PAYSAGE DE LA HIGHVELD I
by Herman Charles Bosman
During the past weeks I have been living on a farm on the Muldersdrift Road, thirteen miles out of town. A private bus passes the farm at about six o’clock in the morning, on the way to the city. At that hour it is still dark, and it is not always easy to distinguish, from the glare of their headlights, between the bus and the farm trucks carrying agricultural produce to market. Consequently, since there are no regular bus stops on the route, I have to describe the accepted hitchhiker’s arc with my thumb each time I see headlights. Sometimes, when I have signalled a lorry, and the vehicle happens to draw up, I get a lift as far as Newtown.
The fascination of driving along the country roads on the outskirts of Johannesburg in the early dawn has not yet begun to pall on me. And I have several times wondered why our South African artists don’t paint the early morning landscape more often. When the koppies and the valleys are swimming in mists. And plantations are dark masses with soft grey light behind them. And the blurred horisons are wrapped in theology. Instead of which, our painters almost invariably limit themselves to canvases of landscapes in the full glare of day or with flamboyant sunrise or sunset effects. Perhaps they leave that part of the day alone – that part of the day before the sky is red – because it is so much more difficult to catch those griseous tones, leaden and ashen-silver tints and neutral greens, and patches that are the colour of doves’ wings; it is not just anybody that can cover a canvas with different kinds of slatey greys and still not make the thing look like a night scene. It takes a real artist to paint a landscape in dun shades – and yet to reveal it as a world filled with morning’s clean light.
It is also difficult to get that particular part of the morning onto canvas because it is an effect that doesn’t stay very long. In about ten minutes’ time the sky is streaked with crimson and the magic of the grey light is gone, and you are left with the orthodox ‘Sunrise on the Veld’. Another reason why paintings of the misty pre-sunrise morning are rare in South African art is because it is hard for the South African artist to get up that early.
Marico Revisited I
by Herman Charles Bosman
A month ago I revisited the Marico Bushveld, a district in the Transvaal to which I was sent, a long time ago, as a schoolteacher, and about which part of the country I have written, in the years that followed, a number of simple stories which I believe, in all modesty, are not without a certain degree of literary merit.
On the train that night on my way back to the Bushveld, I came across a soldier who said to me, ‘As soon as I’m out of this uniform, I’m going back to cattle-smuggling.’
These words thrilled me. A number of my stories have dealt with the time-honoured Marico custom of smuggling cattle across the frontier of the Bechuanaland Protectorate. So I asked whether cattle smuggling still went on. ‘More than ever,’ the soldier informed me. He looked out of the train window into the dark. ‘And I’ll tell you that at this moment, as I’m sitting here talking to you, there is somebody bringing in cattle through the wire.’
I was very glad to hear this. I was glad to find that the only part of my stories that could have dated had not done so. It is only things indirectly connected with economics that can change. Droughts and human nature don’t.
Next morning we were in Mafeking. Mafeking is outside the Transvaal. It is about twenty miles inside the borders of the Northern Cape. And to proceed to Ramoutsa, a native village in the Bechuanaland Protectorate which is the nearest point on the railway line to the part of the Groot Marico to which we wanted to go, we had first to get a permit from the immigration official in Mafeking. All this seemed very confusing, somehow. We merely wanted to travel from Johannesburg to an area in the north-western Transvaal, and in order to get there it turned out that we had first to cross into the Cape Province, and that from the Cape we had to travel through the Bechuanaland Protectorate, which is a Crown Colony, and which you can’t enter until an immigration official has first telephoned Pretoria about it.
We reached Ramoutsa late in the afternoon.
