In the mid 1980s, South Africa was in turmoil. Apartheid was under siege by black activists in South Africa and condemned by the international community. Both white and black South Africans were forced to confront change while living under racial segregation imposed by the Nationalist Party, a political entity dominated by Afrikaners, the descendents of 17th century Dutch settlers. But this is not a story of the large scale implications of the struggle to end racial inequality in South Africa. It is a story of two families, a white Afrikaner farm family and a black Venda family that had worked together for more than a century. In 1985, neither family knew what the future held, but both families knew they were dependent on the success of the farm Sterkfontein. Stoffel and Sarie Botha, the owners of Sterkfontein, were trying to maintain traditional Boer values while hoping for good lives for their children. Thomas and Bethany Tshivashe had endured a lifetime of white domination, but they had good lives and feared the disruptions change would bring. They hoped for better lives for their children but were afraid of the violence that change might bring. Stoffel Botha's youngest son, Karl, tried life as a soldier and a professional hunter before returning to Sterkfontein and meeting Jennifer Smythe, the daughter of a Rhodesian colonial forced to emigrate when Robert Mugabe overthrew white rule. Thomas Tshivashe's youngest son, Vincent, tested many routes to find a life he could live with dignity, including working in the gold mines of the Rand and joining a revolutionary band in an armed attack on whites in South Africa, before returning to Sterkfontein and Lutendo Mutele, a young Venda woman trying to meld her tribal traditions with black liberation.