Mafeking Road and Other Stories

The stories in Mafeking Road are set in the Transvaal region of what is now South Africa at the turn of the 20th century, when the local Boer population were at war with the British in a conflict that is known as the Boer War. The British were seeking to re-establish that part of southern Africa as a British colony, following a brief period of independence, and the characters of Mafeking Road, live their lives against the background of this war and its aftermath.

The stories are related by Oom Schalk Lourens—the self-anointed best storyteller in the Groot-Marico district—a typical slave-owning Boer farmer, who is one of the great characters in modern literature. Schalk is indolent, self-important, meddling, petty, strategically tactful, and, yes, a great storyteller, and his stories both point to the universal in the small community of farmers who work this remote and harsh land—their unevenly fervent religious life, their loves and losses and jealousies, their complaints about the weather and shopkeepers and lazy workers—and to the specificity of the way these universals are lived in the unique environment of the Transvaal.

Each of Schalk’s stories are oral stories, recorded, as it appears, by the author, and each opens in a similar fashion, as seen here in “Veld Maiden”: “I know what it is—Oom Schalk Lourens said—when you talk that way about the veld.” They generally move quickly to a brief summation of what is going to happen in the stories, a summation that acts almost as a preemptive, ironic moral to the story, and they tend to end with a dramatic twist, sometimes one that is only apparent in the final sentence of the story.

This narrative structure is used to maximum effect by Bosman, and it’s remarkably flexible, giving him a distance from Schalk and the stories that allows him to comment on the characters and their situation without having to say anything at all. Quoting again from “Veld Maiden,” we see that Schalk tells his story as he sees it, but this collection clearly doesn’t exhaust his store, and it’s the author who has decided which ones get recorded:

I know what it is—Oom Schalk Lourens said—when you talk that way about the veld. I have known people who sit like you do and dream about the veld, and talk strange things, and start believing in what they call the soul of the veld, until in the end the veld means a different thing to them from what it does to me.

I only know that the veld can be used for growing mealies on, and it isn’t very good for that, either. Also, it means very hard work for me, growing mealies. There is the ploughing, for instance. I used to get aches in my back and shoulders from sitting on a stone all day long on the edge of the lands, watching the kaffirs and the oxen and the plough going up and down, making furrows. Hans Coetzee, who was a Boer War prisoner at St. Helena, told me how he got sick at sea from watching the ship going up and down, up and down, all the time.

And it’s the same with the ploughing. The only real cure for this ploughing sickness is to sit quietly on a riempies bench on the stoep with one’s legs raised slightly, drinking coffee until the ploughing season is over. Most of the farmers in the Marico Bushveld have adopted this remedy, as you have no doubt observed by this time.

The stories in Mafeking Road move between comedy and tragedy, often several times within the same story, and they detail loves lost, or lovers lost, or tragicomic encounters with the British, or family dramas, but each of the stories is masterfully executed and wonderfully written, and achieve their effects almost magically.

Mafeking Road and Other Stories
by Herman Charles Bosman
201 pages, $15.00
978-0-9793330-6-4
Archipelago Books