African Relations: A Story Set in the Eastern Cape of South Africa

Anyone who knows South Africa or has family who spent the Second World War in the region of the Eastern Cape will be moved by this book. The story tells of the growing up of a young girl in a volatile land, where racial conflict was often overridden by the good nature and humanity of ordinary people. Kathleen, born into a bilingual family in 1926 and speaking both English and Afrikaans fluently, eventually meets and marries an Raf Airman, Grahame. She follows him to war-torn England, forever leaving behind her family and all that she knows in South Africa. The book salutes a generation that faced adversity not expected in our modern age and came out toughened and still laughing. A chapter on the life of Nelson Mandela, born in the same region, highlights the irony of the cultural differences of that time.

When Marilyn (Mari) Bennett, née Young, was nineteen, she had a hankering to go to the region of South Africa, where her mother had been born and where she had lived until she left her native country. Years earlier, and at about the same age that Marilyn had been when she went to South Africa, her mother, Kath Young, née Petzer, was making arrangements to leave home for England. Their reasons for making their long journeys by sea, Kath in the 1940s and Marilyn in the 1960s, were different. Marilyn wanted to see her mother's country and to meet her unknown South African relatives. Kath was preparing to rejoin the English husband she had married at the age of sixteen in Grahamstown Cathedral and to meet his parents, his brother, and his three sisters living in Surrey, England. Now in her sixties, Marilyn felt that an actual story of the marriage of two different cultures, as represented by her father and her mother, would be one that would be of interest not only to the extended families of the central characters but also to anyone who may have, at the end of World War II, had similar experiences as servicemen who returned home from their wartime destinations. Marilyn set about putting together her own memories of her parents and their dissimilar backgrounds, supported by contributions from family members, and has managed to create a fascinating and very readable account of their coming together. -Sibyl Bartlett