My nephew Dayne has recently been delving into our family’s past, and what he uncovered has shifted the way I see our story in South Africa. Like many families, I believed our roots here were relatively recent. My paternal great-grandfather arrived from Germany in 1853 as a three-year-old boy and eventually made his home near Somerset East. My paternal grandmother was the daughter of a Scottish doctor who established his practice in Tarkastad in 1886. My mother was born in England, grew up in Kenya, and came to South Africa in the early 1950s, where she met my father. 

That was the narrative I carried with me: German, Scottish, and English strands weaving together in the Eastern Cape. But further research uncovered deeper and far more complex ties, ties that reached back into the 17th century and carried with them the marks of conflict, colonisation, resilience, and survival.

One discovery was that my great-grandfather married Catharina Johanna Dorothea Lötter.

Her brother, pictured here, Johannes Cornelius Jacobus “Hans” Lötter, was executed by the British during the Anglo-Boer War as a Cape Rebel, a reminder that even within families, loyalties to empire and resistance could run in painful opposition.

And then I discovered that the beautiful and famous Khoi lady Eva Krotoa, pictured below, was my 9th great-grandmother.

Through Catharina’s mother, a Buys, I learned of my ninth great-grandmother being Eva Krotoa. To find her name among my ancestors was extraordinary. Krotoa lived at the Cape in the mid-1600s, when Dutch settlement was still young and precarious. Taken into Jan van Riebeeck’s household as a twelve-year-old girl, she became a go-between at a time when two worlds, the Dutch newcomers and the Khoi people, were meeting in both fragile negotiation and violent collision.

She spoke Dutch and Portuguese, interpreted, and brokered peace. In 1662 she was baptised, and in 1664 she married Pieter van Meerhof, a Danish surgeon in Dutch service. This was the first recorded Christian marriage of a Khoi woman, a union that stood at the fraught crossroads of faith, power, and cultural assimilation.

These unions, between German and Scottish settlers, a Khoi woman and a European surgeon, enslaved people from Asia and African families, were not just personal choices or accidents of love. In their own time they were layered with power, struggle, and the fragile attempts of human beings to carve lives for themselves within systems far larger than they could control. And yet, they left descendants. They left me.