Fiela’s Child

This sentence begins the novel. It describes the disappearance of Lukas, the toddler-aged son of Elias and Barta van Rooyen who seems to die in the heavy fog, although his fate remains ambiguous for much of the novel. This passage also introduces the isolated settlement in the woods where the van Rooyens live, which is based on the real-life Knysna forest where author Dalene Matthee spent a lot of time, but which most characters simply call “the Forest.” Although the novel’s opening lines don’t establish this specifically, the story takes place in 19th-century South Africa, and so this passage helps to capture how the lack of modern technology makes the fog—and nature in general—particularly dangerous to humans.

Fog limits a person’s vision, and one of the recurring themes throughout the novel is ignorance and covering up the truth. The next chapter introduces the protagonist, Benjamin, whose whole life starts with a mystery: he doesn’t know the identity of his biological parents. This ignorance allows Elias to take advantage of the situation, claiming Benjamin is Lukas without actually caring if it’s true—Elias just wants someone to help with this work cutting wood beams. Perhaps it’s no accident that the fog at the beginning of the story is white, since it is predominantly white institutions like the office of the magistrate that perpetuate the lie that Benjamin is “Lukas,” rather than accepting the difficult truth that Lukas likely died long ago in the fog.

This quote comes from a conversation between Fiela and the one of the two census-takers from the government who take her by surprise when they appear on her property one day. The quote sets in motion the main conflict for the story—it’s the moment the census-takers realize that Fiela, a “Coloured” (multiracial) woman, is raising a white child. Although the census-takers mostly state their racist beliefs outright, it soon becomes clear that they are white supremacists who think it’s wrong for Benjamin to be with a “Coloured” family. This passage explores how they mask their racism with polite language, trying to get Fiela to agree with them that there is “something very strange going on here” without specifying exactly what they mean.

Fiela says that Benjamin is her “hand-child,” a term she repeats many times throughout the story. What she means is that he’s like a hand-fed lamb (as opposed to a breast-fed lamb, meaning Benjamin is not biological child). This suggests that Benjamin used to be very dependent on her. While Benjamin’s separation from Fiela is the result of racist government policies, it also represents a test, giving him a chance to prove his independence and show how after years of being Fiela’s hand-child he’s ready to go out into the world on his own.

The census-takers have just taken Benjamin away from his family in Long Kloof in order to place him with his supposed rightful family. When Benjamin first arrives at a courtroom in the magistrate’s building in the village of Knysna, mistakes the courtroom for a church. Benjamin hasn’t been many places in the world yet, and so he compares the courtroom to one of the few places he has been: church (although Fiela mostly kept him away from church to avoid having people find out that she had adopted a white child).

But the courtroom’s churchlike appearance establishes also the power of the law in South Africa at the time. Fiela later compares the way the magistrate took Benjamin away from her to an act of God, showing how influential the magistrate is, particularly to a “Coloured” (multiracial) woman like Fiela. Additionally, the man’s command that Benjamin should sit still on the bench illustrates the similarities between the etiquette and rituals practiced in churches and courtrooms. Perhaps the churchlike courtroom evokes how white men in South Africa like the census-takers and the magistrate lose track of Christian morality, “worshipping” their  concept of law and order in courtrooms instead of going to church.

Barta says this quote to her husband Elias, in reference to their son Lukas (who disappeared in the fog many years ago). After the authorities from the magistrate’s office inform Barta that Benjamin may in fact be Lukas, Barta asks her husband Elias if she will “still know [Lukas],” implying that she might not recognize or feel a connection to her son now that so many years have passed since she last saw him. And she worries that the authorities might not believe he’s her son if she doesn’t obviously appear to “know him,”

As later parts of the novel reveal, it doesn’t matter whether Barta recognizes “Lukas” because the process is rigged in favor of her taking Benjamin from the start. What this passage establishes, however, is that Barta herself wasn’t in on the scheme as the government authorities were. When she first came to visit the magistrate, she seemingly had good intentions and wanted to be certain that the child was really her Lukas before accepting him as her son. As later events of the story show, however, good intentions aren’t the same as just actions, and Barta’s unwillingness to challenge the status quo leads to her becoming complicit in the racist justice system that upends the lives of Benjamin and the whole Komoetie family.

This quote comes from a childhood memory that Benjamin recalls as he waits in the magistrate’s courtroom for his supposed real family to claim him as their own. In the memory, Benjamin and Dawid steal an ostrich egg from a wild ostrich and bring it back to Fiela. This passage is her response to their foolish feat. Although Benjamin and Dawid manage to steal the egg without any problems, an ostrich is strong enough to seriously injure or perhaps even kill a child, and so Fiela scolds them for taking that risk. While Fiela herself later raises ostriches on her farm, she does so as an adult in a controlled environment—she doesn’t test nature to the same extent that Benjamin and Dawid do.