From there we travelled to the Marico by car. Within the hour we had crossed the border into the Transvaal. We were once more on Transvaal soil, for which we were, naturally, homesick, having been exiles in foreign parts from since early morning. So the moment we crossed the barbed-wire fence separating the Bechuanaland Protectorate from the Marico, we stopped the car and got out onto the veld. We said it was fine to set foot on Transvaal soil once more. And we also said that while it was a good thing to travel through foreign countries, which we had been doing since six o’clock that morning, and that foreign travel had a broadening effect on the mind, we were glad that our heads had not been turned by these experiences, and that we had not permitted ourselves to be influenced by alien modes of life and thought.
We travelled on through the bush over stony paths that were little more than tracks going in between the trees and underneath their branches, the thorns tearing at the windscreen and the hood of the car in the same way as they had done years ago, when I had first visited the Marico. I was glad to find that nothing had changed.
Dusk found us in the shadow of the Dwarsberge, not far from our destination, and we came across a spot on the veld that I recognised. It was one of the stations at which the bi-weekly Government lorry from Zeerust stopped on its way up towards the Limpopo. How the lorry-drivers knew that this place was a station, years ago, was through the presence of a large anthill, into the crest of which a pair of kudu antlers had been thrust. That spot had not changed. The anthill was still surmounted by what looked like that same pair of kudu horns. The station had not grown perceptibly in the intervening years. The only sign of progress was that, in addition to the horns on its summit, the anthill was further decorated with a rusty milk-can from which the bottom had been knocked out.
And so I arrived back in that part of the country to which the Transvaal Education Department in its wisdom had sent me years before. There is no other place I know that is so heavy with atmosphere, so strangely and darkly impregnated with that stuff of life that bears the authentic stamp of South Africa.
Marico Revisited II
by Herman Charles Bosman
There were features about the Marico Bushveld that were almost too gaudy. That part of the country had been practically derelict since the Anglo-Boer War and the rinderpest. Many of the farms north of the Dwarsberge had been occupied little more than ten years before by farmers who had trekked into the Marico from the Northern Cape and the Western Transvaal. The farmers there were real Boers.
I am told that I have a deep insight into the character of the Afrikaner who lives his life on the platteland. I acquired this knowledge in the Marico, where I was sent when my mind was most open to impressions.
Then there was the bush. Thorn-trees. Withaaks and kameeldorings. The kremetart-boom. Swarthaak and blinkblaar and wag-’n-bietjie. Moepels and maroelas. The sun-baked vlakte and the thorn tree and South Africa. Trees are more than vegetation and more than symbols and more than pallid sentimentality. Nevertheless, what the oak and the ash and the cypress are to Europe, the thorn-tree is to South Africa. And if laurel and myrtle and bay are for chaplet and wreath, thorns are for a crown.
The bush was populated with kudus and cows and duikers and steenbokkies and oxen and gemsbok and donkeys and occasional leopards. There were also ribbokke in the krantzes and green and brown mambas, of which hair-raising stories were told, and mules that were used to pull cars because it was an unhealthy area for horses. Mules were also used for telling hair-raising stories about.
And the sunsets in the Marico Bushveld are incredible things, heavily striped like prison bars and flamboyant like African blankets.
Then there were boreholes, hundreds of feet deep, from which water had to be pumped by hand into the cattle-troughs in times of drought. And there was a Bechuana chief who had once been to London, where he had been received in audience by His Majesty, George V, a former English king; and when, on departing from Buckingham Palace, he had been questioned by the High Commissioner as to what form the conversation had taken, he had replied, very simply, this Bechuana chief, ‘We kings know what to discuss.’
There were occasional visits from Dutch Reformed Church predikants. And a few meetings of the Dwarsberg Debatsvereniging. And there were several local feuds. For I was to find that while the bush was of infinite extent, and the farms very many miles apart, the paths through the thorn-trees were narrow.
It was to this part of the country, the northern section of the Marico Bushveld, where the Transvaal ends and the Bechuanaland Protectorate begins, that I returned for a brief visit after an absence of many years. And I found, what I should have known all along, of course, that it was the present that was haunted, and that the past was not full of ghosts. The phantoms are what you carry around with you, in your head, like you carry dreams under your arm.
