Philida, by André Brink

The location of Philida is a Cape farm which used to be named Zandvliet and is now the celebrated vineyard Solms Delta, owned jointly by Richard Astor and the eminent neuropsychologist Mark Solms. It was Solms who brought to André Brink the story on which the veteran South African novelist bases his 21st work of fiction, which has been longlisted for the Man Booker prize.

The novel’s eponymous heroine is based on a real-life slave who in 1824-32 worked as a knitting-girl at Zandvliet, which then belonged to collateral ancestors of the author. Brink has delved in Solms Delta’s private museum, conned slave registration rolls and mortgage bonds, and perused tomes about child bondage, prison discipline and water resources, to create his story of miscegenation and sexual oppression.  

François Brink, the sensitive, browbeaten son of the owner of Zandvliet and its slaves, loves Philida, by whom he has fathered four children, but is ordered by his brutish father to marry a white woman from Cape Town whose money may bolster the Brinks’ failing fortunes.