Starlight on the Veld
Recognising Blues
Chosen by
Craig Mackenzie and Stephen Gray
HUMAN & ROUSSEAU
PREFACE
THIS VOLUME HAS THE SIMPLE AIM of gathering the best of Bosman’s stories – the most striking, the most moving, the most memorable. He wrote some 170 in all – around sixty Oom Schalks and eighty Voorkamer pieces, with another thirty miscellaneous stories written alongside these two main sequences. So when it came to gathering his best, there was never any question of making weight; on the contrary, the hardest part was deciding what to leave out.
An essay by Bosman (written in late 1944) on a return visit to the Marico heads the sequence, and this provides the reader with all of the contextual detail required to place the stories that follow. Unsurprisingly, the rest of the selection is dominated by Oom Schalk Lourens stories – fourteen in all, arranged in order of publication from 1930 to 1951 (which is also the span of Bosman’s writing life). Four ‘Voorkamer’ pieces follow, and the volume closes with a further four stories in which Bosman uses an authorial narrator.
This roughly chronological sequence reveals that Bosman’s story oeuvre is not characterised by tentative, rough beginnings, proceeding steadily towards ever-greater sophistication and technical accomplishment. While we may discern a degree of over-writing in “The Rooinek”, for example, it is true to say that Bosman found his voice (or, perhaps more accurately, found a narrative voice in Oom Schalk) from the outset. Among his earliest ventures into fiction are “Makapan’s Caves” (1930) and “The Rooinek” (1931) – both of them fine, strong stories with compelling narrative lines.
There is a long and venerable literary ancestry to the kind of ‘oral-style’ story Bosman adopted, stretching from Boccaccio and Chaucer in the fourteenth century to Irving, Twain, Harte and other American humorists more recently. South Africa itself has a tradition of yarn-spinning that can be traced back as far as the mid-nineteenth century and that takes in writers like W. C. Scully, J. Percy FitzPatrick, Perceval Gibbon and Pauline Smith. Through Oom Schalk, Bosman placed himself indisputably at the pinnacle of this style of storytelling in South Africa.
Although he continued to write Oom Schalks throughout his life, Bosman turned in his later years to the more technically challenging genre of the multi-voiced ‘conversation’ piece represented by his Voorkamer sequence. Bosman wrote these pieces in serialised form for the Johannesburg news weekly, The Forum. The series appeared under the rubric ‘In die Voorkamer’, and was clearly intended to provide a comic counterpoint to the more sober ‘forum’ of political commentary and opinion-pieces that constituted the staple of this liberal-left periodical. Bosman’s stamina was remarkable: he wrote all of the eighty Voorkamer pieces in what would be the last eighteen months of his life, never once missing his weekly deadline.
The pieces take the form of conversations among the Marico farmers who gather in Jurie Steyn’s voorkamer, which doubles as the local post office. Maintaining momentum and narrative thrust in the resultant mêlée of competing voices was more demanding than stage-managing Oom Schalk, and Bosman clearly relished the challenge. Although they are best read in sequence, where the unfolding larger story emerges from amidst the detail of each individual episode, some of the Voorkamer pieces can also be read to advantage as independent items. I have selected four such here.
Where Oom Schalk is situated in the early decades of the twentieth century (with recollections stretching as far back as the 1850s), the farmers who foregather in Jurie Steyn’s voorkamer are contemporaneous with the date of publication of the stories (i.e. the 1950s), and, indeed, they frequently comment on current events – the Korean War, the escalation of the Cold War, and the development of modern technology. The most striking example in this respect is “Birth Certificate”, which, notwithstanding its extremely funny moments, comments obliquely but scathingly on the passage of the infamous Population Registration Act through Parliament at the time.
The third category of Bosman’s story oeuvre is represented by the last four stories in this selection. In these Bosman speaks in his own voice as a writer, and reflects humorously and self-ironically on the art of storytelling. One of the fascinations of Bosman’s writing is his skill at smuggling artful, sophisticated commentary on the writing process itself into the apparently artless, homely form of the fireside tale. “The Affair at Ysterspruit” and “A Boer Rip van Winkel” return to the familiar Bosman subject matter of the Boer War, this time incorporating observations on the way he as a writer turns anecdote and folk history into moving fictional narrative.
“The Ox-riem” is not as well known as the other stories included here. It occurs as a tale within the novel fragment “Louis Wassenaar”, and was not published until it appeared in Stephen Gray’s compilation, Bosman’s Johannesburg (1986). Bosman returned to the theme in “The Clay-pit”, which also only appeared posthumously (in Unto Dust, Lionel Abrahams’s 1963 edition of Bosman’s tales). I have included the original version here as I think it deserves to be better known for its taut narrative structure and deep psychological exploration of thwarted desire.
The selection ends with the famous “Old Transvaal Story” (1948), a late Bosman story that, in its amusing reflections on the source of most of his stories (oral lore), loops back to the prefatory “Marico Revisited.” The story is redolent of old, rural South African life: it is a distillation in many ways of hundreds of years of oral culture, of tales doing the rounds by word of mouth from tribal kraal to farm stoep to village bar. In the way it treats its rustic material, however, it is quintessentially modern, and it therefore stands on the cusp of the present era.
This last group of stories brings to the fore the metafictional tendency in much of Bosman’s work. The preoccupation with how to tell a story (in evidence as far back as 1935 with “Mafeking Road”), the intertextual reference to other writers, and the mixing of modes (discursive, fictional) all illustrate Bosman’s life-long fascination with the techniques of storytelling.
“Old Transvaal Story” is also interesting for its portentous qualities: by 1948 not only was the old Marico as Bosman knew it in 1925 fast disappearing, but the election victory of the National Party, which was to be followed by the banning of political parties, the introduction of racist legislation and the suppression of freedom of expression, would begin to erode the basis for the humanistic and romantic vision of Oom Schalk Lourens.
The stories gathered here startlingly reveal Bosman’s temporal and thematic range. Thanks to Oom Schalk’s incredible memory, Bosman was able to reflect ironically on the events of a century of South African history. In the years between the 1850s (when Oom Schalk first went on commando – see “Makapan’s Caves”) and the 1950s (when the later generation of farmers gather in Jurie Steyn’s voorkamer), numerous wars between Dutch settlers and African tribesmen had taken place; two Anglo–Boer Wars had been fought; South Africa had achieved Union and had participated in the Great War; and the Depression and the war following it had been experienced.
Bosman’s stories take in this entire sweep of history. His absorption in his backveld setting is thus cunningly deceptive: his characters may be rustics, but their backwoods canniness and their creator’s ability to imbue them with timeless qualities mean that the stories they tell hold true for us today. Bosman’s enduring popularity for over half a century is eloquent testimony to this. May this selection of his best help to sustain his popularity in the years to come.
Craig MacKenzie
Johannesburg, 2001
MARICO REVISITED
A MONTH AGO I REVISITED THE Marico Bushveld, a district in the Transvaal to which I was sent, a long time ago, as a school-teacher, and about which part of the country I have written, in the years that followed, a number of simple stories which I believe, in all modesty, are not without a certain degree of literary merit.
There were features about the Marico Bushveld that were almost too gaudy. That part of the country had been practically derelict since the rinderpest and the Boer War. Many of the farms north of the Dwarsberge