And when you revisit old scenes it is yourself, as you were in the past, that you encounter, and if you are in love with yourself – as everybody should be in love with himself, since it is only in that way, as Christ pointed out, that a man can love his neighbour – then there is a sweet sadness in a meeting of this description. There is the gentle melancholy of the twilight, dark eyes in faces upturned in a trancelike pallor. And fragrances. And thoughts like soft rain falling on old tombstones.
When I first went to the Marico it was in that season when the moepels were nearly ripening. And when I returned, years later, it was to find that the moepels in the Marico were beginning to ripen again.
Our Brandy
I make bold to say that our best wine brandy can compete with the very best foreign types – even the famous cognacs from the Charente region in France – and do not have to stand back for them at all.
A lot of nonsense is spoken about ‘old brandy’. ... It is not practical to keep brandy in the vat too long, for it evaporates, and a small vat of brandy will be bone-dry after ten years. It is therefore clear that no brandy can stay in a vat for a hundred years; and it is equally clear that a ‘Napoleon-brandy’ from 1815, that has been kept in a bottle, will today be no better than it was then. We have brandy today that is considerably better than that of earlier times.
The truth is that very old brandy is just about undrinkable, because it is so saturated with ethereal salt and volatile acids that it will burn your mouth and lips. A small quantity of such a very old brandy is used to blend a good, younger one – it gives the younger liquid more body and a pleasant bouquet, aftertaste and oiliness. Such additives should, however, be used with the utmost care, for the ‘blending’ of brandy is a matter for the connoisseur. It is therefore done exclusively by the experts attached to the large firms.
For the normal afficionado, a good wine brandy of about ten to twelve years is just as good and tasty as a much more expensive one blended with an age-old liquid, be it imported or local. We now have many such good brandies on the market, and you can get them from any wine merchant. Try the different kinds. Pour a few drops of each into a dry wine glass – it is by no means necessary to use a large ‘brandy glass’ – and sample each, first with your nose and tongue. Warm the glass between your hands to cause the volatile acids to evaporate. Do not pay too much attention to the colour, unless it is too dark – the colour will in most cases have been enhanced by adding burnt sugar or something like that, which will not influence the taste very much. Too light a colour may make you suspect that the brandy has not matured for long enough in oaken vats, but your tongue and palate will be a better guide than your eye. Now taste the warmed liquid; ‘feel’ it on your tongue, and let it warm further – so that the back of the palate can taste the flavour. Try to judge the extent to which the taste is even, oily and without bite, but still has a pleasant tingle. Then swallow and savour the aftertaste. Take a small sip of water, and try another sample in the same way; and decide according to your own taste which brandy you prefer.
Now squirt a few drops of soda water in one of the glasses, and try again. See which of the different samples passes the ‘mixture test’. A first-class brandy will immediately impart its good qualities to the mixture; its flavour will be, as it were, germinated by the carbon hydroxide; its tingling taste will be strengthened to a certain extent. On the other hand, you will, if you have a sensitive palate, immediately spot the lesser kind – that which still has some volatile acids that a good brandy should have given up to the wood of the vat. A subtle change in the aftertaste indicates the presence of the secondary wine spirit – a touch of ‘bitterness’ might then even be noticed. Now compare your observations during the ‘mixture test’ with those made when tasting the pure liquid, and make your choice.
The brandy you like most is the one that will best agree with you. Don’t be impressed by labels or advertisements – make your choice according to your own taste. And then treat your choice with love and understanding. Enjoy it in moderation, preferably after a good lunch or supper, with or after coffee if you like it in its naked purity. Otherwise, again in moderation, with clean spring water, or, if you prefer, soda water. And on a cold winter’s evening, when the wind is howling outside and you are sure that your lambs are safely protected in the kraal, with warm water, a piece of cinnamon, a lump of sugar and a flake of lemon peel, as a warm drink.
