Psycho-Analysis I
by Herman Charles Bosman
‘Koos Nienaber got a letter from his daughter, Minnie, last week,’ Jurie Steyn announced to several of us sitting in his voorkamer, that served as the Drogevlei post office. ‘It’s two years now that she’s been working in an office in Johannesburg. You wouldn’t think it. Two years …’
‘What was in the letter?’ At Naudé asked, coming to the point.
‘Well,’ Jurie Steyn began, ‘Minnie says that …’
Jurie Steyn was quick to sense our amusement.
‘If that’s how you carry on,’ he announced, ‘I won’t tell you anything. I know what you’re all thinking, laughing in that silly way. Well, just let one of you try and be postmaster, like me, in between milking and ploughing and getting the wrong statements from the creamery and the pigs rooting up the sweet potatoes – not to talk about the calving season, even – and then see how much time you’ll have left over for steaming open and reading other people’s letters.’
Johnny Coen, who was young and more than a little interested in Minnie Nienaber, hastened to set Jurie Steyn’s mind at rest.
‘You know, we make the same sort of joke about every postmaster in the Bushveld,’ Johnny Coen said. ‘We don’t mean anything by it. It’s a very old joke.’
~
‘It must be that Koos Nienaber told you what was in his daughter’s letter,’ Johnny Coen said. ‘Koos Nienaber must have come round here and told you. Otherwise you would never have known, I mean. You couldn’t possibly have known.’
That was what had happened, Jurie Steyn acknowledged.
Thereupon Jurie Steyn acquainted us in detail with the contents of Minnie Nienaber’s letter, as retailed to him by her father, Koos Nienaber.
~
‘Koos says that Minnie has been,’ Jurie Steyn said, ‘has been – well, just a minute – oh yes, here it is – I got old Koos Nienaber to write it down for me – she’s been psycho … psycho-analysed. Here it is, written down and all –sielsontleding.’
I won’t deny that we were all much impressed. It was something we had never heard of before. Jurie Steyn saw the effect his statement had had on us.
‘Yes,’ he repeated, sure of himself – and more sure of the word, too, now – ‘Yes, in the gold-mining city of Johannesburg, Minnie Nienaber got psycho-analysed.’
After a few moments of silence, Gysbert van Tonder made himself heard. Gysbert often spoke out of turn, that way.
‘Well, it’s not the first time a thing like that has happened to a girl living in Johannesburg on her own,’ Gysbert said. ‘One thing, the door of her parents’ home will always remain open for her. But I’m surprised at old Koos Nienaber mentioning it to you. He’s usually so proud.’
I noticed that Johnny Coen looked crestfallen for a moment, until Jurie Steyn made haste to explain that it didn’t mean that at all.
According to what Koos Nienaber told him – Jurie Steyn said – it had become fashionable in Johannesburg for people to go and be attended to by a new sort of doctor, who didn’t worry about how sick your body was, but saw to it that he got your mind right. This kind of doctor could straighten out anything that was wrong with your mind, Jurie Steyn explained. And you didn’t have to be sick, even, to go along and get yourself treated by a doctor like that. It was a very fashionable thing to do, Jurie Steyn added. Johnny Coen looked relieved.
‘According to what Koos Nienaber told me,’ Jurie Steyn said, ‘this new kind of doctor doesn’t test your heart any more, by listening through that rubber tube thing. Instead, he just asks you what you dreamt last night. And then he works it all out with a dream book. But it’s not just an ordinary dream book that says if you dreamt last night of a herd of cattle, it means that there is grave peril ahead for some person that you haven’t met yet …’
‘Well, I dreamt a couple of nights ago that I was driving a lot of Afrikaner cattle across the Bechuanaland Protectorate border,’ Fritz Pretorius said. ‘Just like I have often done, on a night when there isn’t much of a moon. Only, what was funny about my dream was that I dreamt I was smuggling the cattle into the Protectorate, instead of out of it. Can you imagine a Marico farmer doing a foolish thing like that? I suppose this dream means that I’m going mad or something.’
~
After At Naudé had said how surprised he was that Fritz Pretorius should have to be told in a dream what everybody knew about him in any case – and after Fritz Pretorius’s invitation to At Naudé to come and repeat that remark outside the post office had come to nothing – Jurie Steyn went on to explain further about what the new kind of treatment was that Minnie Nienaber was receiving from a new kind of doctor in Johannesburg, and that she had no need for.
