A Bosman Companion. Craig Mackenzie
Mbuyiseni Oswald Mtshali’s Sounds of a Cowhide Drum published.
1972 Mongane Serote’s Yakhal’inkomo published.
1973 Athol Fugard’s Sizwe Bansi is Dead and Bessie Head’s A Question of Power published.
1974 Abrahams’s selection of HCB’s poetry appears as The Earth is Waiting. J. M. Coetzee’s Dusklands and Nadine Gordimer’s The Conservationist published.
1976 Sunflower to the Sun, Valerie Rosenberg’s biography of HCB’s life and work, the first full-length work on HCB, appears. The Soweto Uprising occurs; resistance becomes widespread and hundreds are killed; others go into exile. 1970s and 1980s poetry collections by Mafika Gwala, Oswald Mtshali, Mongane Serote, Sipho Sepamla, Ingoapele Madingoane, and others go on to reflect both a new urgency of tone and a more militant artistic agenda. Sipho Sepamla’s The Blues Is You in Me published.
1977 Willemsdorp appears, with some cuts to get round the censorship board. Steve Biko murdered in detention, sparking an international outcry.
1978 Ahmed Essop’s The Hajji and Other Stories published; the first issue of Staffrider, founded and edited by Mike Kirkwood, and espousing a workerist, egalitarian aesthetic, appears: it will go on to publish the work of Njabulo Ndebele, Mtutuzeli Matshoba, Miriam Tlali, Ahmed Essop, and Mothobi Mutloatse, among many others.
1979 Mtutuzeli Matshoba’s Call Me Not a Man published.
1980 Stephen Gray’s selection of HCB’s stories, Selected Stories, appears.
1981 HCB’s Collected Works appears in two volumes; this edition gathered all of the published HCB volumes to date, and was the most comprehensive gathering of his work at the time. Patrick Mynhardt releases his selection of Bosman favourites as The Bosman I Like. Mongane Serote’s To Every Birth Its Blood and Achmat Dangor’s Waiting for Leila published.
1982 Ruth First assassinated by parcel bomb in Maputo.
1983 Jeremy Cronin’s Inside and Njabulo Ndebele’s Fools and Other Stories published.
1985 Ellen Kuzwayo’s autobiography, Call Me Woman, published.
1989 P. W. Botha suffers stroke; F. W. de Klerk becomes State President; De Klerk meets Mandela for the first time; Ivan Vladislavi´c’s Missing Persons published.
1990 De Klerk unbans ANC, SACP and other opposition parties; Mandela’s unconditional release announced.
1991 De Klerk announces that all apartheid laws will be repealed; Mandela elected president of the ANC; Nadine Gordimer wins Nobel Prize for Literature.
1993 Mandela and De Klerk announced joint winners of the Nobel Peace Prize.
1994 First democratic elections held; Mandela becomes president; his autobiography Long Walk to Freedom published.
1996 Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) begins hearings.
1998 Human & Rousseau begin releasing two volumes per year of the Anniversary Edition of Herman Charles Bosman, which will end in 2005, with all of his work released in 14 volumes. TRC report published; Antjie Krog’s Country of My Skull published.
1999 Thabo Mbeki succeeds Mandela as president; J. M. Coetzee’s Booker-winning Disgrace published.
2003 J. M. Coetzee awarded Nobel Prize for Literature.
2005 To mark the centenary of HCB’s birth, Stephen Gray’s biography, Life Sentence: A Biography of Herman Charles Bosman, the most detailed and comprehensive examination of his life and work to date, is released. Valerie Rosenberg releases the third version of her biography, Herman Charles Bosman – Between the Lines. The 14-volume Anniversary Edition concludes with Homecoming: Voorkamer Stories (II).
