His work abounds in murders, hangings and incarcerations, some notable instances occurring in his novel Willemsdorp (1977) and his stories The Gramophone and The Widow from Mafeking Road (1947). He typically used mordant humour to leaven such weighty subject matter.
Bosman himself escaped the rope after being convicted for murdering his stepbrother in 1926. His prison mugshot of the time (used on the cover of the new anniversary edition of his powerful prison memoir Cold Stone Jug) shows the 21-year-old smiling whimsically into the camera — a cool pose indeed for someone who has a date with the hangman. In the event, he was reprieved and ended up serving four years in Pretoria Central Prison.
In the course of my research last year into the Bosman papers at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Centre in Austin, Texas, I came across a completely unknown prison story in manuscript form. Bosman’s cramped hand and the number of untidy revisions littering the manuscripts possibly put other researchers off attempting to determine whether the 24 yellowed pages contained a complete story.
Weeks of work proved that there was indeed a complete story there, and the result is The Old Potchefstroom Gaol. None of the three manuscript versions contained the complete tale, and the story therefore had to be stitched together from these fragments. Inconsistencies were ironed out (characters’ names, and the timing of events, for instance) and a coherent story fashioned.
Although considerable editorial intervention was thus required in order to create a complete version of this story, all of the words in it (with the exception of the title, which I provided) are Bosman’s own.
The Old Potchefstroom Gaol has recently been released alongside 19 other Oom Schalk Lourens tales in a new title from Human & Rousseau, Seed-time and Harvest and Other Stories. The collection contains another previously unpublished story, The Ghost at the Drift, and several other uncollected and barely known stories.
Professor Craig MacKenzie is Chair of the English Department at the Rand Afrikaans University. He and Stephen Gray are general editors of the anniversary edition of Herman Charles Bosman