Nevertheless, despite the fact that Fiela beats Benjamin and Dawid with a strap to discourage them from stealing from the ostriches again, she still uses the egg they stole to make a sugar-cake for Benjamin’s birthday. This shows that despite Fiela’s seeming anger, she still cares about Benjamin. Although Fiela may not approve of disregard for nature’s power that Benjamin and Dawid demonstrated to get the egg, she nevertheless doesn’t want to waste it, showing once again how she makes the most of what nature gives her.

Fiela tires of waiting for the census-takers to return Benjamin to his family in Long Kloof, and so she decides that to go to the village where the magistrate holds court to retrieve him herself. Her husband, Selling, as usual recommends a more cautious approach, echoing the disagreement they had earlier about when to introduce the two ostriches (in that argument, Fiela wanted to take the riskier approach and mate the ostriches sooner rather than later). Fiela, however, has less faith in the magistrate and the institutions he represents.

Fiela’s approach to getting Benjamin back reflects her own desire to take charge of her life at a moment when it feels like she’s losing control. It resembles the actions she takes in a later chapter (describing a flashback) where she travels long distances by herself to see Selling in prison early in their life together. But while Fiela has managed to get Selling out of prison and to shape her property at Wolwekraal under her careful watch, she soon finds out that in Benjamin’s case, her efforts are in vain; no matter how determined she may be to get her child back, the magistrate (and the justice system he represents) is a formidable opponent—and more difficult to control than nature itself.

This quote by Fiela illustrates a low point for her in the story as she announces to the rest of the family that Benjamin isn’t coming back to Long Kloof. After going to Knysna and not even getting to meet with the magistrate, Fiela realizes the scope of the bureaucracy she’s fighting against and how it could be dangerous to her or her family to meddle in the justice system’s affairs. And so, Fiela does what she thinks is easiest: she accepts that Benjamin belongs to the van Rooyens now.

It’s possible to interpret Fiela’s quote in at least two different ways. The first is that she’s saying Benjamin is literally Lukas and therefore belongs with the van The other interpretation, however, is that she’s saying Benjamin’s true identity is irrelevant; the magistrate has decreed that Benjamin belongs to Barta, and so in a legal sense—the only sense that really matters—Benjamin is Lukas.

This passage features a pivotal moment in the story, in which Elias van Rooyen tries to use force to get Benjamin to accept his new identity as “Lukas.” As the quote reveals, Benjamin struggles not to say his old name and doesn’t even know what his last name is supposed to be after he becomes “Lukas.”

What make Elias such a frightening character is that he himself doesn’t even seem to believe that Benjamin is really Lukas. Like Barta, and perhaps even Fiela, Elias has simply decided to treat Benjamin as Lukas because it’s the most convenient option. But whereas Barta and Fiela are trying to avoid angering the magistrate by questioning his judgment, Elias’s motivations for wanting Benjamin to be Lukas are more selfish—he mostly just wants another body in the house to help with his woodcutting business (and make him more money). While this passage seemingly illustrates the control that Elias exerts over Benjamin, later passages will show that Elias’s attempts to control people by force may work in the short term but ultimately drive people away from him in the long term.

Fiela returns to Knysna and demands to speak with the magistrate in person, not realizing that the man she’s speaking to by the door is in fact the magistrate. Although the magistrate speaks few words directly in the novel, his presence resonates throughout the story, and the few words he does speak help to convey his resolute, self-righteous attitude.

When the magistrate says that Benjamin is back with his “rightful” parents, he seems at first to be saying that Benjamin is really Lukas and therefore belongs with the van Rooyens.  As he keeps talking, however, the magistrate reveals that no evidence Fiela presents to him would ever convince him that Benjamin is her son, since he could always just claim that she’s lying. This reveals what the magistrate really means by “rightful”—at the end of the day, he simply doesn’t believe that a “Coloured” (multiracial) woman like Fiela should be allowed to raise a white child, and he is willing to twist the facts however he needs to in order to support this racist belief.

This quote describes yet another one of Elias’s schemes to kill an elephant and sell its tusks. After his earlier trap with a tree turned out to be unsuccessful and Elias nearly gets trampled, he decides that he simply needs to try a different trap, showing that he learned nothing from his first experience.

