She refused to grow anything that was too finicky and she definitely wouldn’t grow anything that wasn’t indigenous to South Africa. Roses were judged to be the flowers of the British, and since they were the people who’d put Ma’s ancestors in concentration camps, killing close to thirty thousand Afrikaners during the Second Boer War, she refused to touch them. Chrysanthemums, peonies, impatiens, begonias, and petunias were judged similarly to be too English.

Instead, she planted arum lilies and Strelitzia, which she called by its common name, bird-of-paradise. She was also partial to vygies in pinks and purples, and oranges and yellows, because they could grow in rocky areas and still flower spectacularly without much care.

“The garden needs some work,” I said. “Stompie hasn’t been able to manage it by himself, which is why it’s so overgrown. It’s on my list of things to work on.”

“So, you’re going to be staying?”

“Yes. I’m retiring here.”

He nodded, but when he didn’t say anything further, I rushed in to fill the silence. “Enough about me, tell me all about you.”

“There isn’t much to tell,” he said. “We still run the farm but we’ve branched out from agriculture into game farming.” His use of the word we could have referred to himself and a wife, or it could have encompassed his brothers, who all probably still had stakes in the family business.

What I really wanted to know was how life had treated him—if he’d gone on to marry, how many children they’d had, if he’d been happy—but he batted away my awkward attempts at steering the conversation in that direction. While he was guarded about his personal life, he chattered animatedly about the volunteer work he’d been doing with the Wits University scientists who’d been streaming into the Kromdraai, Gladysvale, and Sterkfontein areas over the past few years.

“At the Gladysvale caves, they’ve discovered the first hominid specimens, which are humanlike apes—our human ancestors, pretty much—that date back as far as 3.5 million years,” he said. “The fossil sites here are producing more hominin fossils than anywhere else in the world.”

His excitement took me back to our childhood—when I was seven and he was nine—and the time he’d crawled through a tiny opening into a limestone cave on their property. I remembered his feet disappearing into the black hole as he wriggled his way inside, and how his disembodied voice echoed to me from inside.

“Look,” Riaan had said as he pulled himself free of the yawning blackness a while later, holding up something yellowish that looked like an upside-down rhino horn, only smaller. “I think it’s a cat’s tooth.”