Litnet

Moederland: Nine daughters of South Africa by Cato Pedder

Title: Moederland: Nine daughters of South Africa
Author: Cato Pedder
Publisher: John Murray Press
ISBN: 9781399810807

It certainly feels like, as a country, we are slowly coming into our own. Our literature, rightfully so, has been at the prophetic forefront to lead us out of our dark past with books of potted histories towards our authentic sense of collective identity. At last, it looks like our politics is also now catching on, or rather being pulled by the scruff of its neck by our voters (some of the most intelligent in the world) to get on the wagon. Faced with expanding cracks behind the exhausting false narrative of a rainbow nation, we seem to be emerging into facing the reality of our past and current situation for an authentic way forward.

The book Moederland: Nine daughters of South Africa by Cato Pedder is yet another brick towards finding our authentic identity. The identity of Pedder is crucial when talking about this book, because she is a great-granddaughter of a former prime minister of the Union of South Africa. Pedder could have easily bored us by writing an apologia pro vita sua for her famous great-grandfather. Instead, she chose a different and more authentic route. She wrote an honest, frank, confessional, historical memoir along the lines of Jacklyn Cock’s Writing the ancestral river. Where Cock was merely concerned with issues of a historiographer and a memoir, Pedder goes further as a poet in inhabiting the pages where historical fact goes blank, with speculative postulations of her informed imagination. As a historical novelist (another term for a dramatist of historical facts), I love it when a historian involves herself/himself in history by conjecture and psychological insight that elucidates the happenings of history as an attempt at explaining the present. You can feel her deep sympathy for her subjects, even to impose alternative historical endings for her subjects. But Pedder is too committed to historical facts for counterfactual tricks of allohistory.

Moederland (Motherland) is a story of history – from the middle of the 17th century to our era – told from the feminine perspective of nine women whose genes and charged past Pedder biologically and intellectually embodies:

How hard it is to see through the mesh of patriarchy. Patronymic naming conventions are blinding, reading historical records like gazing at the sun. But looked at sideways, these women can be glimpsed: holograms walking, working, riding, managing relationships across the Cape’s mountain ranges and generations. (81)

It begins with the tragic story of Krotoa, the notorious translator/mistress of Jan van Riebeeck, when the Dutch East India Company established itself in the southernmost part of Africa, which ultimately became the Cape Colony. Others were transported from places like Bengal as slaves. In the Cape they began distancing themselves from their personal history, including passing themselves as white to encompass a superior identity of white supremacy eventually came to be called Afrikaner. Some fled the British control of the Cape to be insinuated into what history subsequently called the Voortrekkers. All these are ancestors of what eventually became known as the Afrikaner nation – bolts, nuts and all. The book doesn’t shy away from the proven science of genetics to explain the roots of medical faults in the genome of the Afrikaner nation. And, in showcasing the past, Pedder pleasantly discusses the fauna and geography, and how the landscape of the Cape would have looked, delving a little into geomorphology and the first architecture of the emerging cities like Cape Town. You can feel the reality of how much of a melting pot the South African Cape Colony in establishment was, before it quickly turned into the racial white supremacy capital of the world. In the life of her aunt Petronella Clark we see how history arcs back into insinuating itself into this melting pot when she returns 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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You can feel the reality of how much of a melting pot the South African Cape Colony in establishment was, before it quickly turned into the racial white supremacy capital of the world. In the life of her aunt Petronella Clark we see how history arcs back into insinuating itself into this melting pot when she returns 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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As I read the book, I couldn’t help but admire the honesty and frankness of the writing, and how it probably provokes animated discussions around her family table. It fired my long-held desire to have such as her as a fellow South African, neighbour and table companion – because, I’ll confess, it is the people like Pedder who probably will save us as a nation. The people who know where their blood has been, and are not scared to make themselves vulnerable by using it as ink for the purpose of raising the consciousness of our nation to a higher purpose in revealing how closely related we are, even as we choose to lock ourselves in respective obtuse, parochial corners.

The book dissolves almost all known literary borders. As much as it is a historical memoir, it trespasses into speculative fiction, poetry, philosophy of history and critical literary theory. In short, it is something of beauty – a dense mixture of personal experience, with romantic mythologising of self by magic realism, along the lines of Darrel Bristow-Bovey’s Finding endurance. Where Finding endurance turns out to be an autobiographical aperçu and natural history, Pedder’s book is so with our national history:

Later still, when a friend refers to Smuts as an apartheid leader on Facebook, I am horrified, the inaccuracy meaningless to her, but a disgrace to me. Even later than that, once I have begun to parse out my own place, the responsibility of my own family, there is a flare-up around the statue of Jan Smuts in Parliament Square, which ignites the fuse that brings it all exploding into the light. (91)

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I find this fast-becoming-popular genre of interrogating history through filtered personal and family experience to be a very pleasing literary direction in our country. You’ll not see me complain if we eventually replace the political novel with it, because not only does it gently provide us with a platform to reckon with our (national) past, but it gives us tools for higher consciousness to map up our personal lives also, which is what literature is supposed to do. 

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Historical texts like Moederland are what we need to wake us up from our dreaming and comfort zones. They are morally and epistemologically more important than texts that just make us feel warm and fuzzy, thus ultimately forgetful about the crimes of our history. We need also to understand these crimes if we are ever going to be able to correct them and restore the dignified path for everyone in our country. I find this fast-becoming-popular genre of interrogating history through filtered personal and family experience to be a very pleasing literary direction in our country. You’ll not see me complain if we eventually replace the political novel with it, because not only does it gently provide us with a platform to reckon with our (national) past, but it gives us tools for higher consciousness to map up our personal lives also, which is what literature is supposed to do. Through it, you don’t learn only mere historical and biographical facts, but emotional truth that cleanses the memory from the ripened diseases of history that plague our present and future. It is not self-voyeurism, but distillation of personal history and finding how it all connects with the national and global project of humanity as a whole. That it is written here in this book in poetic exposure of refreshing simplicity and clarity of messages, is a cherry on top. As a country, we are in an age and time when we desperately need deeper insight and knowledge of nuance from our history and politics, in order to find ways of overcoming our stubborn parochialism. Books like Moederland should be a required read for all South Africans of goodwill.

Also read:

Finding Endurance: Shackleton, my father and a world without end by Darrel Bristow-Bovey: a book review

Beyond the door of no return by David Diop: a review

Tinnitus: my near north (on The near north by Ivan Vladislavic)

Inkwenkwezi Efihlakeleyo: Uhlalutyo Lwencadi | The hidden star translated: A book review

The city is mine by Niq Mhlongo: A review