Book extract |Land of My Ancestors: An epic South African story, based on true events by Botlhale Tema
Growing up on Welgeval, we all knew we were different. Firstly, there was no chief living in our community. Secondly, Welgeval men were dedicated and fierce cattle farmers who called each other “neef” and the older people spoke a lot of Afrikaans.
But the more tightly they kept the lid on our origins, the more curious we children became. As we grew older, we learnt indirectly that not only were we different, but we were also outsiders – we did not originate from within the mountains of Pilane, where Welgeval was ensconced. As farming on Welgeval grew more stable and successful, ambitious families encouraged their children to enter professions. My father set a non-negotiable rule that we should get a profession before we got married. Parents sometimes sold cattle to pay for their children’s education.
At the meeting, I exhorted descendants of slaves in the Cape to embrace their history and not to be ashamed of it, arguing that feeling shame amounted to blaming the victims for their history. Later, after I told a historian friend about this, she handed me a book, Slavery in South Africa, to show me that slavery was not confined to the Cape. The book, edited by Elizabeth A Eldredge and Fred Morton, outlines the history of slavery throughout South Africa, including in the Transvaal.
I couldn’t put down the book that night as I uncovered the most unexpected information about my people. In one of his chapters, Fred Morton says that the history of slavery in the Transvaal was never openly acknowledged, even by most historians, partly because legal slavery was abolished in 1834 by the British, who governed the Cape then, and because the Boer leaders in the Transvaal signed the Sand River Convention of 1852, which agreed to prohibit slavery.
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