FictionThatMatters.org

Mafeking Road
by Herman Charles Bosman
Archipelago, 2008. 201 pages.
(First printed in 1947 by Herman & Rousseau)

For it is not the story that counts. What matters is the way you tell it. The important thing is to know just at what moment you must knock out your pipe on your veldskoen, and at what stage of the story you must start talking about the School Committee at Drogevlei. Another necessary thing is to know what part of the story to leave out… And you can never learn these things.

So begins “Mafeking Road”, the title story in a classic collection by the South African writer Herman Charles Bosman. The passage is at once a challenge to aspiring storytellers and a charming exposition of the author’s craft. It’s true, you can’t learn these things. Certainly not by imitation or force of will. But by reading Bosman you can get a whole lot closer. And you’ll do it laughing.

Mafeking Road is set in the Groot Marico district of the Northern Cape Province, an arid region that now shares a border with Botswana. The stories depict the Afrikaaner settler community, with their lives rich in superstition, longing, violence, and love. The land is populated by leopards and bluegum trees. The women wear bonnets and the farmers would rather drink peach brandy than tend to their cattle. There is the tale of a young woman who falls for a criminal, a leopard that sniffs at a farmer’s shoe, a young police officer who sneaks through the dark for a love potion, and the brutal warfare between the Afrikaaners and the indigenous Africans, the Afrikaaners and the English, and, it seems, everyone else.

When you meet a leopard in the veld, unexpectedly, you seldom trouble to count his spots to find out what kind he belongs to. That is unnecessary. Because whatever kind of leopard it is that you come across in this way, you do only one kind of running. And that is the fastest kind.

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Herman Charles Bosman (1905-1951) was born and raised in the Western Cape region of South Africa. He learned English and Afrikaans – a language that is about 80 percent Dutch, with the rest a mix of indigenous languages and Malay – before working as a school teacher in the Groot Marico district of his stories. He then served prison time for shooting his step-brother during a heated argument and traveled the world before settling in Johannesburg.

Bosman was a contemporary with Ernest Hemingway, but his imprint upon South African literature is more akin to that of Mark Twain. Hemingway’s safari tales The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1935) and The Green Hills of Africa (1936), captured a mixture of colonial ambition and frustration. His characters were typically outsiders, usually Americans in East Africa, who swooped into the continent to extract game and trophies and somehow reconcile their spoils with American life.

Bosman’s stories, on the other hand, capture the spirit of the white settler communities. These were not people swooping in for sport, but staking a claim in a land that was clearly not theirs to begin with, but through a centuries-old mixture of spilled blood and religion, came to believe it to be so. Bosman’s characters have no plans to return anywhere.

Perhaps that is why it is safer to say that Bosman was like Twain, for living amongst the people of South Africa – and let’s be clear, living amongst the white people of South Africa – gave him the patience to discern nuances in the community. He had the patience to acknowledge conflicting points of view, and in so doing, captured Twain’s irony. The stories in Mafeking Road often contrast two passions. This can be love and hate, fear and longing – what have you — and the two conflicting points leave a kind of residue. Our natural response to this residue seems to be to smile. In Mafeking Road we long for the next tapping of the narrator’s pipe on his veldskoen boot:

Of course, as a burgher of the Republic, I knew what my duty was. And that was to get as far away as I could from the place where, in the sunset, I had last seen English artillery. The other burghers knew their duty also.

Race in Mafeking Road

It is tempting to end the review here. But that would allow the romantic image of Bosman’s writing to remain without the human rights reality that FictionthatMatters.org seeks to understand. Injecting racial politics into any reading of South African literature can be dangerous and misleading.

But the fact is that Mafeking Road is infused with racial distinctions. Entire storylines such as “Marico Scandal” hinge upon whether a person is white or black. The text is full of references to indigenous Africans as ‘kaffirs’. Today there is little doubt that the term equates to ‘nigger’ but historically it is not so clear. Derived from the Arabic word for ‘heathen’, kaffir described all indigenous Africans. At the time of Bosman’s writing the term may have meant something akin to ‘negro’ but it is difficult to deny the ‘otherness’ of the word and the inherent power relationships that it embodied (master-servant).

The story “Makepan’s Caves”, for example, depicts the loving and tragic relationship between a young Afrikaaner man and his adopted indigenous servant, Nongaas. Nongaas is treated like chattel and at best rises to the level of a pet. (As an experiment, substitute the word ‘dog’ for ‘Nongaas’ and you will see that the story works well, perhaps even better than before.)

Bosman lovers (and lovers of literature) observe that Mafeking Road is told from the standpoint of an Afrikaaner character. The character is the racist and not the author, according to this view, and there are several passages that suggest the narrator Oom Schalk Lourens is puzzled by the more virulent racists of his community. But just as it is not fair to judge Bosman according to contemporary standards, it is not fair to inject too much omniscience into Bosman as an author. Bosman may have laced his texts with irony but that does not mean he was race conscious or functioned beyond the prevailing attitudes of his day. His stories contain unbalanced remarks that may have been the author’s own views, and there are outright inaccuracies and romanticisms of Africans. (The ‘Telegraph Drumming’, for example, in a region where no such drumming existed.) There is a scant historical record about Bosman’s thoughts on race – just a few quotes here or there.

Read the Book Anyway

Either way, Bosman’s stories are laced with such charm that if you love literature you can’t help but laugh at Oom Schalk Lourens smoking his pipe. It’s up to you whether to probe deeper.

I had few regrets when I left South Africa, but one of them was not buying a collection of Bosman’s stories. I had borrowed an old edition of Mafeking Road for so long that I had started to believe it was mine – until I had to move house. How wonderful, then, that Archipelago has produced another beautiful edition of this work. The soft, thick paper and pliant cover are just like the dog-eared pages of the old editions circulating throughout the Cape. Pick one up and enjoy.

–Deji Olukotun

For an excellent paper that probes into Bosman’s use of irony and a very informative discussion of race in his stories, download Rebecca Davis’ paper here. (And if you are Rebecca Davis, please contact me!)