10 September 1943
Street Processions – An Extract
For almost as long as I can remember, street processions have been in my blood. When I see a long line of people marching through the streets – the longer the line, the better I like it – something primordial gets stirred inside me and I am overtaken by the urge to fall in also, and take my place somewhere near the end of the procession. And it’s been like that with me all my life. There is something about the sight and the thought of a long line of people marching through the streets of a city that fills me with an awe I can’t easily define. It has got to be through a city; a procession through a village or over the veld wouldn’t be the same thing.
The ideal conditions for a procession are grey skies and wet streets. And there should be a drizzle. My tastes don’t run to the extremes of a blizzard or a tropical downpour. Thunder and lightening effects are out of place. All you want is a steady drip-drip of fine rain that makes everything look bleak and dismal, without the comfortable abandonment of utter desolation. Then through these drab streets there must come trailing a long line of humanity, walking three or four abreast, their boots muddy and their clothes (by preference) shabby and shapeless in the rain, and their faces a grey pallor. They can sing a little, too, if they like, to try and cheer themselves up – without ever succeeding, of course. And in this sombre trudging of thousands of booted feet on cobbles or tarred road, there goes my heart, also. I get gripped with an intense feeling of being one with stupid, struggling, rotten, heroic humanity, and in this grey march there is a heavy symbolism whose elements I don’t try to interpret for fear that the parts should together be less than the whole; and I find myself, contrary to all the promptings of good sense and reason, yielding to the urge to try and find a place for myself somewhere near the tail-end of the procession.
Oh, and of course, there is another thing, something I had almost forgotten, and that is the cause operating as the dynamism for getting a procession of this description organised and under way. Frankly, I don’t think the cause matters very much. I have a natural predilection for an unpopular cause and, above all, for a forlorn cause – a lost hope, and whether this peculiar idiosyncrasy of mine springs from ordinary perversity, or from a nobility of soul, is something I have not been able to ascertain. And so, while I always feel that it is very nice, and all that, if the march is undertaken by the participants in a spirit of lofty idealism, because a very important principle is at stake, I am equally satisfied – provided that the muddy boots and the grey skies are present – if the spiritual factors behind the demonstration are not so very high or altruistic.
The last time I marched in a procession was as recently as last Saturday afternoon. I was on my way home when, from the top of the Malvern tram, I spotted in front of Jeppe Station a street procession in the course of formation. I could see straight away that the conditions were just right. It was drizzling. The streets were wet and grey and muddy. The sky was bleak and cheerless. I prepared to alight. Unfortunately, however, the tram was very crowded, with the result that I wasn’t able to get off before the Berg Street stop. From there I took another tram back to Jeppe Station, arriving there just as the procession was moving off. I took my place somewhere near the rear. We marched in a northerly direction and swung into Commissioner Street. Trudge. Trudge. Drizzle. Mud. Wet boots and shapeless clothes. I didn’t ask what the procession was about. I didn’t want to reveal my ignorance and chance getting sneered at. I’d been sneered at by a procession before, and I don’t like it.
Sherry – An Extract
It is customary – justifiably, in my view – to have something to drink before dinner. Our forefathers have done so from time immemorial. A pimpeltjie of wine before the meal was the expression in the old days, when that seaman’s term still had currency. Today, nobody knows what a pimpeltjie is. But when I was young, the old ayahs in the cool deep-shade of the vegetable market that used to be one of the sights of Cape Town used that term for what we would now call a pierinkievol; they also spoke of a pimpeltjie when referring to a ‘small bunch’ of something. But originally a pimpeltjie was a measure of wine, a small glass taken before the meal.
From a health point of view, there is something to be said for having a sip of wine before the main meal of the day. It is not just that alcohol stimulates the stomach to produce its digestive juices, but probably also the way in which the amino acids and oils in the wine enable you, twenty minutes later, to appreciate good food better.
