Herman Charles Bosman’s work is now all being reissued in a definitive edition. Craig MacKenzie describes his work on Mafeking Road
Recently, as the editor of the journal English in Africa, I published there for the first time a remarkable exchange of letters between the post- war giants of South African letters – Herman Charles Bosman in Johannesburg and the poet Roy Campbell, then working in London as a talks producer at the BBC. What came to light amounted to something of a literary scandal.
Their subject was Bosman’s first volume of stories – his classic bestseller, Mafeking Road – which Campbell had just discovered and was having broadcast. Bosman was aggrieved at the number of errors and cuts that marred the text, and confided to his older admirer: “My stories in Mafeking Road now only appear in mutilated form. In the end, perhaps the picture is not much affected. But I am acutely conscious of this.”
Campbell offered to compensate by finding Bosman a British publisher, which would have afforded the opportunity of typesetting Mafeking Road afresh. Nothing ever came of this and two years later Bosman was dead. So the book was left to steer its own course through the numerous editions and impressions since 1947. This has meant that one of South Africa’s best-loved collections of stories has continued to appear in a form lamented by the author himself.
Somewhat startled by Bosman’s heartfelt complaint, I began investigating the matter. It turned out that The Rooinek, Bosman’s classic tale about the Boer War, was the story most defaced by the errors. Between them, the first two editions of Mafeking Road omitted two crucial sentences and changed a third significantly. Six salient words were also omitted and one erroneously introduced, and seven mistakes of punctuation were made. When Bosman remarked to Campbell that pieces of stories “were cut as if for reasons of space”, he no doubt had this example in mind.
Such cuts have meant, over all these years, that the reader has been unaware that Oom Schalk Lourens is certain of hitting the defiant redcoat who gets off his horse to rescue his wounded comrade in the opening passage of the story (the sentence “At that distance I couldn’t miss” has always been dropped).
When the Boer families which have embarked on their desperate trek across the Kalahari kneel down in prayer, what is foremost in the Englishman’s mind is the fate of, not himself, but a Boer baby (“The Englishman knelt down beside me, and I noticed that he shivered when Gerhardus mentioned Koos Steyn’s child” has been omitted).
At the end, when the survivors return to search for the Steyn family, it is the Englishman’s presence among the corpses that is pointedly stressed (“Near them the Englishman lay, face downwards” has been lost). Such lacunae have meant that the outstanding qualities of this enemy Englishman (bravery, loyalty) came to be underplayed. Not only have important nuances simply gone missing, but Bosman’s point about judging a man by his deeds has also been lost.
Further investigation revealed that not one of the 21 stories in Mafeking Road had been spared this process of corruption. Although other errors were less misleading, their cumulative effect was to degrade a collection which is surely deserving of better treatment.
Having established the fact that the text of Mafeking Road would require wholesale re-editing, my next task was to reconstruct the chain of events that led to this state of affairs.
It turned out that haste and over- eagerness on Bosman’s part had started it. He was unexpectedly approached by the CNA to compile a collection of his Bushveld stories in 1946 – nearly 15 years after he himself had broached the idea and had been flatly turned down. He now resorted to the only copies of the stories available to him – the printed versions as they originally appeared in The Touleier and The South African Opinion in the 1930s and 1940s, only some of which he had recently reworked. Hurriedly compiling a “manuscript” of relevant pages from these periodicals, he did not give it a thorough checking for accuracy, consistency of spelling and the like.
But then the problems proliferated with the publisher’s copy-editors and typesetters turning this “manuscript” into a book. While failing to correct the printers’ blips already present, they added further errors and cuts which were in many cases more serious. By the time the paperback edition appeared in 1949, nearly 100 errors had been introduced into the text. Little wonder that the meticulous Bosman was distressed and so desperate to find an overseas publisher.
In retrospect, it is clear that no one treated the text with sufficient respect. After all, who was Herman Charles Bosman in 1947? Did anyone think Krisjan Lemmer, the biggest liar in the Marico, would so catch on?
More surprising is that the process of corruption was allowed to continue even after Bosman began to receive the recognition that was his due. Generations of copy-editors since his death have indeed attempted to tidy up the book, but, as it turns out, have only introduced yet further errors. Although there have been no fewer than three resettings of Mafeking Road since 1949, there is no evidence that any systematic attempt has been made to fulfil Bosman’s desire to restore the stories.
Mafeking Road and Other Stories now appears as its author intended at last, as part of what Human & Rousseau are calling the anniversary edition of the definitive works. Planning for the series began 50 years after its first appearance, and the target date for completing the project is 2005, the 100th anniversary of his birth.