‘Let me tell you about Jan Smuts,’ my grandfather, a doctor born not far from Johannesburg, would begin. And we, as children, would mutter and glance sideways and sink into our chairs. The story would go something like this: ‘Smuts was a Boer War leader, later feted by the English political establishment and central to international moves towards a liberal world order, a segregationist back home and reviled by the Afrikaner nationalists, who instituted formal apartheid from 1948. He was many things to many people, and his influence in South Africa and internationally was unparalleled in his time.’ My grandfather’s eyes would mist over and we would grunt responses about problematic legacies and racism.
Enter Cato Pedder, who, as Smuts’s great-granddaughter, heard even more about the man than I did. Though born in California and raised in England, she feels deep ties to South Africa. Her whiteness and Englishness make her doubly foreign there – uncomfortable in a world of burglar bars, barking dogs and shacks tucked into the lee of mansion walls – and at odds with her family’s hand in bringing the nation about. ‘Identity is fluid and contingent,’ she writes. But how to deal with this inheritance of being a Smuts? Come to think of it, how did being a member of the Smuts family come to mean so much in the first place?
Through the lives of nine women – each one an ancestor – Peddertraces the impact of white Afrikaner identity on 400 years of South African history, from the racially fluid, slave-owning colony in the Cape, through the sclerosis of apartheid and finally to democracy.
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