Fron·tier
noun
1. The edge of the known world; the threshold where certainty ends and the wild begins.
2. A shifting boundary not just of land, but of self – where what we are meets what we might become.
3. A liminal place: lawless, raw, and unfinished – a mirror of both fear and freedom.
I love these definitions of frontier – so vast, so wild, so full of yearning. They speak to something elemental in us: the drive to go beyond, to test limits, to shape new lives in unknown spaces. And yet, somewhere along the way, the word frontier stopped meaning possibility. It started meaning conquest. Exploitation. Genocide. Segregation. Why? Maybe because a frontier is never truly empty. There’s always someone already living there, already calling it home. And when discovery meets denial, what follows is often rationalized violence – made noble by the myths we tell ourselves.
The American frontier gave us cowboys and manifest destiny. The Australian frontier gave us bushrangers and outback dreams. The South African frontier gave us Boer treks and battlefields. Each is wrapped in national legend. Each hides something bloodied beneath the surface.
So perhaps the frontier didn’t change – we did. Or maybe we simply started seeing it more clearly: not just as the boundary of the world, but the boundary of our morality.
I grew up in South Africa in the 1980s and 1990s – right through the collapse of Apartheid and the shift to democracy. If you know your history, you know just how massive that transition was. I have since lived in ten countries, each for a meaningful stretch of time. But most of my life has been split between South Africa and the UK – now, in equal measure. I share this because I feel like I can comment from a South African and world perspective.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s this: people are more alike than we think. Everywhere I’ve been, people are searching – for meaning, for identity, for belonging. Most of us lack real answers. Often, what separates us isn’t race, or even geography – it’s culture. What we were taught to value growing up. That can be the real divide.
One thing is clear: ever since Homo sapiens emerged from Africa, we have moved. We’ve migrated. Crossed frontiers. Fought. Protected. Claimed. Reclaimed. This is our nature. And it was never peaceful. One group moved in and claimed. Then another did the same. If this happened seventy thousand years ago, why is it so contentious when it happened four hundred years ago?
What inspired this work is a simple yet unsettling question: why is South Africa so often cast as the world’s villain? What led to that global perception? Why is South Africa treated as an outlier – when, in truth, nearly identical histories unfolded in places like the United States and Australia?
Of course, the word most people reach for is Apartheid. That’s the answer, right? But I ask you to pause. Let’s dig deeper. Yes, South Africa’s system of racial segregation and oppression was horrific. This book does not seek to minimize that, nor excuse it. Instead, it asks: why do some histories remain central, while others are simplified or forgotten? For example, did you know that South Africa had a much smaller Indigenous population at European contact than Australia or the U.S? Yet despite this, its modern society remains deeply layered. In Australia, Indigenous people once vastly outnumbered settlers; today they are just 3.8% of the population. South Africa meanwhile developed with far greater racial and cultural mixing from the start.
Before South Africa was a nation, and long before Apartheid, it was a colony – just like America, just like Australia. The same forces were at play: conquest, dispossession, assimilation, survival. Yet something sets South Africa apart – and perhaps it’s this: it never became a place with one dominant cultural narrative. It remained mixed. Messy. More layered. More uncomfortable. Is diversity the problem? Is colonisation? Is slavery? It can’t be just that – slavery was everywhere, and in some places, still thrives. So again, we’re left with complexity.
This book doesn’t pretend to have all the answers. But it dares to ask uncomfortable questions – and refuses to look away from the contradictions that define us. Because maybe, just maybe, it’s time we stop pretending things are simple.
The Blood Saga is a work of historical fiction inspired by real events, people, and forces that shaped frontiers and British colonies like South Africa, then known as the Cape Colony, during the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
While the characters of Ewan McLachlan, the Dreyers, Koos, Tomas, Elsie van Wyk, and many others are fictional, they represent the composite lives of frontier rebels, colonial enforcers, ordinary settlers, and the many indigenous inhabitants caught in cycles of conquest, rebellion, and survival.
The Cape Colony during this period was a crucible of empires. The British and Dutch contested its strategic value, but the real cost was borne by the indigenous Khoi, Nama, and Xhosa peoples – and by settler families both empowered and imperilled by imperial agendas.
This saga reflects the uneasy truths of occupation, rebellion, and memory. It does not seek heroes or villains, but rather examines the choices made in lands soaked with both hope and blood. By fictionalizing history, it aims to illuminate its echoes in our present.
In telling this tale, I have chosen to use the English of our own day rather than the speech of the 18th and 19th centuries. This decision was made to keep the reader immersed in the story and not distracted by unfamiliar words and phrases. While conversations in that time might often resemble conversations of our own, many words have either been lost to history or have shifted in meaning. Our Highlander hero, Ewan, and the British colonialists would have likely spoken in a tongue closer to that of old Scots and English – a language that, at times, formed a maze of curious words and phrases that might baffle the modern reader. The Dutch traders and settlers, on the other hand, were developing a new language shaped by contact with French, German, Portuguese, Khoi, Xhosa, and others – a language that would eventually become Afrikaans.
Finally, this is a tale whose inspiration has been drawn from fact. Where possible, timelines and facts remain intact; however, these have often been adjusted, and dialogue imagined, to create dramatic effect.
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