A
aardvark (Dut./Afr.) Lit. ‘earth pig’; also known as an antbear; a shy and solitary pig-like mammal; difficult to locate because of its secretive nocturnal behaviour and habit of digging burrows into the ground; feeds on termites (S&H: 74 “The Story of Hester van Wyk”; UD: 100 “Oom Piet’s Party”).
aasvoël (Afr.) Vulture; probably the Cape Vulture, Gypaetus barbatus (MR: 34 “In the Withaak’s Shade”; MR: 70 “Makapan’s Caves”; OTS: 50 “The Heart of a Woman”; S&H: 111 “Cometh Comet”).
abafazi’ nkulu le tshefu (Zulu) Lit. ‘the women large this poison’; HCB appears to be stringing together a set of Zulu words he is only partly familiar with, or he has perhaps simply made up a random ‘sentence’ from words he has (mis)overheard and has (mis)spelled phonetically. Perhaps the best sense that can be made of the words is ‘tall women are poison’ or ‘women are big poison’. In the context of the story (Louis Wassenaar eavesdropping on passers-by for inspiration to write a story) it is not of consequence. Wassenaar is reported to be simply unable to put the fragment to any creative use: “Not much of a lead in that, either. Louis Wassenaar did not know any of the Bantu languages” (OTS: 95 “Louis Wassenaar”).
abba A chimney that has been built on afterwards on the outside of a house (OTS: 34 “A Tale Writ in Water”; IT: 103 “Stars in their Courses”).
Abjaterskop (Afr.) Lit. ‘Rogue’s Head’; situated between the Dwarsberge and the Rant van Tweedepoort; at 1 378 m the highest peak in the region; portrayed by HCB as haunted. See “Willem Prinsloo’s Peach Brandy”; “In the Withaak’s Shade”; Maps.
Abrahams, Lionel (1928–2004) Poet, short-story writer, critic, editor, publisher. Born in Johannesburg and schooled at Damelin College, where he first encountered HCB, he graduated from the University of the Witwatersrand in 1955. He was vigorous in his promotion of South African literature both through his own writings and through the editing and publishing of the writings of others. One of his most important contributions as an editor was to publish editions of the works of HCB, who was also his literary mentor for a short period. These include A Cask of Jerepigo (1957), Unto Dust (1963), Bosman at His Best: A Choice of Stories and Sketches (1965), Jurie Steyn’s Post Office and A Bekkersdal Marathon (both 1971; see Voorkamer Sequence), a collection of HCB’s poetry, The Earth is Waiting (1974), and The Collected Works of Herman Charles Bosman (1988). His most detailed biographical piece on HCB appeared as “Mr Bosman: A Protégé’s Memoir” in 2001 (reprinted in RB: 120-64). See appearance; teaching.
absinthe Anise-flavoured spirit with a high alcohol content; popular among the writers of Paris in the nineteenth century; banned in 1915 because of its supposed harmful effects (L&O: 97 “Paris: Sidelights and Half-laughs”).
Achilles Hero of the Trojan War in Greek mythology; half man and half god, his mother – in an attempt to make him invulnerable – dipped him in the river Styx as a baby, except for his heel where he was held, thus creating his one weak point (JN: 159).
Adonis(es) In Greek mythology Adonis was known for his exceptional beauty, which is why Venus fell for him; consequently, attractive and youthful young men are referred to as Adonises (CSJ: 90).
Aeolian harp Named for the Greek God of the wind, it is an instrument that produces sounds when the wind blows through it; it is a box with a soundboard and strings stretched across it, and placed in a window where the breeze can pass through it (CJ: 37 “The Good Earth”).
Aeschylus (524/525– c. 455/456 BCE) Greek writer of tragedies, one of the most famous being Seven against Thebes; contemporary of Euripides (VS: 173 “Die Duistere Vers”).
“Affair at Ysterspruit, The” (OTS: 39) A young schoolmaster in the Marico (a lightly fictionalised rendering of HCB himself) seeks and finds a story of Boer War bravery from Ouma Engelbrecht. A poignant story with a twist that reveals as much about the art of storytelling as it does about the bitterness caused by the Boer War. The schoolmaster prompts his informant (an old oom) to resume his tale “– his words a slow and steady rumble and with the red dust of the road in their sound, almost – a tale of terror or of high romance or soft laughter.” The story appeared in an earlier Afrikaans version as “Die Voorval by Ijzerspruit” (VS: 35).
African