Pieternella, Daughter of Eva opens in the early days of the first white settlement at the Cape of Good Hope, beneath the shadow of Table Mountain, with the Dutch East India Company clinging precariously to a little piece of land - Robben Island - in Table Bay. Eva was one of the first interpreters and intermediaries between her Goringhaicona tribe and the Dutch, and Pieternella's father was Pieter van Meerhoff, the Company surgeon who was murdered by slave dealers in Madagascar. Pieternella and her siblings were among the first mixed-race children born at the Cape and their lives are a manifestation of a sentiment often expressed by Matthee in this novel - that life can consist of heaven and hell rolled up together in one bundle. After her mother's sudden and untimely death, the orphaned Pieternella and her brother Salomon are sent to the hurricane- and drought-afflicted Mauritius, a penal colony at the time, to work as 'slaves' to foster parents. Pieternella barely survives the exhausting sea voyage and a premature marriage becomes her salvation. Pieternella remains attached to the memory of her mother and is full of turbulent emotions about how she is both brown and white in the same body. What will her children look like? Is she really only half-human, as she has so scornfully been told? Will she ever come to terms with who she is and find the peace and comfort she yearns for? Through this remarkable true story, which took three years of intensive research into old journals, diaries and historical records, Matthee has resurrected and breathed new life into the early history of the Cape, and Robben Island and Mauritius - the isles of banishment. She skilfully balances the elements of Pieternella's life: love and shame for her mother, the impersonal might of the Company versus one individual, and a slave who is freer than a free woman. She allows the historically misunderstood Eva finally to come into her own through the eyes of her clever, sensitive daughter.

Presents a fictional account of the life of Pieternella, the mixed-raced daughter of Eva of the Goringhaicona tribe of South Africa and one of the first interpreters for the Dutch colony of the Cape of Good Hope and Pieter van Meerhoff, surgeon for the Dutch East India Company; discussing her life after being orphan, her early marriage, and her feelings of being half-human.

Set in nineteenth-century rural Africa, Fiela's Child tells the gripping story of Fiela Komoetie and a white, three-year old child, Benjamin, whom she finds crying on her doorstep. For nine years Fiela raises Benjamin as one of her own children. But when census takers discover Benjamin, they send him to an illiterate white family of woodcutters who claim him as their son. What follows is Benjamin's search for his identity and the fundamental changes affecting the white and black families who claim him. "Everything a novel can be: convincing, thought-provoking, upsetting, unforgettable, and timeless."—Grace Ingoldby, New Statesman "Fiela's Child is a parade that broadens and humanizes our understanding of the conflicts still affecting South Africa today."—Francis Levy, New York Times Book Review "A powerful creation of time and place with dark threads of destiny and oppression and its roots in the almost Biblical soil of a storyteller's art."—Christopher Wordsworth, The Guardian "The characters in the novel live and breathe; and the landscape is so brightly painted that the trees, birds, elephants, and rivers of old South Africa are characters themselves. A book not to miss."—Kirkus Reviews

Early in the twentieth century a four-year-old boy is washed ashore like a piece of driftwood at Rietfontein Bay in the Southern Cape. Plucked from amongst the drowned bodies and the wreckage of the ship which floundered on the rocky reefs, the child is adopted by Willem and Sanna Swart and is given the name Moses. More than fifty years later, Moses spends his days taking care of a flock of sheep, continually haunted by a sense of displacement and a yearning to know his real identity. When he goes to work as a gardener for the elderly Lord and Lady de Saumarez he begins for the first time to feel a sense of belonging, and the missing pieces of his life start to unravel. Dalene Matthee, in this her final work, has created a moving tale of identity lost and found.

The Cape Town Book presents a fresh picture of the Mother City, one that brings together all its stories. From geology and beaches to forced removals and hip-hop, Nechama Brodie, author of the best-selling The Joburg Book, has delved deeply into the hidden past of Cape Town to emerge with a lucid and compelling account of South Africa’s fi rst city, its landscape and its people. The book’s 14 chapters trace the origins and expansion of Cape Town – from the City Bowl to the southern and coastal suburbs, the vast expanse of the Cape Flats and the sprawling northern areas. Offering a nuanced, yet balanced, perspective on Cape Town, the book includes familiar attractions like Table Mountain, Kirstenbosch and the Company’s Garden, while also giving a voice to marginalised communities in areas such as Athlone, Langa, Mitchells Plain and Khayelitsha. Many of the images in the book have never been published before, and are drawn from the archives of museums, universities and public institutions. This beautifully illustrated, information-rich book is the defi nitive portrait of the wind-blown, contradictory city at the southern tip of Africa that more than three million people call home

