Overview

'Exploring the past, bringing it to vivid life with wonderful prose . . . Pedder writes with perspicacity and sensitivity . . . We need more books like this' Observer '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.

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9781399810814

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Reviews

Compelling . . . traces South Africa's turbulent past through the contrasting lives of nine women in [Cato Pedder's] prehistory. From 1600s Cape Town, then a remote outpost of the Dutch East India Company to her aunt Petronella who falls in love with a 'coloured' man, she unpacks the cargoes of her Afrikaans heritage -- Caroline Sanderson, Editor's choice * Bookseller * Fascinating and engrossing . . . part memoir, part account of [Pedder's] own lineage and part exploration of what it is to be wedded through one's family to race exploitation and conquest * Literary Review * Informed by impressively thorough research . . . Exploring the past, bringing it to vivid life with wonderful prose, [Pedder] intersects the lives of her ancestors with her own thoughts and experiences . . . But this is not another whinging apologia by a white author. Pedder writes with perspicacity and sensitivity . . . Moederland provides more questions than answers, but that is not a flaw. It is the questioning that makes this book valuable . . . We need more books like this, we need more detailed research, more people allowing themselves to be uncomfortable and to question * Observer * These women's stories come down to us in fragments, having been written out of 'recorded history' . . . Moederland proves Cato Pedder to be uniquely qualified to tell that story * Independent *

Author Information

Cato Pedder was born into the Quaker Clark shoe family and is a former newspaper reporter with 15 years of experience in South Africa and the UK, including at the Johannesburg Star and The Sun. She graduated from Cambridge University in English Literature and holds further degrees in African Studies from SOAS and Creative Writing from Kingston University, where she won the academic prize. She is a published poet, was born in California and brought up in England. She has lived in South Africa and returns there regularly.

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