In South Africa’s Fabled Wine Country, White and Black Battle Over Land

In this fabled corner of South Africa, where Americans and other foreigners come to taste chenin blanc and pinotage, white farmers like Mr. Smit have been trying to hold on to a part of the country they consider their historic domain.

He and his white Afrikaner friends call it an invasion, part of a calculated effort by the governing African National Congress to capture the only province that remains out of its political control.

“People are being brought” from other parts of the country “just to create a voting bloc,” said Jan de Klerk, a friend of Mr. Smit’s and a son of F.W. de Klerk, the former president who negotiated the end of apartheid with Nelson Mandela. “It’s not skills coming into the town. It’s basically just people coming in, and there’s no room.”

The squatters say they moved in out of desperation. Life had barely changed for the men and women in the neighboring township, even a quarter-century after achieving democracy. They still lived in flimsy shacks in cramped quarters, while Mr. Smit and his friends hold vast tracts of land brutally snatched from African inhabitants generations ago and deliberately kept in white hands for decades to come.