In Brief: Moederland: Nine Daughters of South Africa

By Cato Pedder. John Murray, 2024. 348 pages. $29.10/hardcover.

A British Quaker, Cato Pedder is a great-granddaughter of the famous (or infamous) South African prime minister and White supremacist Jan Smuts, who also served his country as a military officer and statesman before being elected its leader, serving from 1919–24 and 1939–48. Smut’s legacy includes both helping to establish the League of Nations and the United Nations, and also supporting racial segregation and contributing to early apartheid policies. Pedder’s maternal grandmother, Catharina, for whom she was named (Cato being a nickname), was an Afrikaner of a line of Afrikaners stretching back to the 1652 Calvinist Dutch settlers and their children (some of mixed race).

Pedder attempts to make sense of her place in all of this complicated history by telling the stories of nine of her ancestors, all women: a Khoikhoi translator; an enslaved girl from Bengal; an emigrant from Germany; four Afrikaners; a daughter of Jan Smuts who escapes to England and marries a Quaker; and her daughter (Pedder’s aunt) who returns to southern Africa, falls in love across the color bar, and fights what her grandfather helped to build.

The stories are gleaned from family tradition and corrected and amplified through archival research. She pieces together the story of survival and racism that led to apartheid, including the role played by women. History tells of men, mostly White, while Afrikaner women kept house, tended babies, and remained invisible. Pedder shines a light on them. Family loyalty tugs at her moral repugnance as she tries to come to terms with the contradictions between her family’s legacy and her Quaker ethics, especially as seen through female experiences. Interwoven with the family history are vignettes from her many trips to South Africa to visit relatives, see the homes where her female ancestors held forth, and observe conditions before and after the fall of legal apartheid.

Moederland ends on a high note of the first multiracial election in April 1994, although Pedder’s visits since then offer glimpses of more recent conditions. It is a fascinating, honest, and thought-provoking story. It might be a model for Friends as we examine our connection with slavery and Native American boarding schools.

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—Reviewed by Marty Grundy, a New England Friend who briefly visited the Republic of South Africa in 1982 and 1990 while her husband, Ken, devoted much of his professional career to researching politics in the area