The Complete Voorkamer Stories

by Herman Charles Bosman

  Acknowledgments: This volume draws substantially on

  the Anniversary Edition of Bosman’s works that Stephen Gray and I

  undertook between 1997 and 2005, the centenary year of Bosman’s birth.

  My grateful thanks are extended to my co-editor, both for his assistance with

  the Voorkamer collections I edited for the Anniversary Edition and, more particularly,

  for advice here. I wish also to record my thanks to David Goldblatt for so

  graciously giving up his time to pore over his bushveld

  collection with me. – C. M.

  Preface

  In April 1950, just eighteen months before his death, Herman Charles Bosman embarked on one of his most ambitious projects: a series of 2 000-word stories written to a weekly deadline for Johannesburg’s The Forum. It is testimony to his manic creative drive that he was able to produce eighty of these pieces in all, over a period of eighteen months without a single break, until his sudden death from cardiac arrest in October 1951.

  The series was clearly intended to provide a comic counterpoint to the more sober political commentary and opinion-pieces that constituted the staple of The Forum, and it is typical of Bosman that he chose to locate his “forum” in a narrow, backveld setting. In the bushveld meeting-place of Jurie Steyn’s voorkamer, also the Drogevlei post office, local farmers gather under the pretext of waiting for the Government lorry bearing their letters and empty milk-cans from Bekkersdal.

  The “Government lorry” at Frik Loubser’s place near Nietverdiend. December 1964

  Usually prompted by At Naudé, they offer their weekly Marico perspective on topical subjects. The pattern of the pieces is typically a desultory, meandering conversation sparked off by an item of news (a marathon dancing competition, atomic testing, the appointment of General Douglas MacArthur to the supreme command in South Korea, a race classification mix-up), an event in the district (the return of a pretty girl from finishingschool in the Cape, the annual school concert, a stranger arriving on the Government lorry), or a perennial topic (ghosts, white ants, bank managers). Various voices, almost entirely in direct or reported speech, take up the thread of chat, usually turning it in a different direction and often having fun needling or duping one of the present company.

  The pieces are more accurately described as “conversation pieces” or “sketches” rather than “short stories” in that they are often less formal and seldom have a strong narrative line. Like Bosman’s famous Oom Schalk Lourens stories, however, the Voorkamer pieces are firmly rooted in the medium of the spoken word. The sequence can in fact be seen to be a further development of Bosman’s preoccupation with oral narrative modes, his fascination with telling stories. This time, in the place of a single storyteller figure through whom the entire narrative is filtered, we have a set of speakers – the habitués of Jurie Steyn’s voorkamer.

  Apart from Jurie Steyn himself, puffed up with his new role as postmaster, we usually encounter Gysbert van Tonder, cattle-smuggler and hostile neighbour of Jurie’s; Chris Welman, the Dopper from the Eastern Cape who prides himself on his singing abilities, and who was once a “white labourer” digging foundations in Johannesburg; At Naudé, avid radio-listener and the chief purveyor of news; young “Meneer” Vermaak, the earnest schoolmaster who is remorselessly baited by the others; Johnny Coen, the most romantically inclined of the backveld rustics; and Oupa Sarel Bekker, their elder statesman, who bears a distinct resemblance to Schalk Lourens. Conveying all of this to the reader is an anonymous narrator, memorably described by Gillian Siebert as “a transparent minutes secretary of the eternal, inconclusive voor-kamer debates” (New Nation, June, 1972).

  These Marico denizens are situated a generation after Oom Schalk Lourens and his Boer War comrades in the 1920s. The unbounded liberties of frontier life have gradually been fenced in by outside agencies – legislating bodies in Pretoria, border police patrols, the Land Bank. The ox-wagon and mule-cart of Oom Schalk’s day have been supplanted by the Government lorry that runs between Bekkersdal and Groblersdal, delivering visitors and gossip from the outside world into the heart of the Marico.

