Book description
Pieternella, Daughter of Eva
opens in the early days of the first white settlement at the Cape of
Good Hope, beneath the shadow of Table Mountain, with the Dutch East
India Company clinging precariously to a little piece of land - Robben
Island - in Table Bay. Eva was one of the first interpreters and
intermediaries between her Goringhaicona tribe and the Dutch, and
Pieternella's father was Pieter van Meerhoff, the Company surgeon who
was murdered by slave dealers in Madagascar. Pieternella and her
siblings were among 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 can consist of heaven and hell rolled
up together in one bundle. After her mother's sudden and untimely death,
the orphaned Pieternella and her brother Salomon are sent to the
hurricane- and drought-afflicted Mauritius, a penal colony at the time,
to work as 'slaves' to foster parents. Pieternella barely survives the
exhausting sea voyage and a premature marriage becomes her salvation.
Pieternella 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 only half-human,
as she has so scornfully been told? Will she ever come to terms with who
she is and find the peace and comfort she yearns for? Through this
remarkable true story, which took three years of intensive research into
old journals, diaries and historical records, Matthee has resurrected
and breathed new life into the early history of the Cape, and Robben
Island and Mauritius - the isles of banishment. She skilfully balances
the elements of Pieternella's life: love and shame for her mother, the
impersonal might of the Company versus one individual, and a slave who
is freer than a free woman. She allows the historically misunderstood
Eva finally to come into her own through the eyes of her clever,
sensitive daughter.
