A Bosman Companion
Craig MacKenzie and Tim Sandham
Human & Rousseau
Acknowledgments: The authors are grateful to the following people for valuable assistance with various aspects of the book: Gerhard Burger, Angus Douglas, Thulani Maseko, Koos Olivier, Mark Sandham, Caroline Sillman and Egbert and Santa van Bart.
Bosman in 1931 (photo: Eli Weinberg)
A Note to the Reader
The purpose of this companion is to be a comprehensive guide to Herman Charles Bosman’s life and works, and to people and places associated with him. It grew out of conversations between the authors about the kinds of questions posed to us by the audiences to which we give Bosman-related talks, plays and presentations.
We have attempted to provide a brief description of, and illustrative extract from, every single one of Bosman’s hundreds of stories, sketches, essays and novels. We have also included photographs and illustrations to provide the kind of detail and interest words simply cannot, and the reader’s attention is also drawn to the detailed maps at the end of the book.
There is also a Classified Contents List at the end of the book as a ‘quick index’: the reader can see at a glance which aspects of Bosman’s life are covered, for example, without needing to trawl through the entire alphabetical listing. A chronology has been provided in order to place Bosman’s life and work in an illuminating context.
In the interests of economy and focus, we have restricted our entries to items of interest and pertinence to Bosman and his world.
The Companion has five main kinds of entries:
1. Biographical entries on HCB, e.g. education (school)
2. People (fictional and historical)
Fictional (characters in HCB’s work), e.g. Bekker, Oupa (Sarel)
Historical (people who knew HCB or who have had something to do with his life and work), e.g. Bernstein, Edgar (1912–74)
3. References to stories/texts, e.g. “In the Withaak’s Shade” (MR: 34)
4. Places (known by HCB or in some way connected to him) e.g. Heimweeberg (Afr.)
5. Unusual/distinctive language, e.g. gramadoelas (Afr. slang)
The standard reference is to the 14 volumes of the Anniversary Edition of Herman Charles Bosman (1997-2005), and these references occur at the end of many of the entries. In the interests of economy, the page numbers that follow such references indicate the first page of the item only.
Certain words and phrases occur repeatedly throughout Bosman’s stories, and we do not therefore provide references to all such instances. One or two illustrative examples from the works have to suffice.
Words that appear in small caps (e.g. ‘Zeerust’ under ‘Heimweeberg’) indicate to the reader that an entry under that word also appears in the Companion. If the word appears more than once in a particular entry, only the first instance of it is rendered in small caps.
As is standard practice, items that begin with the articles ‘a’, ‘an’ and ‘the’ are placed alphabetically according to the next word in the title: thus “The Red Coat” can be found under “Red Coat, The”. However, Afrikaans titles or items are all placed alphabetically under ‘die’: “Die Rooibaadjie”.
Abbreviations
The Anniversary Edition of Herman Charles Bosman (1997–2005) is the standard reference:
CJ = A Cask of Jerepigo
CSJ = Cold Stone Jug
H = Homecoming
IT = Idle Talk
JN = Jacaranda in the Night
L&O = My Life and Opinions
MR = Mafeking Road and Other Stories
OTS = Old Transvaal Stories
S&H = Seed-time and Harvest and Other Stories
UD = Unto Dust and Other Stories
VS = Verborge Skatte
W = Willemsdorp
WS = Wild Seed
YB = Young Bosman
Frequently cited secondary works:
BtL = Between the Lines (Rosenberg, 2005)
HCB = Herman Charles Bosman (ed. Gray, 1986)
IB = The Illustrated Bosman (1985)
IKH = Herman Charles Bosman as I Knew Him (Sachs, 1974)
LS = Life Sentence (Gray, 2005)
RB = Remembering Bosman (ed. Gray, 2008)
(See Bibliography for full details of these texts.)
General abbreviations:
Afr. = Afrikaans
BCE = Before the Common Era
CE = Common Era
Dut. = Dutch
Eng. = English
Fr. = French
Ger. = German
HCB = Herman Charles Bosman
HRHRC = Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center (at the University of Texas at Austin)
Lat. = Latin
Lit. = literally
OSL = Oom Schalk Lourens
SA = South Africa
Chronology
1867 Discovery of diamonds in Griqualand West.
1870–71 Diamond rush to Kimberley.
1877 Proclamation of Transvaal as British Crown Colony.
1879 Anglo–Zulu War.
1880–81 First Anglo–Boer War.
1883 Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm published.
1886 Discovery of main gold reef on the Witwatersrand.
1890 Cecil Rhodes becomes Prime Minister of Cape.
