Wine, Women and Good Hope

While setting up a refreshment station in the Cape of Good Hope, Jan van Riebeeck tried his hand at making wine and brewing beer. This introduction, partnered with its trusty bedfellow, sex, set the tone for what would become a hedonistic metropolis. Wine, Women and Good Hope is a romp through this more salacious history of the Cape, looking at the antics of certain missionaries from the London Missionary Society, whose wandering eyes and love of the flesh took precedence over their moral duty to the church, and Cecil John Rhodes, whose excessive indulgence in alcohol contributed to his own demise and no doubt influenced the disgraceful behaviour of some of his contemporaries. Using her knowledge as a genealogist, June McKinnon traces the lineages of many well-known family trees to overturn the notion that those who lived in the past were nobler or had more sense than their modern descendants. Encompassing tales that are both humorous and tragic in their revelations of past misdeeds, this book will give you access to the little-known history of the Cape of Good Hope, and leave you asking the question, ‘What were my ancestors really up to?’