The Life and Times of Esther Cronje

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This fictional memoir takes us on the personal trek of Esther Cronjé, an Afrikaner woman, across a panorama of times and places. Sometimes cruel, sometimes warm-hearted, occasionally whimsical, this account carries us from the savagery of the Anglo-Boer War to the isolation of a mining camp without running water in a place called Lohatla, somewhere in the wilderness of the southern Kalahari. The chronicle opens on 12 April 1901 when the pregnant Esther and her little boy, Piet, are forcibly removed by British forces from their farm in the Warrenton District of the Northern Cape and taken to Warrenton Station for transportation to the Kimberley Camp, one of several dozen such concentration camps operated in South Africa by the British invaders. Along Esther's journey, the reader will discover different aspects of her resilient personality: her questioning of Christianity, her dislike of the British Empire, her disdain for men who desert their families to go to war and, above all, her love and open-handedness towards all who enter her life.