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4.
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The narrative opens in the early days of the white settlement at the Cape, with the Dutch East India Company clinging precariously to a little piece of land in Table Bay, Robben Island. Pieternella is the daughter of Eva, one of the first interpreters and intermediaries between her Khoikhoi tribe and the Dutch, and Pieter van Meerhoff, the Company surgeon at the Cape. Pieternella and her siblings are amongst the first mixed-race children born at the Cape and their lives are a manifestation of a sentiment often expressed by Matthee in this novel, that life consists of heaven and hell rolled together in the same cloth. After her mother's sudden death, Pieternella and her brother Salomon are sent, reluctantly, as a orphan 'slaves' to foster parents in Mauritius, a penal colony at the time. The sea voyage is described in detail, wondrously imagined, with Pieternella making sense of the new experience in terms of her life at the Cape, so that to her the ship looks like a wooden goose floating on the water and she focuses on the animals on board to orientate herself on the deck, sheep-side and chicken-side.A premature marriage is Pieternella's salvation, but she remains attached to the memory of her mother and is full of turbulent emotions about how she is both brown and white in the same body. What will her children look like? Is she really a half-slave? Eventually Pieternella must learn to come to terms with her life in Mauritius, a realisation that will, with time, give her some peace and comfort....
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6.
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Set in nineteenth-century rural Africa, Fiela's Child tells the gripping story of Fiela Komoetie and a white, three-year old child, Benjamin, whom she finds crying on her doorstep. For nine years Fiela raises Benjamin as one of her own children. But when census takers discover Benjamin, they send him to an illiterate white family of woodcutters who claim him as their son. What follows is Benjamin's search for his identity and the fundamental changes affecting the white and black families who claim him.
"Everything a novel can be: convincing, thought-provoking, upsetting, unforgettable, and timeless."—Grace Ingoldby, New Statesman
"Fiela's Child is a parade that broadens and humanizes our understanding of the conflicts still affecting South Africa today."—Francis Levy, New York Times Book Review
"A powerful creation of time and place with dark threads of destiny and oppression and its roots in the almost Biblical soil of a storyteller's art."—Christopher Wordsworth, The Guardian
"The characters in the novel live and breathe; and the landscape is so brightly painted that the trees, birds, elephants, and rivers of old South Africa are characters themselves. A book not to miss."—Kirkus Reviews
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