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This is a fascinating first person autobiographical account of one womans experiences and life in Southern Africa between the early 1880s and her final years in Johannesburg in the 1960s. Bertha Goudvis enjoyed a long and arduous life (1876 1966) during years of turbulent change and several wars. She was a first hand observer of the colonial world and lives on to comment on city life in modern Johannesburg.
This is a particularly important book in giving sketches of Johannesburg in 1893 and in 1911 but there is much more besides.
Born in England in 1876, Bertha came with her family to South Africa at the age of five. She spent her youth trekking by ox-wagon across the country from one small mining town to another. Living among both English and Afrikaans communities but belonging to neither because she was Jewish, Bertha was in a unique position to record early colonial attitudes. She was in touch with many of the people who feature in South Africa's history books, including Rhodes, Lobengula, Kruger and Louis Botha.
Bertha enjoyed a long career of journalism and creative writing, as a correspondent for The Natal Mercury, a journalist for Johannesburg's The Star and having published a bestselling novel, Litte Eden in 1949 and her short stories The Mistress of Mooiplaas in 1956. Bertha also wrote the libretto for a musical, Sunshine Land, and several plays.
This is the story of a revolutionary-for-her-times writer who eloquently brings to life a pre-modern South African landscape etched with the discovery of gold