  Bekkersdal, we learn near the end of the sequence, is named after Oupa Bekker’s grandfather; both it and Groblersdal have been relocated by Bosman to the Dwarsberg and are not to be confused with the present-day places. Jurie Steyn’s post office, however, is modelled on the one run by Jurie Prinsloo on the Nietverdiend–Abjaterskop road, photographed by David Goldblatt in a ruined state in 1964 (featured on the cover of this book).

  Egg and spoon race of the Dwarsberg Boerevereniging’s Boeresport, in the seventh year of drought. 31 December 1965

  At Naudé’s “wireless” also brings the outside world to the reluctant farmers’ doorstep, and, resist though they might (indeed, they cussedly ignore At Naudé’s recycled bulletins), their world, with all the glamour of the open veld life, is steadily and irrevocably being encroached upon. Where the “rooinek” in Mafeking Road came with a laden ox-wagon and the desire to settle, people pass in and out of this world on a regular basis; there are even seasonal tourists. The lure of the big cities is proving irresistible: Johnny Coen pines for a Marico lass who has gone to the bad in Johannesburg; Chris Welman’s son, Tobie, has spent some years at a reform school there; their representative in Pretoria visits them only at election time … This is becoming a forgotten world, containing people increasingly marginalised by developments elsewhere. Impoverished and abandoned, but obstinately resisting the inevitable, these farmers gather to pit their homely wisdom against all innovations. Indeed, a great deal of the humour of the pieces lies in the way these wiseacres attempt to fit such novelties into their limited frames of reference.

  Oom Schalk’s romantic world may be fading away, but now we have Oupa Bekker to recall that era for us with his stories about how news was conveyed “in the old days”, how the freebooting republics of Goshen (which they pronounce Goosen), Stellaland and Ohrigstad (of which he was apparently Finance Minister) were run, and what the Transvaal was like in the days when Potchefstroom was its capital. Where Schalk Lourens had oracular status in this society, however, Oupa Bekker is more of a deaf and doddery museum-piece. Like Schalk, he can still catch his listeners out with a twist in the narrative, but whereas Schalk had a ready circle agape for the unexpected, Oupa Bekker’s interlocutors resist his increasingly demented tales of “die ou dae”, and head him off on more than one occasion.

  These farmers are disillusioned and disgruntled, and they no longer want to hear Oupa Bekker’s tales of better times. Their alienation from the soil is particularly evident in “Local Colour”, in which a writer coming to the district for local lore and folk-wisdom leaves dismayed at the farmers’ unrelenting literalness and lack of interest in the hazy wonders of nature. The story humorously registers their deracination: there is no romance left, it seems, just a harsh, grinding struggle for survival. Bosman’s self-irony is present in this story as well, in the figure of the writer looking for the kind of rural romance about which only leisured city-dwellers have illusions. It is also present in the portraits of the young schoolmasters Charlie Rossouw and Vermaak, sent out, as Bosman himself once was, to educate the rustics – and receiving an education from them instead.

  Oupa Bekker and At Naudé are rivals for the attention of the voorkamer audience, as they represent two different, and opposed, worldviews. Perversely, Bosman often has Oupa Bekker winning this battle. Unlike At Naudé, Oupa Bekker still heeds Schalk Lourens’s dicta concerning the telling of a tale: how fast to go, when to mention certain details and what to leave out. At Naudé’s news is like the modern world itself that threatens this isolated re
gion: fragmented, diverse and discordant, it brings little solace to the marginalised men in the voorkamer and they often wilfully misunderstand At Naudé as a form of retribution. Scornfully pushing aside his information about “stone-throwings in Johannesburg locations and about how many new kinds of bombs the Russians had got”, they are more interested in whether it “was true that the ouderling at Pilanesberg really forgot himself in the way that Jurie Steyn’s wife had heard about from a kraal Mtosa at the kitchen door … Now, there was news for you” (“News Story”).

  Tant Nellie Haasbroek and her grandson. Tant Nellie was Bosman’s landlady. Heimwee-berg. 1964

  Bosman situates Jurie Steyn’s voorkamer at the boundary between the old and the new. This is suggested by the room itself: it is simultaneously an old-world waiting room, where guests are served coffee while passing the time of day in leisurely loquacity, and an actual post office, rather poorly equipped but nevertheless the sorting-house of information and communication. Jurie Steyn may loyally hang his stamps to dry on the wall when the leaky roof lets in the rain, and he may take great pride in his brass scales and new wire-netting, but once modern developments reach the Marico in earnest, he too will be superseded. The institution of Jurie Steyn’s post office is on the brink of passing away, and with it the last vestiges of its old-world charm.

