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...