‘It’s not the ordinary kind of dream book, like that Napoleon dream book on which my wife set so much store before we got married,’ Jurie Steyn continued. ‘It’s a dream book written by professors. Minnie has been getting all sorts of fears, lately. Just silly sorts of fears, her father says. Nothing to worry about. I suppose anybody from the Groot Marico who has stayed in Johannesburg as long as Minnie Nienaber would get frightened in the same way.
‘What puzzles me is only that it took her so long to start getting frightened.’
Marico Stars, Marico Moon, Marico Lovers
by Herman Charles Bosman
There is a queer witchery about the moon when it is full – Oom Schalk Lourens remarked – especially the moon that hangs over the valley of the Dwarsberge in the summertime. It does strange things to your mind, the Marico moon, and in your heart are wild and fragrant fancies, and your thoughts go very far away. Then, if you have been sitting on your front stoep, thinking these thoughts, you sigh and murmer something about the way of the world, and carry your chair inside.
I have seen the moon in other places besides the Marico. But it is not the same there.
Braam Venter, the man who fell off the Government lorry once, near Nietverdiend, says that the Marico moon is like a woman laying green flowers on a grave. Braam Venter often says things like that. Particularly since the time he fell off the lorry. He fell on his head, they say.
Always when the moon shines full like that, it does something to our hearts that we wonder very much about and that we never understand. Always it awakens memories. And it is singular how different these memories are with each one of us.
Johannes Oberholtzer says that the full moon always reminds him of one occasion when he was smuggling cattle over the Bechuanaland border. He says he never sees a full moon without thinking of the way it shone on the steel wire-cutters that he was holding in his hand when two mounted policemen rode up to him. And the next night Johannes Oberholtzer again had a good view of the full moon; he saw it through the window of the place he was in. He says the moon was very large and very yellow, except for the black stripes in front of it.
And it was in the light of the full moon that hung over the thorn-trees that I saw Drieka Breytenbach.
Drieka was tall and slender. She had fair hair and blue eyes, and lots of people considered that she was the prettiest woman in the Marico. I thought so, too, that night I met her under the full moon by the thorn-trees. She had not been in the Bushveld very long. Her husband, Petrus Breytenbach, had met her and married her in the Schweizer-Reneke district, where he had trekked with his cattle for a while during the big drought.
Afterwards, when Petrus Breytenbach was shot dead with his own Mauser by a worker on his farm, Drieka went back to Schweizer-Reneke, leaving the Marico as strangely and as silently as she had come to it.
And it seemed to me that the Marico was a different place because Drieka Breytenbach had gone. And I thought of the moon, and the tricks it plays with your senses, and the stormy witchery that it flings at your soul. And I remembered what Braam Venter had said, that the full moon is like a woman laying green flowers on a grave. And it seemed to me that Braam Venter’s words were not so much nonsense, after all, and that worse things could happen to a man than that he should fall off a lorry on his head.
And I thought of other matters.
‘I saw her again, Oom Schalk,’ he said, ‘I saw her last night. In a surpassing loveliness. Just at midnight. She came softly across the veld towards my tent. The night was warm and lovely, and the stars were mad and singing. And there was low music where her white feet touched the grass. And sometimes her mouth seemed to be laughing, and sometimes it was sad. And her lips were very red, Oom Schalk. And when I reached out with my arms, she went away. She disappeared in the maroelas, like the whispering of the wind. And there was a ringing in my ears. And in my heart there was a green fragrance, and I thought of the pale asphodel that grows in the fields of paradise.’
‘I don’t know about paradise,’ I said, ‘but if a thing like that grew in my mealie-lands, I would pull it up at once. I don’t like this spook nonsense.’
I then gave him some good advice. I told him to beware of the moon, which was almost full at the time. Because the moon can do strange things to you in the Bushveld, especially if you live in a tent and the full moon is overhead, and there are weird shadows among the maroelas.
The berries of the karee-boom (Oom Schalk Lourens said, nodding his head in the direction of the tall tree whose shadows were creeping towards the edge of the stoep) may not make the best kind of mampoer that there is. What I mean is that karee brandy is not as potent as the brandy you distil from moepels or maroelas. Even peach brandy, they say, can make you forget the rust in the corn quicker than the mampoer you make from karee berries.
But karee-mampoer is white and soft to look at, and the smoke that comes from it when you pull the cork out of the bottle is pale and rises up in slow curves. And in time of drought, when you have been standing at the borehole all day, pumping water for the cattle, so that by evening the water has a bitter taste for you, then it is very soothing to sit on the front stoep, like now, and to get somebody to pull the cork out of a bottle of this kind of mampoer. Your hands will be sore and stiff from the pump-handle, so that if you try and pull it out, the cork will seem as deep down in the bottle as the water in the borehole.