The question, then, is not whether to drink, but what to drink. Definitely not those heavy mixtures of fortified wines, liqueurs, gins, Canadian grain-spirits, English beer-brandies, or even Russian vodkas, and absolutely not the one-hundred-and-three variations of the American cocktail. They spoil your sense of taste and ruin your appetite. The only possible exception – but I would question even that – is the mixture consisting of one-third lime juice and two-thirds first-class Bols.
No, the very best drink before dinner is a small glass of genuine sherry. It contains everything you need for the preparatory stimulation of the stomach lining, and too little alcohol to have a damaging effect on the appetite. Sherry it is, then.
Sherry is a wine that can be exposed to the air without harm. Indeed, it is preferable to uncork a bottle of sherry a few hours before drinking it, and it should be enjoyed at room temperature, which is sufficient to enable the oily taste to come fully into its own. The unfalsified fino – almost colourless, aromatic, bone-dry, and bitter without any trace of brackishness – is not easy to get hold of. You need to be able to coax it from the KWV.
The excellence of sherry is due to the quality of its various components, the most important being the oils, fatty acids and amino acids, and the least important the alcohol content. It is a wine that should be sipped slowly and emphatically, preferably on its own. As a table wine I recommend it just before the meal, possibly with soup (unless the taste of the soup is too floury – so not with a purée), and possibly even with a fish like barracuda or yellowtail. It does not go with anything sugary, and it is far too proud of its own flavour to keep the inferior company of fruit and walnuts – its own nuttiness and its own fruity oils are sufficient, thank you very much.
Enjoy it therefore as a pimpeltjie before the meal – preferably not the sweet variety – or as a drink on its own, for which the oleroso, darker, or semi-sweet varieties are best. Try it at about eleven in the morning, especially on a beautiful sunny day when the vygies are blossoming and the sheaves of wheat are being brought in from the fields.
29 May 1942
The One and Only Coen Brits
From Trekking On - in the company of brave men
by Deneys Reitz
During the 1914 Rebellion
General Botha was still in the west, and for the moment old Coen Brits was in charge. I reported to him, and he greeted me with a slash of his rawhide sjambok, which was his idea of a military salute. He was an amusing character. He stood six foot six inches, did not know a word of English, drank enormous quantities of alcohol without turning a hair, and was celebrated throughout the Transvaal for his racy wit and Rabelaisian stories. But he was a good soldier. He had fought with skill and courage on the Republican side during the Anglo-Boer War, and General Botha was the only man who had any influence over him. When Botha wired him to mobilise his men for the South-West expedition, he wired back to say he was ready, but wanted to know whether he had to fight the Germans or the British. He was quite prepared to do either, for he worshipped Botha, and obeyed him blindly.
There was a Scotchman with me who owned a set of bagpipes, which he played around our campfires at night, and old Coen apparently took this to be a Scottish religious observance. One morning a Dutch Reformed clergyman wrote for permission to address the men. Coen, who was somewhat of a pagan, replied that he didn’t want any preaching in his camp and, turning to me, said that as he had forbidden the predikant to come, he must be fair as between the sects, and I was to stop that damned Scotchman of mine from playing the bagpipes!
German South-West Africa
General Botha ordered me to report for duty to Coen Brits, so Ruiter and I went to find him at Karibib, where the old man greeted me with the usual cut of his sjambok by way of welcome.
Old Coen was as genial and entertaining as ever. He provided me with a horse, and I rode to and fro on long journeys, carrying orders to outlying posts. Once there came a telegram for him from a Union citizen of bibulous habits, offering his services. Coen wired back: ‘Don’t come; all the liquor there is in South-West Africa I can drink myself.’
I was told that on the march from the coast his supply of alcohol had given out, and the only available bottle in his brigade was found to belong to a soldier. Coen was told that, as a brigadier, he was not supposed to drink with a private, but he easily overcame this difficulty, for he promoted the owner to second-lieutenant, and after the two of them had emptied the bottle, he reverted the man back to the ranks, satisfied that military conventions had been properly observed.
