STELLENBOSCH, SOUTH AFRICA — Like many black professionals during the dark days of apartheid, Diale and Malmsey Rangaka dreamed of leaving the crowded township of Soweto. But, unlike their neighbors, they didn't want to move to the gated white suburbs.
They wanted to be farmers.
For years Diale, an English literature professor, would chatter away about cattle ranching, quoting the latest issue of Farmer's Weekly. His wife was skeptical. "But you haven't produced so much as a rabbit your whole life," she would gently chide him.
But Malmsey, a clinical psychologist, harbored her own ambition: She wanted to be an organic farmer. To which her husband would invariably point out that she hadn't grown so much as a carrot.
A few years ago, with their children grown and land ownership suddenly open to blacks, they began scanning advertisements for farmland. Twenty-two farms later, their quest ended. It was neither a ranch nor a vegetable farm but a moldering 100-acre tract of grapes and guava.
They quit their jobs, borrowed the entire purchase price from the government land bank and moved nearly 800 miles southwest, leaving the coal-fire haze of their black township to take up a life that had once defined the white Afrikaner settlers in South Africa.
They were a pair of dreamers, cultured urbanites with romantic visions of green acres and the cleansing power of an honest day's work. They were in for a few surprises.
This corner of the Western Cape province is a bucolic region of rolling hills, Cape Dutch architecture, dramatic mountain backdrops and quaint villages. The area's two-lane roads are speckled with signs bearing drawings of grape clusters and the names of passing vineyards. Stellenbosch, the center of South Africa's wine industry, is just a few miles away from the farm.
When the Rangakas arrived in late 2003, their farm was in sad shape. Repairs had been neglected and the vines were old. But at least they were inheriting a staff of farmworkers who lived on the property.
The Rangakas knew that relations between some white farmers and their laborers were poor. They thought being black -- and the shared experience of being victims of white-minority rule -- might help them.
But the couple soon discovered that skin color wasn't quite as important as history, tradition and language.
The farm's four permanent laborers were mixed-race Colored and spoke Afrikaans, as do most white farmers here. In the racial hierarchy under apartheid, the lighter-skinned Coloreds, who are a majority in the province, were a notch above blacks. And 15 years of black majority rule hasn't fully erased that feeling of superiority.
The dayworkers were ethnic Xhosas, blacks from impoverished rural areas of the Eastern Cape province, and they spoke Xhosa and Afrikaans.
Diale, 55, and Malmsey, 53, are both Tswana, from northern South Africa. They spoke Setswana and English -- and very little Afrikaans or Xhosa.
"It was an interesting situation," Malmsey said, her sigh suggesting an understatement. "They spoke Afrikaans and Xhosa and were used to working under a white farmer. They saw we were black and they weren't used to it."
After a few months, three of the four laborers asked to speak privately to Diale. They tendered their resignations.
"They said they liked working for us but they couldn't get used to having a black boss," Diale recalled. "It was amazing to me." Later, the foreman resigned too, citing the difficulty of working for a woman, especially one he couldn't communicate with.
Later, the Rangakas learned that their laborers were being mocked by other Colored farmworkers as "slaves" for working for blacks.
That was just the beginning of the culture clash.
During the first guava harvest, black farmworkers from the area would pull up in their pickups and take scrap metal from the Rangakas' property. "They never came to the house to ask. They just took what they saw laying around and thought we weren't using," Malmsey said.
Then, when the guava ripened, "they would take away fruit by the vanload," Diale said. "When we asked them why, they said they were told that if you needed guava, just to come."
Diale put up fences. But they were ignored.
"I had to go out there and tell people that the whole purpose of a fence is that if you are standing on one side, you can't go to the other," he said. But what really surprised Diale was that the scofflaws, when caught, never seemed to feel guilty.
Being a former literature professor, Diale at first tried to understand their motivation. While this might look like ordinary thievery to some, he thought, perhaps it had deeper meaning. "I really wanted to understand why they were picking our fruit and taking it for themselves," he said.
He concluded that the intruders had a perception that, as black farmers, Diale and Malmsey were a resource for fellow blacks who had less. And many of them had grown up in communal Xhosa villages where fruit on trees belonged to everyone.
