Moederland: Nine Daughters of South Africa

'Fascincating and engrossing' Literary Review. How did South Africa turn out the way it did? In Moederland - 'Motherland', in Afrikaans - Cato Pedder takes us on an eye-opening journey across four centuries, tracing the country's turbulent past and the rise and fall of apartheid (and her family's charged legacy) through the lives of nine very different women.: KROTOA is Khoikhoi translator to the newly arrived Dutch East India Company; ANGELA, a former slave from Bengal, climbs the ladder of settler society; ELSJE arrives from Germany aged 3, marries at 13, a mother at 15; ANNA, mistress of the Cape's grandest estate, regains control from her violent husband; MARGARETHA, uncompromising Afrikaner farmer, resists the abolition of slavery; ANNA loads her family on an ox-wagon and treks into the interior to elude the British; ISIE survives the Boer War to become wife of South Africa's Prime Minister and 'Mother of the Nation'; CATO escapes to England and the Quakers as white supremacy mutates into apartheid; PETRONELLA, returning to the Motherland, falls in love across the colour bar and risks everything to fight the system her grandfather set in motion.