Cato Pedder for Moederland: Nine Daughters of South Africa

Moederland is a courageous and modern appraisal of what it means to be descended from the people who created the ultra-racist apartheid system in South Africa. Illuminating its turbulent history through the lives of her female ancestors, it is a history of South Africa like no other, told from the perspective of women long silenced in the historical narrative, such as:

• 17th century Krotoa (or Eva in Dutch) who became a conduit between Dutch settlers and her Khoikhoi tribe, gave birth to many children by white men, and died in misery;
• Angela van Bengale, a slave girl brought from Bengal who married a white man and ended her life in wealth;
• white settler women such as Anna Retief who took her children on a journey across country to settle on Zulu land in the mid-19th century – a journey that became legendary in Afrikaner history as it ended in disaster for the settlers;
• Isie Smuts, Cato’s great-grandmother, wife to Jan Smuts, pro-Apartheid and anti-women’s rights;
• And finally, Petronella, Cato’s aunt who, against the odds, found love across the colour lines and lived in exile in Lesotho.

In Moederland - 'Motherland', in Afrikaans - Cato Pedder travels the centuries from the 1600s, when Cape Town was a remote outpost of the Dutch East India Company, to the kraal of a Zulu king in the 1800s before doubling back to Europe and then culminating with the English Quaker aunt who defies apartheid to marry across the colour line.

As anti-racist campaigners call out the statue of Jan Smuts in Parliament Square, Cato painstakingly excavates the long-forgotten life stories of the women of her prehistory, unpacking the legacy of her Afrikaans heritage and bringing their collective shame into the light.

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.