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.