The timing of Elias’s realization—on a Sunday—may be significant, because Sunday is typically the day that Christians attend church services. Unlike Fiela, who puts her faith in the Christian God to sustain her through difficult moments, Elias instead tries—often in vain—to exercise control over every aspect of his life, often turning to his money-making schemes to keep himself going. While Fiela often faces challenges and sometimes feels God has abandoned her, her willingness to put her fate in God’s hands and let nature run its course leads her to fare much better than Elias, whose schemes consistently fail him, often leaving him worse off than he started and exposing his deluded belief that he can conquer the natural world and repurpose it to suit his needs. His greed gives him an inflated sense of power, instilling in him the deluded belief that he is completely in control of his life.

After promising to do everything in his power to return Benjamin to Fiela (the government ordered Benjamin to go Knysna to ensure that he would live with a white family) Petrus ultimately returns to Fiela and Selling alone, having failed to convince the magistrate to release Benjamin. The passage illustrates how even a relatively wealthy and influential white man like Petrus doesn’t have the ability to challenge the magistrate. It also reaffirms that Fiela’s skepticism toward Petrus is perhaps more justified than Selling’s admiration for him. The novel leaves it unclear if Petrus truly fought for Benjamin—whether he really did everything in his power to try to challenge the magistrate’s ruling, or whether he simply accepted magistrate’s ruling because his own status as a wealthy white man made him quick to trust the magistrate’s word.

The sugar-cake that Fiela left on the kitchen table is Benjamin’s favorite and recalls the one she made for him many years ago on his birthday. Again, the novel leaves some ambiguity, and it isn’t clear whether Fiela truly expected that Benjamin would return to her—or whether she was just trying to be optimistic while ultimately fearing the worst.

This quote describes Fiela’s thoughts at the funeral for Dawid. Dawid’s death comes as a shock with no warning, and Fiela compares the unfairness of this event with the earlier injustice she suffered of having to give up Benjamin on the magistrate’s orders.

Continuing the motif of the magistrate’s courtroom being like a church, this passage evokes how the magistrate sometimes acts as if he himself is God. Fiela’s bitterness at the magistrate’s decision reflects her frustration at her feelings of powerlessness, brought on by the racist legal system that the magistrate represents. Fiela ponders not only why a just God would take Dawid away from her so early and suddenly but also why a just God would allow the magistrate to impose so much authority on her. While this passage depicts a dark moment where Fiela seems to doubt her faith, she ultimately refuses to lose hope, choosing instead to see the hardship she endures as a test of faith that she needs to pass.

This sentence begins the novel. It describes the disappearance of Lukas, the toddler-aged son of Elias and Barta van Rooyen who seems to die in the heavy fog, although his fate remains ambiguous for much of the novel. This passage also introduces the isolated settlement in the woods where the van Rooyens live, which is based on the real-life Knysna forest where author Dalene Matthee spent a lot of time, but which most characters simply call “the Forest.” Although the novel’s opening lines don’t establish this specifically, the story takes place in 19th-century South Africa, and so this passage helps to capture how the lack of modern technology makes the fog—and nature in general—particularly dangerous to humans.

Fog limits a person’s vision, and one of the recurring themes throughout the novel is ignorance and covering up the truth. The next chapter introduces the protagonist, Benjamin, whose whole life starts with a mystery: he doesn’t know the identity of his biological parents. This ignorance allows Elias to take advantage of the situation, claiming Benjamin is Lukas without actually caring if it’s true—Elias just wants someone to help with this work cutting wood beams. Perhaps it’s no accident that the fog at the beginning of the story is white, since it is predominantly white institutions like the office of the magistrate that perpetuate the lie that Benjamin is “Lukas,” rather than accepting the difficult truth that Lukas likely died long ago in the fog.

This quote comes from a conversation between Fiela and the one of the two census-takers from the government who take her by surprise when they appear on her property one day. The quote sets in motion the main conflict for the story—it’s the moment the census-takers realize that Fiela, a “Coloured” (multiracial) woman, is raising a white child. Although the census-takers mostly state their racist beliefs outright, it soon becomes clear that they are white supremacists who think it’s wrong for Benjamin to be with a “Coloured” family. This passage explores how they mask their racism with polite language, trying to get Fiela to agree with them that there is “something very strange going on here” without specifying exactly what they mean.

Fiela says that Benjamin is her “hand-child,” a term she repeats many times throughout the story. What she means is that he’s like a hand-fed lamb (as opposed to a breast-fed lamb, meaning Benjamin is not biological child). This suggests that Benjamin used to be very dependent on her. While Benjamin’s separation from Fiela is the result of racist government policies, it also represents a test, giving him a chance to prove his independence and show how after years of being Fiela’s hand-child he’s ready to go out into the world on his own.

