Botlhale Tema holds her book out for me to see as she traces a circle from generation to generation of sepia-soaked family members on the front cover of The People of Welgeval (Zebra). She ends her explanation with the stern-faced young boy in the foreground. “He died when I was 10-years-old at a ripe old age [in his 80s],” she says lifting her small hands with a flourish and laughing.
For Tema, writing about her family has been an excavation into an until-recently undiscovered history of tenacity and a slow, but determined elevation from the oppression of slavery — a fact she only discovered in 1998 while working on the United Nations Economic and Social Council’s Slave Route Project. She was at a project meeting when a historian friend showed her a passage from a book about slavery that mentioned Welgeval — the farm where she had spent much of her childhood. The extract talked about the farm’s founders — a Swiss missionary Henri Gonin and Tema’s ancestors and former slaves “Januari”, later christened Petrus, and “Vieland”, christened Stephanus, who had been stolen by a Boer commando during a raid on the BaKwena capital of Dithubaruba in 1852.
“If you wake up one morning and someone tells you you come from a generation of slaves … that is amazing,” she says. “You want to know who was responsible? How did they organise themselves [to] pull themselves out of that?”
Tema says that slavery was widespread in South Africa, but “it was so subtle that even historians [use] euphemisms [to describe it]. Until the victims of this write about it, it will not be relieved.” Her objective in writing the book was, however, more to understand the motivational drive coursing through her family than a need for healing.
“There is no bitterness in my family. They were focused on creating a destiny for themselves. All those people [slave traders and owners] were not important … you can wallow in pain or you can ride it.
“Ultimately this was more for my children. [I wanted to show them] you cannot be defeated with all of that behind you.”
That said, Tema admits that it would have been difficult for her to write the book if her father were still alive as the older generation found it hard to come to terms with the “shame” associated with slavery.
As she writes in an afterword to her book: “Nobody ever offered to explain how Welgeval’s traditions grew to be so different. In fact, enquiring about these anomalies was an open invitation for a smack. Whatever the story was, the old folks sat on it and made sure that the younger generation was spared the details.”
By way of explanation she says: “There were so many layers of things really [in] dealing with the pain. If my father were still alive I would not have been able to write the book, there would have been too many things for him to experience. Part of it [the silence] was to protect us.
“For us now [we think] how exciting, how interesting. There is no pain attached to [our history]. We have no complexes about it.”
The People of Welgeval covers four generations – whose personalities and pasts Tema has patched together from archival material, family anecdotes and memory — set against a history of slavery, colonialism, war and apartheid. It is as much a history of the piece of land, tucked away in what is now the Pilanesberg National Park in North West province, as of its people. And just as the people of Welgeval have come full circle from “victims to victors”, the farm has followed its own course in history. It was returned to the family in December 2004 after they lodged a claim that was successful, in part, as a result of the information dug up by Tema while researching her book.