Many years ago, when I was a young man, and I sat here, on the front stoep, and I saw that white smoke floating away slowly and gracefully from the mouth of the bottle, and with a far-off fragrance, I used to think that the smoke looked like a young girl walking veiled under the stars. And now that I have grown old, and I look at that white smoke, I imagine that it is a young girl walking under the stars, and still veiled.
I have never found out who she is.
‘Always, on a clear night, when I see those bright stars in a row, I look for a long time at the lowest star, and there seems to be something very friendly about the way it shines. It seems to be my star, and its light is different from the light of the other stars … and you know, Schalk, Annie Steyn had such red lips. And such long, soft hair, Schalk. And there was that smile of hers.’
Afterwards the stars grew pale and we started rounding up the donkeys and got ready to go. And I wondered what Annie Steyn would have thought of it, if she had known that, during all those years, there was this man, looking up at the stars on nights when the sky was clear, and dreaming about her lips and her hair and her smile. But as soon as I reflected about it, I knew what the answer was also. Of course, Annie Steyn would think nothing of Jan Ockerse. Nothing at all.
And, no doubt, Annie Steyn was right.
Home Town – Part II
From Selected Stories
by Herman Charles Bosman
Chris Welman started feeling sorry for Oupa Bekker then.
‘Was it really as altered as all that, Oupa?’ he asked.
‘Altered?’ Oupa Bekker repeated. ‘Take the hotel, now. It used to be a wood and iron building with a long verandah. Now it was a double-storey brick building. And where there had been a hitching-post in front of that, that we children used to swing on, there was now one of those upright iron box things that have to do with electricity. Electricity – why, in the old days we hardly even had paraffin-lamps.’
It all sounded quite sad. But then, as Gysbert van Tonder remarked, there had to be such a thing as progress. We couldn’t expect the world to just stand still, for Oupa Bekker’s sake, or for any of our sakes, for that matter, either.
‘I went to look for the place that we children used to call the river,’ Oupa Bekker went on, ‘and that we used to fish in, and that people used to lead water into their gardens from, and that had a bridge over it.’
Well, we knew what was coming, of course. And we almost wished that Oupa Bekker wouldn’t go to the length of telling us about it. Because they would have put pipes there, of course. And the stream would have been covered up. And where the bridge had been, there would now be a new power station. Or a glue factory.
We would rather not think what there was on the site of the garden wall that Jurie Steyn and Chris Welman and Gysbert van Tonder had spoken about earlier.
The piece of garden wall that every person who spent his childhood in a village remembers. A red-brick and honeysuckle wall, or a white-washed wall wildly rich with convolvulus.
‘After I had had dinner in the hotel,’ Oupa Bekker proceeded – and without his having to say so, we gathered that he did not eat much: his voice told us all that – ‘I went to the bioscope. I had been there earlier in the day, and it had said that there would be an afternoon show.
‘It was a picture about cowboys and Indians, or about cowboys and something. Or it might not even have been cowboys. I’m not sure. Seeing that the talking was all in English, I couldn’t understand very much of it.
‘But there was a coach in the picture, like the Zeederberg coaches they used to have here in the old days, before they had trains, much. And there was a fat man in the picture with a black manel who had other fat men under him. And he looked important, like a raadslid that they had in that village when I was a boy. And that fat-man-with-the-manel’s job seemed to be to work out for the other fat men what was the best way to rob that Zeederberg coach, every time.
‘And after a while, sitting in that bioscope, I began to get quite happy again, and I didn’t mind so much that my home town had changed. Because the places they had there, on the picture, where all those things were going on, were just like my village had been when I was a boy. And there was the same sort of riding on horses, that I remembered well. And the hotel in the picture had the same kind of verandah. And although I didn’t actually see any children swinging on the hitching-post, they might have been, but the picture just didn’t show it. Anyway, I knew it was the same hitching-post. I mean, I would know it anywhere.
‘And I was pleased to see the bridge, too. It was exactly the same bridge that we had over our stream, in the old days. And there was a young fellow who wasn’t as fat as the fat-man-in-the-manel’s men, and who seemed to be on the opposite side from what they were on, and got in their way, every time. And the young fellow stood on that very bridge that I remembered from my childhood. He stood on the bridge with a lovely girl in his arms. And if you had looked under the bridge, I’m sure there would have been the same pieces of tree-trunk washed up under the side of it.
