A Bosman Companion. Craig Mackenzie

      The Malan grandchildren: Herman (seated), Pierre (bottom left), Zita Grové (standing left) (NELM)

      bitterbessie (Afr.) Lit. ‘bitter berry’; while there are many bitter berries there is no specific plant named a bitterbessie (IT: 102 “Stars in their Courses”).

      bittereinder(s) (Afr.) Lit. ‘bitter-ender(s)’; a soldier in the Second Anglo–Boer War (and by extension his family) who refused to surrender after the capture of Pretoria and other major centres in 1900, but who fought on into the protracted guerilla phase of the war, until the ‘bitter end’ in May 1902. See, in particular, the OSL-narrated stories “The Question”, “Peaches Ripening in the Sun”, “The Traitor’s Wife” and “The Rooinek” for vivid depictions of this phase of the war, and of the attitude and conduct of the ‘bittereinders’. The term is used in opposition to the so-called ‘hensoppers’ (‘hands-uppers’), who surrendered meekly at earlier stages in the war. See “Mafeking Road” for a depiction of this unheroic tendency among some Afrikaners, and “The Rooinek” (MR: 130), where HCB misspells it ‘hendsopper’.

      Black Hole of Calcutta A dungeon in Fort William, Calcutta (now Kolkata), India, where British prisoners of war were held in 1756. Conditions were so cramped that many soldiers suffocated; some accounts say as many as 123 of the 146 prisoners died, others say only 23 died. In context, Dap van Zyl’s fear leads him to believe that he too is suffocating in the holding cell, and he offers a needless confession merely to get out of the confines of the cell instead of waiting for his lawyer (W: 185).

      “Black Magic” (H: 26) Gysbert van Tonder regales the gathering with an anecdote about a witch-doctor who promises him hidden gold. A wry look at superstition and confidence tricksters. “‘Oh, yes, the money, Baas Gysbert,’ the witch-doctor said, his face lighting up with intelligence and apricot brandy. ‘Oh, yes, the money that is buried here on Baas Gysbert’s farm.’”

      Black Maria Slang term for a police van used to transport prisoners (L&O: 135 “The Old Magistrates’ Court”).

      Black, Stephen (1880-1931) Journalist, playwright, novelist, short-story writer. Born in Cape Town and educated at Saint Saviour’s Upper Boys’ High School and Diocesan College, he worked as a sports and crime reporter on the Cape Argus from 1906. In 1910 he formed his own theatre company and toured SA and Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). He lived in England from 1913 to 1915, where he wrote articles for London’s Daily Mail, and in France from 1918 to 1927. A number of Black’s plays have been published. Three Plays (1984; edited by Stephen Gray) contains Love and the Hyphen (1908, revised 1928-29), Helena’s Hope, Ltd. (1910) and Van Kalabas Does His Bit (1916). He is also the author of two novels: The Dorp (1920) and The Golden Calf: A Story of the Diamond Fields (1925). Black was founder of the literary magazine The Sjambok (1929-31), which in May 1929 published one of HCB’s early pieces, “In the Beginning”, smuggled out of prison. After HCB left prison, other fiction – “In Church” (January 1931) and “The Night-dress” (February 1931) – and journalistic pieces followed. HCB met Black in the last year of the latter’s life and (briefly) revived The Sjambok as the The New Sjambok. See “Stephen Black”.

      Blackburn, Douglas (1857–1929) London-born, he came to SA in the early 1890s and worked on The Star. He spent nearly two decades in the country. At the time of the Jameson Raid he became the proprietor-editor of the weekly newspaper The Sentinel, and during the Boer War years worked on both sides of the front as a correspondent. His most important novels are Prinsloo of Prinsloosdorp: A Tale of Transvaal Officialdom (1899; reissued in 1978 and 1989), A Burger Quixote (1903; reissued in 1984) and Leaven: A Black and White story (1908; reissued in 1991). The last of these is an early example of the ‘Jim Comes to Joburg’ genre. The first two are important precursors in style and theme to the work of Pauline Smith and, in particular, HCB. They both use a larger-than-life narrator who relates his various picaresque adventures in a tongue-in-cheek manner.

      Blake, William (1757–1827) English Romantic poet, painter and mystic; famous for his poetry sequences Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of Experience (1794); HCB quotes a line from Blake’s For Children: The Gates of Paradise (1793) (VS: 174 “Die Duistere Vers”).

      blerrie Corruption of the swearword ‘bloody’, rendered in a low-Afrikaans form, with the appropriate Afrikaans pronunciation and inflection (CSJ: 74).

      blesbok (Afr.) Blesbuck; lit. ‘bald buck’ (Damaliscus pygargus phillipsi); medium-sized purplish antelope with white face; grassland animal that is found only in SA (UD: 33 “The Picture of Gysbert Jonker”; OTS: 34 “A Tale Writ in Water”).

      blesbuck See blesbok.

      Blignaut, Aegidius Jean (1899–1994) Journalist, short-story writer and biographer. Born in the Free State, he went to school in Kroonstad and later worked as a journalist in Johannesburg. In the 1930s he edited a number of satirical magazines with HCB (including The Touleier, 1930–31, The New L. S. D, 1931–33, and The New Sjambok, 1931). A recidivist convict (con man, fraudster, extortionist), he spent chunks of the 1930s in prison, and in fact was held there ‘at his majesty’s pleasure’ for a long spell from 1934 onwards. Probably in order to escape yet another lengthy gaol sentence, if not in fact the ‘indeterminate sentence’, he left for Britain and served with the RAF in the Second World War, remaining in Britain thereafter. He is best remembered for his simple-seeming and yet complex ‘Hottentot Ruiter’ narrator-figure, which influenced HCB’s ‘Schalk Lourens’ character and is part of a tradition of SA ‘oral-style’ stories. The Hottentot’s God (1931), Blignaut’s first collection of stories (introduced by HCB), features Hottentot Ruiter. Few (if any) copies of this privately published volume have survived, however, and Dead End Road (1980) was issued to bring the stories back into print. The stories Ruiter narrates all deal with his picaresque exploits and in one of them Schalk Lourens himself makes an appearance. Blignaut is also the author of the memoir My Friend Herman Charles Bosman (1981), and edited Death hath Eloquence (1981), a selection of HCB’s poetry. Talitha (1984) is a further selection of Blignaut’s stories.