The census-takers have just taken Benjamin away from his family in Long Kloof in order to place him with his supposed rightful family. When Benjamin first arrives at a courtroom in the magistrate’s building in the village of Knysna, mistakes the courtroom for a church. Benjamin hasn’t been many places in the world yet, and so he compares the courtroom to one of the few places he has been: church (although Fiela mostly kept him away from church to avoid having people find out that she had adopted a white child).

But the courtroom’s churchlike appearance establishes also the power of the law in South Africa at the time. Fiela later compares the way the magistrate took Benjamin away from her to an act of God, showing how influential the magistrate is, particularly to a “Coloured” (multiracial) woman like Fiela. Additionally, the man’s command that Benjamin should sit still on the bench illustrates the similarities between the etiquette and rituals practiced in churches and courtrooms. Perhaps the churchlike courtroom evokes how white men in South Africa like the census-takers and the magistrate lose track of Christian morality, “worshipping” their  concept of law and order in courtrooms instead of going to church.

Barta says this quote to her husband Elias, in reference to their son Lukas (who disappeared in the fog many years ago). After the authorities from the magistrate’s office inform Barta that Benjamin may in fact be Lukas, Barta asks her husband Elias if she will “still know [Lukas],” implying that she might not recognize or feel a connection to her son now that so many years have passed since she last saw him. And she worries that the authorities might not believe he’s her son if she doesn’t obviously appear to “know him,”

As later parts of the novel reveal, it doesn’t matter whether Barta recognizes “Lukas” because the process is rigged in favor of her taking Benjamin from the start. What this passage establishes, however, is that Barta herself wasn’t in on the scheme as the government authorities were. When she first came to visit the magistrate, she seemingly had good intentions and wanted to be certain that the child was really her Lukas before accepting him as her son. As later events of the story show, however, good intentions aren’t the same as just actions, and Barta’s unwillingness to challenge the status quo leads to her becoming complicit in the racist justice system that upends the lives of Benjamin and the whole Komoetie family.

This quote comes from a childhood memory that Benjamin recalls as he waits in the magistrate’s courtroom for his supposed real family to claim him as their own. In the memory, Benjamin and Dawid steal an ostrich egg from a wild ostrich and bring it back to Fiela. This passage is her response to their foolish feat. Although Benjamin and Dawid manage to steal the egg without any problems, an ostrich is strong enough to seriously injure or perhaps even kill a child, and so Fiela scolds them for taking that risk. While Fiela herself later raises ostriches on her farm, she does so as an adult in a controlled environment—she doesn’t test nature to the same extent that Benjamin and Dawid do.

Nevertheless, despite the fact that Fiela beats Benjamin and Dawid with a strap to discourage them from stealing from the ostriches again, she still uses the egg they stole to make a sugar-cake for Benjamin’s birthday. This shows that despite Fiela’s seeming anger, she still cares about Benjamin. Although Fiela may not approve of disregard for nature’s power that Benjamin and Dawid demonstrated to get the egg, she nevertheless doesn’t want to waste it, showing once again how she makes the most of what nature gives her.

Fiela tires of waiting for the census-takers to return Benjamin to his family in Long Kloof, and so she decides that to go to the village where the magistrate holds court to retrieve him herself. Her husband, Selling, as usual recommends a more cautious approach, echoing the disagreement they had earlier about when to introduce the two ostriches (in that argument, Fiela wanted to take the riskier approach and mate the ostriches sooner rather than later). Fiela, however, has less faith in the magistrate and the institutions he represents.

Fiela’s approach to getting Benjamin back reflects her own desire to take charge of her life at a moment when it feels like she’s losing control. It resembles the actions she takes in a later chapter (describing a flashback) where she travels long distances by herself to see Selling in prison early in their life together. But while Fiela has managed to get Selling out of prison and to shape her property at Wolwekraal under her careful watch, she soon finds out that in Benjamin’s case, her efforts are in vain; no matter how determined she may be to get her child back, the magistrate (and the justice system he represents) is a formidable opponent—and more difficult to control than nature itself.

This quote by Fiela illustrates a low point for her in the story as she announces to the rest of the family that Benjamin isn’t coming back to Long Kloof. After going to Knysna and not even getting to meet with the magistrate, Fiela realizes the scope of the bureaucracy she’s fighting against and how it could be dangerous to her or her family to meddle in the justice system’s affairs. And so, Fiela does what she thinks is easiest: she accepts that Benjamin belongs to the van Rooyens now.

It’s possible to interpret Fiela’s quote in at least two different ways. The first is that she’s saying Benjamin is literally Lukas and therefore belongs with the van The other interpretation, however, is that she’s saying Benjamin’s true identity is irrelevant; the magistrate has decreed that Benjamin belongs to Barta, and so in a legal sense—the only sense that really matters—Benjamin is Lukas.

