The Complete Oom Schalk Lourens Stories. Herman Charles Bosman

      Edited by

      Craig MacKenzie

      Human & Rousseau

      Preface

      Bosman’s Oom Schalk Lourens is a literary creation without equal in South African literature. Precedents there are aplenty, to be sure (one thinks of Ernest Glanville’s ‘Uncle Abe Pike’, Perceval Gibbon’s ‘Vrouw Grobelaar’, Pauline Smith’s ‘Koenraad’ or Jean Blignaut’s ‘Hottentot Ruiter’), but no storyteller figure looms as large in the popular imagination as Oom Schalk. His famous boast, “… I can tell the best stories of anybody in the Transvaal …” (“Mafeking Road”, 1935), has gone unchallenged for the seventy years since it was first uttered.

      Remarkably, Bosman got the formula right from the outset: his two earliest Oom Schalk stories – “Makapan’s Caves” (1930) and “The Rooinek” (1931) – have remained classics despite the author’s relative youth (25) and the many later gems that might well have eclipsed them. Subsequent refinements there certainly were: both early stories are somewhat overwritten, and “Makapan’s Caves” even used the cumbersome and unnecessary device of inverted commas to denote Oom Schalk’s narrative voice. But all of the characteristic irony, humour and pathos that were later to become so famous were present in these first efforts.

      There were two main forms of influence on Bosman’s creation, one literary and the other contextual. Bosman’s liking for the American yarnsters in the Mark Twain and Bret Harte mould is well documented, and he also delighted in collecting tales by local practitioners of the ‘tall tale’ genre (some of which duly appeared in his Veld-trails and Pavements collection of 1949).

      But these literary models found real-life equivalents in the Groot Marico District, to which Bosman was sent as a young and impressionable teacher in January 1926. The next six months in the young man’s life were to prove momentous: he was exposed to a community poor in material wealth but rich in the art of storytelling. Sent out to convert the people of this region to the alphabet and literacy, he was instead won over by their own spellbinding mastery of oral narrative. Stories about the Anglo-Boer wars and tribal skirmishes, about life in the Boer Republics of Stellaland, Goshen and Ohrigstad, about local legend and lore were all eagerly absorbed by the young school-teacher over coffee on the farm stoep or in the voorkamer.

      Later in life he was able to draw on this deep reservoir of material in over 150 stories spanning some twenty years, and this work established his reputation as one of South Africa’s most popular and enduring writers. It also brought a unique region of the country to the public’s attention: “There is no other place I know,” Bosman later remarked (“Marico Revisited”, November 1944), “that is so heavy with atmosphere, so strangely and darkly im­pregnated with that stuff of life that bears the authentic stamp of South Africa.”

      The first collection of Oom Schalks appeared under Bosman’s own direction as Mafeking Road in 1947. It was rapturously re­ceived by the public and quickly established itself as a major South African classic, going into six editions and innumerable impressions in the years since its first appearance. For sixty years it has never been out of print. Bosman’s premature death thwarted his intention to release a second Oom Schalk collection, which he apparently intended to title ‘Seed-time and Harvest’. In 2001, a volume with this title appeared in the fourteen-volume Anniversary Edition of Bosman’s works, and was followed in 2002 by Unto Dust and Other Stories, which completed the sequence.

      Here between the covers of one volume for the first time, however, all sixty of these Oom Schalks are gathered, together with the illustrations that originally accompanied them. For, celebrated though Oom Schalk may be, the talented illustrators who contributed richly to the way his stories originally appeared have all but been forgotten. Here an attempt is made to recuperate this unique aspect of the Schalk Lourens story. H. E. Winder, A. E. Mason, Wilfrid Cross, Reginald Turvey, René Shapshak, Maurice van Essche and Abe Berry were giants of the magazine and art world of the period 1930 to 1960, and, as any survey of periodicals from the 1930s through to the 1950s will show, Bosman was highly regarded by these men. No other writer of the period was able to attract such a range of creative talent – or, for that matter, induce editors to make available the extra space and cover the expense that illustrations involve.

      As the notes on the illustrators reveal (see “Bosman’s Illus­trators”), Bosman either knew these men personally, or knew of and actually reviewed their work. He took local art very seriously, and made the time to view it in the various exhibitions that he enthusiastically attended both in Johannesburg and Cape Town. This aspect of Bosman is little known, and perhaps the present volume will restore it to the public’s attention.

      Two principles govern the sequencing of the stories here: publication chronology and publication venue. Fortunately, these dovetail neatly, because Bosman tended (until the last years, at least) to place his stories in one magazine until this was no longer viable and then move on to the next. So I was able to cluster the stories according to where they were published without significantly disrupting the publication sequence.

      The Oom Schalk Lourens sequence as a whole can be divided into three broad phases: early stories (1930–31); those he wrote in London (1934–37); and those he wrote upon his return to South Africa in 1940 until his death in 1951. This last grouping has been further sub-divided for ease of reading – again, largely on the basis of where stories were first published. (A detailed contextua­lisation of the stories and the periodicals in which they appeared is offered in “Notes on the Stories.”)

      Bosman’s achievement is to have created a character who has far outlived the time and place in which he is putatively situated. This is because Oom Schalk Lourens is only apparently simple, prejudiced and narrow-minded. He has endured as a much-loved South African literary figure because his humane vision extends to embrace all of South Africa, and all South Africans. He therefore speaks to us today as poignantly, beguilingly and movingly as he did when he made his first appearance seventy-six years ago.

      On the dust-jacket of the first edition of Mafeking Road the following description of him appeared. Probably written by Bosman himself, it goes unrivalled to this day:

      Each of the stories here presented is identified with the central character, Oom Schalk Lourens, an old Boer farmer, who has seen all the way into life, but whose experiences have not embittered him; and who retains, in spite of his Calvinistic outlook and background, and in spite of all his narrow backveld prejudices (and he has them in good measure), a warm kindliness of disposition, irradiating the stories he tells with a sincere and strangely moving humanity.

      Craig MacKenzie

      Johannesburg, 2006

      The Touleier Years

      (1930–31)