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VRYHEID, South Africa - Nakeni Khulu sits on a stone, watching over her grandchildren huddled around a charcoal fire, their shoulders bare against an icy night wind. They are at home, by the side of a road.
They can see across two strands of barbed wire to the remains of the homestead where they lived until Sept. 26. That day, the youngsters were yanked out of school to watch as tractors pulled down their round mud-and-thatch huts. Policemen kept the Khulus at bay with dogs and batons.
Up the hill, secure inside his farmhouse with a pistol at his hip, Andreis Scheepers goes to sleep knowing but not caring that "the natives," as he calls them, are struggling to keep their children warm where he deposited them beside the road.
The Khulus had lived on Scheepers' farm under a near-feudal arrangement that exchanged their free labor for a place to plant crops and graze cattle.
Now, Scheepers and other white farmers in the rolling Natal countryside are evicting these black "labor tenants," anticipating that the Mandela government will give the tenants the right to seek title to land on which many have lived for generations.
Burdened by old laws
"People are being evicted because landowners are merciless and have no compassion about...