  This volume is intended to capture some of this charm, with Bosman’s classic Voorkamer stories presented here in their entirety and original sequence, enhanced by David Goldblatt’s 1960s Marico portraits, which have been used as visual lead-ins to the various story-clusters.

  The closing item here, “Homecoming” (which, appropriately, deals with the return of a disillusioned Marico native to his home district), was also the last piece Bosman wrote. Uncannily, as if the writer were attempting a trickster’s last twist, it appeared on the Friday just after his death. The concluding piece to this volume thus contains Bosman’s last contribution to the literary culture of a country he loved deeply and captured with such enduring vitality. It represents his final homecoming.

  Craig MacKenzie

  Johannesburg, 2011

  I

  Frik Loubser (behind the counter of his shop and post office) and the driver of the “Government lorry”. Near Nietverdiend. December 1964

  The Budget

  We were sitting in Jurie Steyn’s voorkamer at Drogevlei, waiting for the Government lorry from Bekkersdal, which brought us our letters and empty milk-cans. Jurie Steyn’s voorkamer had served as the Drogevlei post office for some years, and Jurie Steyn was postmaster. His complaint was that the post office didn’t pay. It didn’t pay him, he said, to be called away from his lands every time somebody came in for a penny stamp. What was more, Gysbert van Tonder could walk right into his voorkamer whenever he liked, and without knocking. Gysbert was Jurie Steyn’s neighbour, and Jurie had naturally not been on friendly terms with him since the time Gysbert van Tonder got a justice of the peace and a land-surveyor and a policeman riding a skimmel horse to explain to Jurie Steyn on what side of the vlei the boundary fence ran.

  What gave Jurie Steyn some measure of satisfaction, he said, was the fact that his post office couldn’t pay the Government, either.

  “Maybe it will pay better now,” At Naudé said. “Now that you can charge more for the stamps, I mean.”

  At Naudé had a wireless, and was therefore always first with the news. Moreover, At Naudé made that remark with a slight sneer.

  Now, Jurie Steyn is funny in that way. He doesn’t mind what he himself says about his post office. But he doesn’t care much for the ill-informed kind of comment that he sometimes gets from people who don’t know how exacting a postmaster’s duties are. I can still remember some of the things Jurie Steyn said to a stranger who dropped in one day for a half-crown postal order, when Jurie had been busy with the cream separator. The stranger spoke of the buttermilk smudges on the postal order, which made the ink run in a blue blotch when he tried to fill it in. It was then that Jurie Steyn asked the stranger if he thought Marico buttermilk wasn’t good enough for him, and what he thought he could get for half a crown. Jurie Steyn also started coming from behind the counter, so that he could explain better to the stranger what a man could get in the Bushveld for considerably less than half a crown. Unfortunately, the stranger couldn’t wait to hear. He said that he had left his engine running when he came into the post office.

  From that it would appear that he was not such a complete stranger to the ways of the Groot Marico.

  With regard to At Naudé’s remark now, however, we could see that Jurie Steyn would have preferred to let it pass. He took out a thick book with black covers and started ticking off lists with a pencil in an important sort of a way. But all the time we could sense the bitterness against At Naudé that was welling up inside him. When the pencil-point broke, Jurie Steyn couldn’t stand it anymore.

  “Anyway, At,” he said, “even twopence a half-ounce is cheaper than getting a Mchopi runner to carry a letter in a long stick with a cleft in the end. But, of course, you wouldn’t understand about things like progress.”

  Jurie Steyn shouldn’t have said that. Immediately three or four of us wanted to start talking at the same time.

  “Cheaper, maybe,” Johnny Coen said, “but not better, or quicker – or – or – cleaner –” Johnny Coen almost choked with laughter. He thought he was being very clever.

