is. But be the sky for a moment, float backwards in order to cast your gaze across the world, and you’ll see things clearly.