Life on the windswept highlands of South Africa’s Eastern Cape is defined by trust.

In this biodiversity hotspot , there are no fences to mark where one family’s land ends and another’s begins. Cattle and sheep graze without borders; rivers and ridgelines serve as boundaries — held not by law, but by the word of neighbors, determined to keep the grassland healthy, together.

This is an ancient way of herding livestock — a system that depends on movement.

For generations, herders grazed livestock the way their semi-nomadic ancestors did — chasing rainfall alongside the great herds of African wildlife, never settling in one place long enough to wear the land down.

But that tradition has collapsed under the long shadow of Apartheid — disrupted by the forcible displacement of pastoralist communities from their ancestral territories.…