  Meanwhile, Chris Welman was trying to tell a story we had heard from him often before about a letter that was posted at Christmas time in Volksrust and arrived at its destination, Magoeba’s Kloof, twenty-eight years later, and on Dingaan’s Day.

  “If a native runner took twenty-eight years to get from Volksrust to Magoeba’s Kloof,” Chris Welman said, “we would have known that he didn’t run much. He must at least have stopped once or twice at huts along the way for kaffir beer.”

  Meanwhile, Oupa Sarel Bekker, who was one of the oldest inhabitants of the Marico and had known Bekkersdal before it was even a properly measured-out farm, started taking part in the conversation. But because Oupa Bekker was slightly deaf, and a bit queer in the head through advancing years, he thought we were saying that Jurie Steyn had been running along the main road, carrying a letter in a cleft stick. Accordingly, Oupa Bekker warned Jurie Steyn to be careful of mambas. The kloof was full of brown mambas at that time of year, Oupa Bekker said.

  “All the same, in the days of the Republics you would not get a white man doing a thing like that,” Oupa Bekker went on, shaking his head. “Not even in the Republic of Goosen. And not even after the Republic of Goosen’s Minister of Finance had lost all the State revenues in an unfortunate game of poker that he had been invited to take part in at the Mafeking Hotel. And there was quite a big surplus, too, that year, which the Minister of Finance kept tucked away in an inside pocket right through the poker game, and which he could still remember having had on him when he went into the bar. Although he could never remember what happened to that surplus afterwards. The Minister of Finance never went back to Goosen, of course. He stayed on in Mafeking. When I saw him again he was offering to help carry people’s luggage from the Zeederberg coach station to the hotel.”

  Oupa Bekker was getting ready to say a lot more, when Jurie Steyn interrupted him, demanding to know what all that had got to do with his post office.

  “I said that even when things were very bad in the old days, you would still never see a white postmaster running in the sun with a letter in a cleft stick,” Oupa Bekker explained, adding, “like a Mchopi.”

  Jurie Steyn’s wife did not want any unpleasantness. So she came and sat on the riempies bench next to Oupa Bekker and made it clear to him, in a friendly sort of way, what the discussion was all about.

  “You see, Oupa,” Jurie Steyn’s wife said finally, after a pause for breath, “that’s just what we have been saying. We’ve been saying that in the old days, before they had proper post offices, people used to send letters with Mchopi runners.”

/>   “But that’s what I’ve been saying also,” Oupa Bekker persisted. “I say, why doesn’t Jurie rather go in his mule-cart?”

  Jurie Steyn’s wife gave it up after that. Especially when Jurie Steyn himself walked over to where Oupa Bekker was sitting.

  “You know, Oupa,” Jurie said, talking very quietly, “you have been an ouderling for many years, and we all respect you in the Groot Ma-rico. We also respect your grey hairs. But you must not lose that respect through – through talking about things that you don’t understand.”

  Oupa Bekker tightened his grip on his tamboetie-wood walking-stick.

  “Now if you had spoken to me like that in the Republican days, Jurie Steyn,” the old man said, in a cracked voice. “In the Republic of Stella-land, for instance –”

  “You and your republics, Oupa,” Jurie Steyn said, giving up the argument and turning back to the counter. “Goosen, Stellaland, Lydenburg – I suppose you were also in the Ohrigstad Republic?”

  Oupa Bekker sat up very stiffly on the riempies bench, then.

  “In the Ohrigstad Republic,” he declared, and in his eyes there gleamed for a moment a light as from a great past, “in the Republic of Ohrigstad I had the honour to be the Minister of Finance.”

  “Honour,” Jurie Steyn repeated, sarcastically, but yet not speaking loud enough for Oupa Bekker to hear. “I wonder how he lost the money in the State’s skatkis. Playing snakes and ladders, I suppose.”

  All the same, there were those of us who were much interested in Oupa Bekker’s statement. Johnny Coen moved his chair closer to Oupa Bekker, then. Even though Ohrigstad had been only a small republic, and hadn’t lasted very long, still there was something about the sound of the words “Minister of Finance” that could not but awaken in us a sense of awe.