I found out recently why one of the arguably most significant events in South African history was not mentioned in my history classes in the first two years of high school.

At Pretoria Girls’ High in the early eighties, as in all white schools under Christian National Education, we sat through interminable descriptions of the Great Trek and the endless Cape Frontier Wars. We learnt about the Boers’ farming tools, dress and way of life in excruciating detail – does anyone else remember the black-and-white photo of a sheep’s jawbone, apparently used as a toy by Boer children, in the history textbook of the time? – but had no sense of who they were as people, or the fact that they fought a courageous three-year war against incredible odds.

I found the reason for this shocking omission in the first Note to Beverly Roos-Muller’s book Bullet in the Heart (Jonathan Ball, 2023): apparently it was felt that including the Boer War in the curriculum would be too divisive. I assume that’s because it was thought it would create antagonism between English and Afrikaans South Africans.

I wonder how much division was sown by this ridiculous decision to censor history. When we don’t know people, when we don’t know their stories, it’s easy to cast them as the enemy.

How much better it would have been, I think, if I had grown up with the insight I now have from reading Roos-Muller’s extraordinary book, which tells the true story (pieced together from their diaries and letters) of four Free State brothers who rode off to fight in the Boer War in 1899. By the end of the book, I had a startling sense of knowing these long-dead men, their fears, their preoccupations, their frustrations and their grief, and so of understanding their motivation in resisting the British, the devastating price they and their families paid, and the long-term consequences for South Africa.

Only three of the of the brothers returned, and each of those three spent a couple of years in a POW camp, two in Ceylon and one in Bermuda. At the end of the book, I found myself weeping quietly through two pages that described the men’s return from exile, when they came back to decimated families and annihilated farms, and for the first time I understood the context in which poet Jan Celliers wrote ‘Dis Al’. It’s given me an insight into our history that I wish I’d had years ago.

Having grown up the child of English-speaking parents, specifically a British father, I was automatically socialised into their way of seeing the world: the English were the ‘goodies’, and so the Boers had to be the ‘baddies’. I’m sorry to say that I didn’t know that the Boer War was motivated by British greed and fought with such inhumanity, with the war being waged as much against the Boer’s civilian wives and families as against the armed men themselves.

Those unexamined prejudices and stereotypes lived on in me well into adulthood – in fact until recently, when this magnificent and fascinating book gave me the chance to re-examine them and see the world differently.