LITMIR.BIZ

      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).