This passage features a pivotal moment in the story, in which Elias van Rooyen tries to use force to get Benjamin to accept his new identity as “Lukas.” As the quote reveals, Benjamin struggles not to say his old name and doesn’t even know what his last name is supposed to be after he becomes “Lukas.”

What make Elias such a frightening character is that he himself doesn’t even seem to believe that Benjamin is really Lukas. Like Barta, and perhaps even Fiela, Elias has simply decided to treat Benjamin as Lukas because it’s the most convenient option. But whereas Barta and Fiela are trying to avoid angering the magistrate by questioning his judgment, Elias’s motivations for wanting Benjamin to be Lukas are more selfish—he mostly just wants another body in the house to help with his woodcutting business (and make him more money). While this passage seemingly illustrates the control that Elias exerts over Benjamin, later passages will show that Elias’s attempts to control people by force may work in the short term but ultimately drive people away from him in the long term.

Fiela returns to Knysna and demands to speak with the magistrate in person, not realizing that the man she’s speaking to by the door is in fact the magistrate. Although the magistrate speaks few words directly in the novel, his presence resonates throughout the story, and the few words he does speak help to convey his resolute, self-righteous attitude.

When the magistrate says that Benjamin is back with his “rightful” parents, he seems at first to be saying that Benjamin is really Lukas and therefore belongs with the van Rooyens.  As he keeps talking, however, the magistrate reveals that no evidence Fiela presents to him would ever convince him that Benjamin is her son, since he could always just claim that she’s lying. This reveals what the magistrate really means by “rightful”—at the end of the day, he simply doesn’t believe that a “Coloured” (multiracial) woman like Fiela should be allowed to raise a white child, and he is willing to twist the facts however he needs to in order to support this racist belief.

This quote describes yet another one of Elias’s schemes to kill an elephant and sell its tusks. After his earlier trap with a tree turned out to be unsuccessful and Elias nearly gets trampled, he decides that he simply needs to try a different trap, showing that he learned nothing from his first experience.

The timing of Elias’s realization—on a Sunday—may be significant, because Sunday is typically the day that Christians attend church services. Unlike Fiela, who puts her faith in the Christian God to sustain her through difficult moments, Elias instead tries—often in vain—to exercise control over every aspect of his life, often turning to his money-making schemes to keep himself going. While Fiela often faces challenges and sometimes feels God has abandoned her, her willingness to put her fate in God’s hands and let nature run its course leads her to fare much better than Elias, whose schemes consistently fail him, often leaving him worse off than he started and exposing his deluded belief that he can conquer the natural world and repurpose it to suit his needs. His greed gives him an inflated sense of power, instilling in him the deluded belief that he is completely in control of his life.

After promising to do everything in his power to return Benjamin to Fiela (the government ordered Benjamin to go Knysna to ensure that he would live with a white family) Petrus ultimately returns to Fiela and Selling alone, having failed to convince the magistrate to release Benjamin. The passage illustrates how even a relatively wealthy and influential white man like Petrus doesn’t have the ability to challenge the magistrate. It also reaffirms that Fiela’s skepticism toward Petrus is perhaps more justified than Selling’s admiration for him. The novel leaves it unclear if Petrus truly fought for Benjamin—whether he really did everything in his power to try to challenge the magistrate’s ruling, or whether he simply accepted magistrate’s ruling because his own status as a wealthy white man made him quick to trust the magistrate’s word.

The sugar-cake that Fiela left on the kitchen table is Benjamin’s favorite and recalls the one she made for him many years ago on his birthday. Again, the novel leaves some ambiguity, and it isn’t clear whether Fiela truly expected that Benjamin would return to her—or whether she was just trying to be optimistic while ultimately fearing the worst.

This quote describes Fiela’s thoughts at the funeral for Dawid. Dawid’s death comes as a shock with no warning, and Fiela compares the unfairness of this event with the earlier injustice she suffered of having to give up Benjamin on the magistrate’s orders.

Continuing the motif of the magistrate’s courtroom being like a church, this passage evokes how the magistrate sometimes acts as if he himself is God. Fiela’s bitterness at the magistrate’s decision reflects her frustration at her feelings of powerlessness, brought on by the racist legal system that the magistrate represents. Fiela ponders not only why a just God would take Dawid away from her so early and suddenly but also why a just God would allow the magistrate to impose so much authority on her. While this passage depicts a dark moment where Fiela seems to doubt her faith, she ultimately refuses to lose hope, choosing instead to see the hardship she endures as a test of faith that she needs to pass.