Donkerhoek Chronicles

This novel tells the story of the Vorsters and their heriditary South African farm spanning more than two decades  of the transition from apartheid to democracy. Inherently good people whose views and prejudices  inevitably lead to conflict and finally ruin.

The escarpment of Mpumalanga with its views of hazy faraway bluish mountains, vleis of waving grass, sighing pines, forest fires and stock theft is the backdrop of false land claims and a struggle for possession that lead to racial strife and murder.

The patriarg Jaap Vorster cannot come to terms with the blemish on his family caused by the inter racial marriage of his son Pieter to Johanna Dlamini, daughter of his black foreman. Lured by a fire in his plantation Jaap is murdered by the son of the foreman, a trained cadre. Pieter takes over the forestry enterprise and is wrongly convicted of the murder of his wife's other brother. A fugitive from justice, he attempts to convince his wife of his innocence.

Unabating on his spoor remains Inspector Khumalo who seeks to erase the disgrace caused by Pieter's escape from custudy and who eventually succeeds to confront him in the Appeal Court in Bloemfontein. The sessions of the Circuit Court in Piet Retief and the Appeal Court in Bloemfontein  are described  with intimate knowledge and the warring lawyers sketched with deprecating humour.

This action-filled novel of suspense has as sombre background music the multi-faceted  insoluble South African land question.