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Moederland

Nine Daughters of South Africa

Cato Pedder

$55

Hardback

Forthcoming
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English
John Murray Publishers Ltd
30 July 2024
'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.

By:  
Imprint:   John Murray Publishers Ltd
Country of Publication:   United Kingdom
Dimensions:   Height: 238mm,  Width: 160mm,  Spine: 34mm
Weight:   600g
ISBN:   9781399810791
ISBN 10:   1399810790
Pages:   368
Publication Date:  
Audience:   General/trade ,  ELT Advanced
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Forthcoming

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.

Reviews for Moederland: Nine Daughters of South Africa

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 *


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