Oct: HCB dies of cardiac arrest at his home in Lombardy East. 19 Oct: His last Voorkamer piece, “Homecoming”, appears after his death.
1953 Bantu Education Act; South African Communist Party (SACP) formed underground.
1955 Sophiatown, a black ‘location’ north-west of Johannesburg, and the home or temporary abode of many artists and musicians, destroyed.
1956 ANC approves Freedom Charter; 20 000 women march to the Union Buildings in Pretoria to protest against the extension of the pass laws to women; Nadine Gordimer’s Six Feet of the Country published.
1957 Lionel Abrahams publishes his selection of HCB’s journalistic essays as A Cask of Jerepigo.
1959 Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) formed; Es’kia Mphahlele’s Down Second Avenue published.
1960 Sharpeville massacre; State of Emergency declared; ANC and PAC banned; Douglas Livingstone’s first poetry collection, The Skull in the Mud, published.
1961 South Africa withdraws from the Commonwealth and becomes a republic; ANC adopts armed struggle.
1963 Lionel Abrahams’s selection of HCB’s Bushveld stories appears as Unto Dust. Bloke Modisane’s autobiography, Blame Me on History, and Dennis Brutus’s poetry collection Sirens, Knuckles, Boots published.
1965 Abrahams’s perennial seller, Bosman at His Best, appears.
1966 Verwoerd assassinated; Vorster becomes Prime Minister; Sydney Clouts’s One Life, the only collection of poems to appear in his lifetime, published. District Six cleared and declared a white area. Like Sophiatown, District Six was the home or meeting place of numerous writers and musicians.
1969 Jan: First performance of Willem Prinsloo’s Peach Brandy, Percy Sieff’s adaptation for the stage of some HCB stories and extracts from Cold Stone Jug, in Cape Town. Nov: Patrick Mynhardt opens his one-man Bosman show, A Sip of Jerepigo, which runs for over three years, and is followed by various other one-man Bosman shows by Mynhardt, until his death in 2007. Athol Fugard’s Boesman and Lena published.
1971 Abrahams’s selections of HCB’s Voorkamer stories appear as Jurie Steyn’s Post Office and A Bekkersdal Marathon. 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
