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The book is no less than a history of a Tswana tribe, the Batloung, that stretches from the terrible and bloody Matabele wars of the 1820s up to the late 1950s - but I did not know that when I first held the book in my hands. All I knew was that my grandfather was a missionary at Putfontein, where my mother was born, and that this little volume might tell me something about him that I could pass on to his great-grandchildren. Extracting that information from the book was not easy. My German is rusty, and the font in which the book was printed is the old German Gothic script, where the letter s looks like an f, and so on. Furthermore, the font was tiny. The book was not an easy read! I gave up trying, and put it down... but it stayed on my mind.
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