This novel of epic proportions from South Africa, set between 1650 and 1710, covers the first fifty years of the Dutch colony at the Cape of Good Hope. Beautifully rendered, this is a world and a time never before dealt with in fiction-a period when powerful colonizers took over the lands of Hottentot tribes, exposing aborigines for the first time to Western eyes and Western ways. Through the life stories of seven men-all involved with and defined in one way or another by Pieternella, thebeautiful daughter of the first mixed marriage of the new colony-we gain an understanding of the vast historical forces at work. Teeming with characters, rich with lived experience, gripping in its unexpected turns, Islands is a story of greed, power, war, courage, and international intrigue, at once a meticulously researched portrait of the age and a great adventure story.

Nations as well as individuals are in many ways the sum of their memories, which are shaped by perception as much as by events. This collection of essays by South African academics looks at the ways the country is dealing with its past, a complex mixture of colonialism, slavery, apartheid,struggle, and guilt. The emphasis is on how that past is being perceived and moulded in the post-apartheid era.

The San (hunter- gatherers) and Khoe (herders) of southern Africa were dispossessed of their land before, during and after the European colonial period, which started in 1652. They were often enslaved and forbidden from practicing their culture and speaking their languages. In South Africa, under apartheid, after 1948, they were reclassified as “Coloured” which further undermined Khoe and San culture, forcing them to reconfigure and realign their identities and loyalties. Southern Africa is no longer under colonial or apartheid rule; the San and Khoe, however, continue in the struggle to maintain the remnants of their languages and cultures, and are marginalised by the dominant peoples of the region. The San in particular, continue to command very extensive research attention from a variety of disciplines, from anthropology and linguistics to genetics. They are, however, usually studied as static historical objects but they are not merely peoples of the past, as is often assumed; they are very much alive in contemporary society with cultural and language needs. This book brings together studies from a range of disciplines to examine what it means to be Indigenous Khoe and San in contemporary southern Africa. It considers the current constraints on Khoe and San identity, language and culture, constantly negotiating an indeterminate social positioning where they are treated as the inconvenient indigenous. Usually studied as original anthropos, but out of their time, this book shifts attention from the past to the present, and how the San have negotiated language, literacy and identity for coping in the period of modernity. It reveals that Afrikaans is indeed an African language, incubated not only by Cape Malay slaves working in the kitchens of the early Dutch settlers, but also by the Khoe and San who interacted with sailors from passing ships plying the West coast of southern Africa from the 14th century. The book re- examines the idea of literacy, its relationship to language, and how these shape identity. The chapters in this book were originally published in the journal Critical Arts: South-North Cultural and Media Studies.

The Great White Hunter—Southern Africa is the third and final book of the Dutch Century Trilogy. It covers the last two-thirds of the 1600s, during which the Dutch exercised considerable control of all sub-Saharan Africa. Among the Dutch who spent significant portions of their lives in the region were farmers, traders, builders, mariners, and slavers. And, most interesting, some intrepid long-distance hunters. They sought fortunes as rewards for museum-quality mounted specimens, success beyond their wildest imaginations from the elephant tusk/ivory trade, and adventure—always adventure. They were brave and hardy souls who faced hardships of miserable travel in oxwaggons, difficult to manage native helpers, balky oxen, mules, and horses. In addition, there were problems of tribalism, close calls from fearsome beasts, including lions, leopards, elephants, rhinos, crocs, and dangerous men. Piet van Brakel explored the lower half of the African continent while still a fugitive from the dangerous Dutch VOC. To succeed, he had to control the vicissitudes of weather—floods, droughts, winds, starvation, and great thirsts. He was the baas, the bwana who had to deal with all unseen and unknown surprises. That included: animal attacks, Arab slaver/killer invasion, war with ruthless Zulu impis, poisons, malfunctioning guns, and misbehaving men of his safari team. He lost six of his nine lives, accumulated hard-won treasure twice, and gained incomparable friends and success beyond measure. Such a life was never a sure thing for the man. How he accomplished, that is the stuff of legend.

Set in the politically charged atmosphere of the Cape in the mid-seventeenth century, Krotoa-Eva: The Woman from Robben Island is an exploration of identity, power and how individuals react to the clash of cultures. This biographical novel focuses on the vivid and memorable character of Krotoa-Eva; it also takes us into the hearts and minds of the women and men at the Cape at the time of the Dutch East India Company: the politicians and farmers, the military men and adventurers, and the chiefs, healers and cattle-traders. A deeply moving and yet highly informative book. Also timely, touching as it does on the search for a truly South African identity