‘I thought about collective guilt and individual responsibility, how impunity allows sin to continue to walk among us.’ Photo: Jan Smuts holds the Cato’s mother (his granddaughter, 1944), courtesy of Alfred Gillett Trust
Moederland: Cato Peddar on what brought her to investigate her family history
‘Still, here I am.’
In the course of my work as media officer at Quakers in Britain, I spend some time each week, in Zoom meetings or on telephone calls, explaining the pronunciation of my name. ‘No, not “Kate-o”, “Cuh-too”. It’s Afrikaans, short for Catharina. No, I’m not Afrikaans, just named for my grandmother.’ Sometimes, when this label gets too heavy, I exaggerate to lighten the load, ‘No, half South African, through my mum.’
I don’t mind doing this at all. My name is an integral part of my identity – but it goes some way towards explaining that identity. In calling me Cato, my parents were not trying to burden me, but to follow an Afrikaans tradition where names are passed down through generations, and where, as second daughter, I was named for my maternal grandmother, the only Afrikaner among them.
It was an ‘owning’ and a commitment that ensures I am forever connected to a country 6,000 miles from home, to a culture freighted with shame. In 1973, perhaps, when I was born, claiming descent from a world statesman, warrior, philosopher – from the prime minister, Jan Smuts – was a source of pride, not shame. But surely even then, I think, the stain of apartheid must have been apparent. Still, here I am.
Over the past few years, Quakers, after receiving centuries of praise as abolitionists, have been actively researching our role in the transatlantic slave trade. In 2022, we agreed to consider making practical reparation for that involvement. Later this year, the first Quaker World Plenary since 2016 will be held near Johannesburg, to think about the legacies of the past and the way forward in a fractured burning world.
In Germany, as it struggles to come to terms with the Third Reich, this working through the past is known as vergangenheitsbewaltigung. This is also the work of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, designed to lay the horrors of apartheid to rest. But as the seventh set of post-apartheid general elections in South Africa roll around on 29 May, apartheid’s legacy persists – the vergangheitsbewaltigung unfinished.
Thirty years after the racist paraphernalia of apartheid is dismantled, after black people are legally entitled to vote, to have sex with, and marry, white people, to live wherever they like, instead of in so-called ‘tribal homelands’, or slums on the outskirts of white cities, race has been mobilised in post-Rainbow Nation South Africa by an embattled African National Congress (ANC) and a proletariat fed up with the slow pace of change and the entrenchment of white power.
Students proclaim ‘Rhodes must fall’ as they occupy universities, and topple statues of old white men. South Africa has begun to seem less a miracle of reconciliation and more a weeping sore. Globally, identity politics have caught fire as Black Lives Matter activists protest against the continuing violence visited upon black people, and ‘MeToo’ activists against the continuing violence visited upon women and girls.
There’s a zeitgeist which carries all of us with it, although we can sometimes stick in an oar to alter course slightly, or pull harder in the direction of travel. And it was in the intersection between South Africa and historical wrongs that I have found myself rowing, sticking my oar in, trying to understand my own past and how to move forward.
My name, my Afrikaner heritage, has shaped my life, but it’s not something that’s ever been comfortable. Not when I was visiting relatives in apartheid South Africa as a child, nor when working as a news reporter in the new ‘Rainbow Nation’ in the mid-1990s. As I aged, and the voices for racial justice got louder, I was drawn to examine how this heritage evolved, and my own relationship with it, as an Englishwoman. So, over the course of ten years, I wrote the book which was to become Moederland: Nine daughters of South Africa, researching and attempting to reconstruct the lives of nine different women.
The book starts with Krotoa, a Khoikhoi girl, on the beach in what is now Cape Town, in 1652, when the first Dutch settlers arrive. Within a few years, Krotoa is a translator between the Dutch East India Company and her pastoralist people. She helps, inadvertently, to open the door to centuries of white supremacy across Southern Africa, and seals the fate of her own first-nations people, who are all but wiped out within fifty years.
The story moves through enslaved people and settlers to my great grandmother, Isie Krige, who marries Jan Smuts. Jan Smuts becomes a South African statesman so revered by the British that in the 1950s a statue is raised to him in Parliament Square. My great grandfather is father of the Royal Air Force, central to the creation of the League of Nations, and drafts the Preamble to the United Nations Charter. He is prime minister of South Africa, twice, and Albert Einstein holds him to be one of only ten people who truly understands the theory of relativity. But Jan Smuts is also a white supremacist who supports racial segregation in South Africa. Moral narratives shift and Smuts falls out of the history books, at least until the summer of 2020, when anti-racist campaigners, having thrown a statue of Edward Colston in Bristol Harbour, turn to the statue of Jan Christiaan Smuts in Parliament Square.
Moederland moves on to his daughter Cato, my namesake, who marries an English Quaker, Bancroft Clark, which makes all the difference to me. And the final character is her daughter, my aunt, Petronella Clark, who several of you will know personally. Petronella, an English Quaker, marries Lionel Sylvester, who is Cape Coloured, forcing them to live in exile in Lesotho as mixed marriages are forbidden under apartheid law.
As I wrote Moederland I thought about collective guilt and individual responsibility, how impunity allows sin to continue to walk among us. How Desmond Tutu said that, because human beings live in communities, groups must acknowledge their part in the past in a symbolic confession of wrongdoing.
I thought about the collective looking-away from violence done to black bodies – the theft, dispossession, and denial of black people as human beings. All the centuries that edifice took to build, the weight of the ship of history, how long she takes to turn. And how empty she is of women’s stories, not only of our triumphs, but of our crimes, our complicity.
I wondered if I was brave enough to hurt people I love by bringing our shame into the light, by unpicking the tapestry of our identity. And I thought about those leaky frontiers between guilt and innocence; about whether that burden can be unpacked, its parts used to construct something more worthwhile.
The theme of the 2024 Quaker World Plenary is ‘Living the spirit of Ubuntu: Responding with hope to God’s call to cherish creation – and one another’. Ubuntu is the Zulu philosophy of togetherness: ‘umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu’ – I am because we are. It’s a philosophy I kept returning to as I wrote this book, one which is related to our Quaker belief that there is that of God in each of us, that we are connected by the divine. That we bear a responsibility to each other and to the living world.
Moederland is my contribution to this ongoing conversation, a seeking to understand how the lost stories of these women, my ancestors, helped shape South Africa into her distorted, monstrous yet strangely joyous present. It is an attempt to begin to make reparation for the past, to step forward into the future
Moederland is out now.
