The Complete Voorkamer Stories. Herman Charles Bosman
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Acknowledgments: This volume draws substantially on
the Anniversary Edition of Bosman’s works that Stephen Gray and I
undertook between 1997 and 2005, the centenary year of Bosman’s birth.
My grateful thanks are extended to my co-editor, both for his assistance with
the Voorkamer collections I edited for the Anniversary Edition and, more particularly,
for advice here. I wish also to record my thanks to David Goldblatt for so
graciously giving up his time to pore over his bushveld
collection with me. – C. M.
Preface
In April 1950, just eighteen months before his death, Herman Charles Bosman embarked on one of his most ambitious projects: a series of 2 000-word stories written to a weekly deadline for Johannesburg’s The Forum. It is testimony to his manic creative drive that he was able to produce eighty of these pieces in all, over a period of eighteen months without a single break, until his sudden death from cardiac arrest in October 1951.
The series was clearly intended to provide a comic counterpoint to the more sober political commentary and opinion-pieces that constituted the staple of The Forum, and it is typical of Bosman that he chose to locate his “forum” in a narrow, backveld setting. In the bushveld meeting-place of Jurie Steyn’s voorkamer, also the Drogevlei post office, local farmers gather under the pretext of waiting for the Government lorry bearing their letters and empty milk-cans from Bekkersdal.
The “Government lorry” at Frik Loubser’s place near Nietverdiend. December 1964
Usually prompted by At Naudé, they offer their weekly Marico perspective on topical subjects. The pattern of the pieces is typically a desultory, meandering conversation sparked off by an item of news (a marathon dancing competition, atomic testing, the appointment of General Douglas MacArthur to the supreme command in South Korea, a race classification mix-up), an event in the district (the return of a pretty girl from finishingschool in the Cape, the annual school concert, a stranger arriving on the Government lorry), or a perennial topic (ghosts, white ants, bank managers). Various voices, almost entirely in direct or reported speech, take up the thread of chat, usually turning it in a different direction and often having fun needling or duping one of the present company.
The pieces are more accurately described as “conversation pieces” or “sketches” rather than “short stories” in that they are often less formal and seldom have a strong narrative line. Like Bosman’s famous Oom Schalk Lourens stories, however, the Voorkamer pieces are firmly rooted in the medium of the spoken word. The sequence can in fact be seen to be a further development of Bosman’s preoccupation with oral narrative modes, his fascination with telling stories. This time, in the place of a single storyteller figure through whom the entire narrative is filtered, we have a set of speakers – the habitués of Jurie Steyn’s voorkamer.
Apart from Jurie Steyn himself, puffed up with his new role as postmaster, we usually encounter Gysbert van Tonder, cattle-smuggler and hostile neighbour of Jurie’s; Chris Welman, the Dopper from the Eastern Cape who prides himself on his singing abilities, and who was once a “white labourer” digging foundations in Johannesburg; At Naudé, avid radio-listener and the chief purveyor of news; young “Meneer” Vermaak, the earnest schoolmaster who is remorselessly baited by the others; Johnny Coen, the most romantically inclined of the backveld rustics; and Oupa Sarel Bekker, their elder statesman, who bears a distinct resemblance to Schalk Lourens. Conveying all of this to the reader is an anonymous narrator, memorably described by Gillian Siebert as “a transparent minutes secretary of the eternal, inconclusive voor-kamer debates” (New Nation, June, 1972).
These Marico denizens are situated a generation after Oom Schalk Lourens and his Boer War comrades in the 1920s. The unbounded liberties of frontier life have gradually been fenced in by outside agencies – legislating bodies in Pretoria, border police patrols, the Land Bank. The ox-wagon and mule-cart of Oom Schalk’s day have been supplanted by the Government lorry that runs between Bekkersdal and Groblersdal, delivering visitors and gossip from the outside world into the heart of the Marico.
Bekkersdal, we learn near the end of the sequence, is named after Oupa Bekker’s grandfather; both it and Groblersdal have been relocated by Bosman to the Dwarsberg and are not to be confused with the present-day places. Jurie Steyn’s post office, however, is modelled on the one run by Jurie Prinsloo on the Nietverdiend–Abjaterskop road, photographed by David Goldblatt in a ruined state in 1964 (featured on the cover of this book).
Egg and spoon race of the Dwarsberg Boerevereniging’s Boeresport, in the seventh year of drought. 31 December 1965
At Naudé’s “wireless” also brings the outside world to the reluctant farmers’ doorstep, and, resist though they might (indeed, they cussedly ignore At Naudé’s recycled bulletins), their world, with all the glamour of the open veld life, is steadily and irrevocably being encroached upon. Where the “rooinek” in Mafeking Road came with a laden ox-wagon and the desire to settle, people pass in and out of this world on a regular basis; there are even seasonal tourists. The lure of the big cities is proving irresistible: Johnny Coen pines for a Marico lass who has gone to the bad in Johannesburg; Chris Welman’s son, Tobie, has spent some years at a reform school there; their representative in Pretoria visits them only at election time … This is becoming a forgotten world, containing people increasingly marginalised by developments elsewhere. Impoverished and abandoned, but obstinately resisting the inevitable, these farmers gather to pit their homely wisdom against all innovations. Indeed, a great deal of the humour of the pieces lies in the way these wiseacres attempt to fit such novelties into their limited frames of reference.
Oom Schalk’s romantic world may be fading away, but now we have Oupa Bekker to recall that era for us with his stories about how news was conveyed “in the old days”, how the freebooting republics of Goshen (which they pronounce Goosen), Stellaland and Ohrigstad (of which he was apparently Finance Minister) were run, and what the Transvaal was like in the days when Potchefstroom was its capital. Where Schalk Lourens had oracular status in this society, however, Oupa Bekker is more of a deaf and doddery museum-piece. Like Schalk, he can still catch his listeners out with a twist in the narrative, but whereas Schalk had a ready circle agape for the unexpected, Oupa Bekker’s interlocutors resist his increasingly demented tales of “die ou dae”, and head him off on more than one occasion.
These farmers are disillusioned and disgruntled, and they no longer want to hear Oupa Bekker’s tales of better times. Their alienation from the soil is particularly evident in “Local Colour”, in which a writer coming to the district for local lore and folk-wisdom leaves dismayed at the farmers’ unrelenting literalness and lack of interest in the hazy wonders of nature. The story humorously registers their deracination: there is no romance left, it seems, just a harsh, grinding struggle for survival. Bosman’s self-irony is present in this story as well, in the figure of the writer looking for the kind of rural romance about which only leisured city-dwellers have illusions. It is also present in the portraits of the young schoolmasters Charlie Rossouw and Vermaak, sent out, as Bosman himself once was, to educate the rustics – and receiving an education from them instead.
Oupa Bekker and At Naudé are rivals for the attention of the voorkamer audience, as they represent two different, and opposed, worldviews. Perversely, Bosman often has Oupa Bekker winning this battle. Unlike At Naudé, Oupa Bekker still heeds Schalk Lourens’s dicta concerning the telling of a