Karel Schoeman

This beautifully written novel, by one of South Africa's most celebrated writers, has an almost hypnotic power that draws the reader into one woman's life. As a post-apartheid novel, "This Life" considers both the past and future of the Afrikaner people through four generations of one family. In an elegiac narrator's tone, there is also a sense of compulsion in the narrator's attempts to understand the past and achieve reconciliation in the present. This Life is a powerful story partly of suffering and partly of reflection.

In this book, based on primary and secondary published sources, the available information on Cape slavery during the eighteenth century is placed in the wider context of Dutch colonial society during this period. The result, which is a sequel to Schoeman's Early slavery at the Cape of Good Hope, is probably the fullest and most detailed survey of the subject to date.

Presented in the form of biographies centering on a number of men, women and families varying in status and race, Cape Lives of the Eighteenth Century provides a vivid survey of the Cape of Good Hope at the end of the Dutch period, during a period of rapid and dramatic development and change for the colony. The book's aim is to sketch the development of the Dutch colony at the Cape in the eighteenth century through the lives of eighteen individuals and families, primarily for the benefit of non-specialist and non-South African readers. Schoeman has published a great number of books, both fiction and non-fiction, including a general survey of the period covered here, with special emphasis on slavery.

The first slave reached the Cape in 1653, a year after the first white settler party under Jan van Riebeeck. Slavery was to remain an institution here until the end of the Dutch period in 1795, and well beyond, for it was not until 1834, under British administration, that Cape slaves were finally emancipated. In Early slavery at the Cape of Good Hope Karel Schoeman describes the transplanting of slavery from the Dutch colonies in the East and the first sixty years of its development under local conditions, basing his account mainly on contemporary sources and providing as much information on individual slaves and their lives as these allow. Attention is likewise given to the gradual manumission of slaves and the slow development of a 'free black' community at the Cape towards the close of the seventeenth century.

Teen die einde van die negentiende eeu kom 'n middeljarige besoeker uit Europa in die binneland van Suid-Afrika aan. Versluis is 'n afsydige Nederlander wat na Bloemfontein kom om van tering te herstel. Hy verken die vreemde land en doen algaande kennis en begrip op van dit wat tot dusver vir hom vreemd was. Dit word ook, uiteindelik, 'n voorbereiding op die onafwendbare einde van die reis - die dood. Die "ander land" word nie net geografies bedoel nie, maar ook die reis na die onbekende.

In 1799 four missionaries - two English and two Dutch - arrived at the Cape, having been sent out by the London missionary society. Although mission work by the Moravians had begun some time before, this meant the commencement of large-scale mission work in South Africa, and initiated what might be called the 'golden age' of missionary activity in South Africa. The early mission, 1799--1819 consists of 17 essays, some of them in Afrikaans, in which the noted writer and historian Karel Schoeman describes the life and work of a number of missionaries, mission assistants and artisans, 'native agents', catechists and lay helpers, including three women, who where involved in the establishment of the mission during the pioneer period. His subjects are mainly Dutch and indigenous mission workers in the service of the LMS and their work among the slave population of the Cape Colony and the inhabitants of the Orange river area beyond the northern frontier of the Colony.

In die verhaal van vier generasies van 'n enkele blanke boeregesin oor 'n tydperk van bykans 'n honderd jaar word die omwenteling weergegee wat in die loop van die negentiende eeu op die Suid-Afrikaanse platteland en in die Afrikaner-samelewing voltrek i

In 1825 seasonal migration to the region by white farmers was officially allowed, which soon developed into permanent settlement; in 1838 a Trekker party acquired the area around the modern Winburg from its original black inhabitants, in 1846 a British Resident settled at Bloemfontein, and two years later British sovereignty was proclaimed over the area. Early white travellers in the Transgariep is a survey of this phase of white contact with the region, and more especially of the written accounts left by the first white travellers there, and includes the text of eleven of the latter, in many cases translated from the Dutch, German or French.