‘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.
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.
