He is a university man who had a brilliant scholastic career; is highly read and possesses a most fascinating personality. On Sundays I used generally to chat with him. To me he was like an oasis in a desert – he freshened up the old classics – which I had practically forgotten. – We talked on Virgil, Cicero, Sallust, Homer, Ovid… In English prose and literature this man was thoroughly grounded [as well]. As we became better acquainted he lent me the copies of verses which he had written and on scanning them I realised instantly that here was no mere scribbler, such as the world is full of, but one with a rare gift…
I became very friendly with this man, but I am asked not to give his name, though what could come of this but good to the poor fellow I do not know. Will not something be done to mitigate his unhappy fate and give back to his country a fine intellect? The poor young student I speak of is an Afrikander and educated wholly in South Africa. But he has no trace whatever of any Colonial accent. His aspect is a bright and cheerful one; he has clear blue vital eyes. He was convicted of having shot and killed in an ungovernable fit of rage and jealousy. There was not any suggestion of a premeditated crime; it was wholly a crime of passion, of impulse. The law recognised this when it reprieved him; but ten years is a cruel sentence. The young man has undoubtedly great literary gifts, some think genius. And there he lies, wasting his life and abilities, which could be used in the service of his beloved South Africa…
To me it seems wrong to destroy a brilliant talent – or to stunt it in these dreadful surroundings… Above all the young prisoner is a philosopher and he makes the lightest of the thorny path which fate has mapped out for him… When I first arrived he was one of the assistant librarians – but after some months of this indoor work he asked for a change of labour, asked to be allowed to break stones! But the stones (as he said) were “under God’s clear sky!”
Now he is in the Carpenter’s Shop.
Among the First Offenders the personality and good temper of the young prisoner have made him very popular and I do not think he has an enemy in the prison.
As evidence of this youth’s potential, on 5 July Clifford had Black quote his lyric, “Perhaps Some Day”, which begins:
Some day, perhaps, I’ll see the world again.
May be some day.
When all those things of grinding grief and pain
Have passed away.
For there’s a longing in my heart to be
Beneath wide skies…
Twenty years later Bosman would weave that phrase, “some day”, into the vast pattern of his book (see Chapters 8 and 9 here).
In accordance with Black’s policy on the paper, the thrust of Clifford’s series was against capital punishment; indeed, at the Judges’ Conference held in Cape Town in January, 1931, its abolition was discussed as the key topic. Black kept pushing on this issue: on 23 January he ran a hair-raising piece by an unidentified ‘legal reporter’, obviously an official in the Justice Department, on “When Murderers Face Death”, which painted South Africa’s places of hanging (then in Cape Town and East London, Pietermaritzburg, Bloemfontein and especially Pretoria, before they were all centralised in the latter) as vile butcher’s shops.
Another ex-con to hit town was the forger Aegidius Jean Blignaut who, as a more cultural half-section to The Sjambok, in December, 1929, launched Vol. 1, No. 1 of The Touleier along the lines of Roy Campbell and William Plomer’s Voorslag (of 1926 in Durban). On the masthead was the synthetic name of ‘Herman Malan’ as literary editor, responsible for the authorship of some of Blignaut’s more inflammatory exposés and also for any further work smuggled out from his old university crony, Bosman. Here the latter’s masterly story, “Makapan’s Caves”, and other now classic pieces, first saw the light, mixed in with much other dubious and substandard material. Black continued to use Bosman in his magazine’s column under the rubric of ‘Life as Revealed by Fiction’ – for example, on 2 January, 1931, he carried “In Church” by the Bosman half of Herman Malan, and on 13 February “The Night-dress”, both accomplished pieces.
When Black’s Sjambok had to close, Blignaut immediately took up the baton, reviving Black’s old LSD as The New LSD on 27 March, 1931, without missing a week, and by July converting it into New Sjambok. (Black was to die unexpectedly on 8 August.) There Blignaut also continued the prison reform campaign with several of his own scurrilous and reprehensible pieces (which he was often to recycle). Examples are “What God and the Hangman Know” (on 25 July, 1931), which sentimentalises a gruesome adieu, and “Van Straaten – Prison Teacher” (on 7 September, 1931), which purports to expose the farce of Pretoria’s prison school.
Only one of these New Sjambok japes may with certainty be attributed to Bosman, on the grounds that it was repeated practically verbatim in Cold Stone Jug (the account of Billy the Bastard searching the convict from the sawmill missing two fingers in Chapter 5). This item was presented as “From our Correspondent” in Pretoria Central Prison no less, and headed “Morons in Khaki” (on 12 October, 1931). It concludes rather ruefully:
life is tolerable [here] only because most of the warders and chief warders are humane enough to exercise a certain amount of discretion in applying the Prison Regulations.
The piece also mentions his discovery of his brother convict-writers in the prison library, Paul Verlaine and Oscar Wilde, together with François Villon, whom he would for ever after cite as his true soul mates. Villon of course earns the final accolade in the Epilogue of Cold Stone Jug.
Later the Blignaut-Bosman team descended to using their Ringhals and New Ringhals to conduct vicious scams of minimal literary worth. Bosman kept writing stories of interest (“The Prophet” first appeared on 20 January, 1934, in the only copy of The Ringhals which has survived), while Blignaut was the next, disguised as the ex-clergyman ‘Clewin Webb’, to write his rather disjointed prison memoirs. In the episode of 24 November, 1934, he recounts how when he had come across Bosman once again in Pretoria Central in 1928, he “looked less like a murderer than usual. Perhaps because his crime was due more to impulse than premeditation he did not seem to have stamped upon his features the brand of Cain.”
The evidence led against the effectiveness of the prison system by the three gaol-birds, Clifford, Blignaut and Bosman, may be summarised on two fronts. They stood not only against what was becoming the Right’s definition of the problem of crime, but also against the Left’s explanation. Under the first count they could evoke a long history of what may be labelled eugenicist thought, beloved of white male supremacists and predicated on a hereditarian belief which attributes criminality to bad genes. In the late 1920s much public debate in South Africa was tinged with the fear of degeneration which the race biologists predicted in reaction to the rise of women’s rights and increasing sexual tolerance. For example, take Dr C. Louis Leipoldt, the great poet and the Transvaal’s first medical inspector of schools, who was now the editor of The South African Medical Journal in Cape Town and who should have known better. On 21 July, 1931, he began a frank series on “Racial Deterioration in the Union” in Johannesburg’s Rand Daily Mail explaining the nation’s drastic need to deflect a future of flat-footed halfwits and mental defectives. In response Blignaut went off the deep end (on 25 July in The New Sjambok), inviting Leipoldt to examine their muscular, eleventh-generation office boy, who would show him just how degenerate he had become by rolling up his sleeves and hurling the “flat-brained pseudo-poet” down the New Sjambok’s stairs. When a Transvaal judge recommended sterilisation as a solution to a mere bigamy case, Blignaut was incensed. Bosman’s own riposte to this line was to be Cold Stone Jug: its firm, orderly intelligence dispels any impulse to explain away the criminal mind
