Two young boys are torn from their families and swept into the informal slave trade of the mid-1800s. They forge a friendship that spans a lifetime and gives rise to this uniquely South African narrative, based on the ancestors of Botlhale Tema.
Released from the shackles of slavery and in search of a lost sister, Maja and Polomane befriend a Swiss missionary and set off to a remote farm in the Pilanesberg region, Welgeval, to establish a mission station and make a new life for themselves. As they raise their families and take in other people who have been dispossessed, we follow the births, deaths, adventures and joys of the farm’s inhabitants in their struggle to build a new community.
Set against the backdrop of slavery, colonialism, the Anglo-Boer War and the rise of apartheid, The People of Welgeval is a superbly crafted and dramatic historical novel. It is an epic story about friendship and family, landownership and learning, and about how people transform themselves from victims to victors.

Botlhale Tema
Botlhale Tema was born in Johannesburg but raised in small villages and townships in the Western Transvaal. She studied the sciences in South Africa and the United Kingdom. She has worked as a teacher, and was first secretary general of the South African National Commission for UNESCO. She is currently general manager responsible for international cooperation at the Department of Science and Technology.

The Welgeval community is one of the three groups of land claimants of portions of lands which were incorporated into Pilanesberg National Park, for who the Minister of Land Affairs, Lulama Xingwane and the Commission on Land Restitution recently held a Settlement Celebration at Moruleng Village on the 24th of February 2008.