Jacoba Anna Hendrika Sloet was my great-great-grandmother. My father met her as a boy. She sounded like a grouchy, imposing old woman, probably racist. He says she thumped her walking stick on the wooden floorboards when she wanted the maid to come, and was scornful of “kitchen Dutch” (Afrikaans), even though, as it turned out, her husband and her mother were Boers.
This was in Durban, maybe No. 46 Alpha Road in Umbilo, which was still standing when I went to try find it with my two young sons. It was one of the only remaining houses amidst new warehouses that had sprung up in a semi-industrial area close to the harbour that is now quite run down. I remember it as a simple, maybe lower-middle class suburban house from the early 1900s, with yellowwood floors, a fireplace and a small, muddy backyard. I think it was being used for office space. A woman with bleached hair and bright leggings let us in to look around. She seemed bemused by our interest.
“There was a big avocado tree we used to climb outside,” my dad said. “Was it there?” I wasn’t sure. She lived in a few places in Umbilo, sometimes I think renting.
She was a Dutch baroness. My gran always told me that, and I thought it was one of those stories people tell about their families that are passed on down the generations with no real evidence of being true.
But after spending the past 15 or...