‘And afterwards, when there was shooting in the hotel, it was exactly the same paraffin lamps and candles that they had there that used to be in the village hotel in the old days, before they made it into two storeys.’
~
Afterwards, Oupa Bekker said, when it came to the end of the picture, and that lovely girl got married to the young fellow who wasn’t as fat as the man-in-the manel’s men were fat, he felt happier than he had done for a considerable while – happier than he had felt at any time since he got off the train, that morning, and saw that the road over the rise was tarred.
‘Because the church they got married in was the old church just as I had known it,’ Oupa Bekker said. ‘It was like the church used to be, before they made it three times bigger and moved it to the other end of the plein.’
~
And when he went back to the station in the evening, Oupa Bekker said, descending the rise with the light wind that he knew so well blowing about him, it was with much satisfaction that he realised how, through all those years, his home town had not changed.
‘But that bioscope itself,’ Jurie Steyn said. ‘That must be quite a new thing, I should imagine. They certainly couldn’t have had a bioscope in that village when you were a boy.’
‘No,’ Oupa Bekker said. ‘Where they built that bioscope there was, before that, when I was a boy, a stretch of garden wall with a creeper over it.’
Home Town – Part I
Click Here to Play Podcast
From Selected Stories
by Herman Charles Bosman
Oupa Bekker told us about how he had once gone back – very many years later – to revisit a village where he had lived as a child. Jurie Steyn asked him how many years, but he did not answer. He pretended to be too deaf to hear Jurie Steyn’s question.
That was a peculiarity of Oupa Bekker. He not infrequently, by implication, made claims to great age. But he never allowed himself to be pinned down into stating how old he actually was, in terms of years. It seemed that he wanted to give himself a certain measure of room for manoeuvering in, on that score.
Nor did Oupa Bekker acquaint us with the name of the little place that he went back to, to have a look at, after an interval of many years. But that did not matter. Since, for each of us, they were the remembered scenes of our own childhood that Oupa Bekker spoke about.
‘Of course, there was a railway station now, which, of course, there hadn’t been before,’ Oupa Bekker said.
‘Yes, and tarred streets, and a filling station with petrol pumps,’ Chris Welman said.
‘And a fish and chip shop, and a milk bar with high stools,’ Gysbert van Tonder said.
‘And where there had been an old garden wall of red bricks with honeysuckle growing over it – ’ Jurie Steyn began.
‘No, not honeysuckle,’ Chris Welman interrupted him, ‘but a creeper with those broad leaves and blue flowers. I forget what it’s called now.’
‘And the wall isn’t red brick,’ Gysbert van Tonder said, ‘but a whitewashed earth wall.’
~
They were in general agreement, however, that whatever building had been erected on the site of that old garden wall must be something pretty awful, anyway.
Oupa Bekker took our remarks in bad part.
‘Who’s telling this story – me or the lot of you?’ he asked.
Then he went on to say that from the station there was a bit of a rise before you got to the village itself.
‘And so you decided to walk,’ Jurie Steyn said, ‘so you could enjoy each moment of it, recalling how you had run over the veld there as a carefree boy.’
‘Yes,’ Oupa Bekker snapped. ‘That’s what I did do. I did walk. But the way you’re carrying on, I’m sorry now that I didn’t take a taxi instead.’
That shut Jurie Steyn up for a while. And so Oupa Bekker told us how, having deposited his suitcase in the railway cloakroom, he set off along that road, which was tarred now (as Chris Welman had said it would be), and there was a soft wind blowing, that was always there, on the rise, when in the village in the hollow the air was very still.
And Oupa Bekker said that he thought what a strange thing it was that, after all those years, the same wind should still be there. You think of wind as something that blows and is gone, Oupa Bekker said. And yet after so many long years, there, on the rise, there that wind still was, and not changed in any way.
So Chris Welman said that was how it always was. When you revisited a place after a long interval, the first impression you always got was that it hadn’t changed. The first building you would see, as likely as not, would be the church. And the church steeple would look just like it did when you were a child, except not so tall any more. Only afterwards did you find out how much the place had really altered.
‘And when you were a child the steeple, even then, needed paint on it,’ Gysbert van Tonder observed.
~
‘What I had noticed,’ Oupa Bekker proceeded, getting bitter at all the interruptions, ‘what I noticed, as I walked up the rise, was that the rise was not as high as it had seemed when I was a boy. Only, when I was a boy I could get up over it easier. Maybe that was the fault of the tarred road. But when Chris Welman says that the church steeple did not look so tall any more, he’s quite wrong. Because the church steeple looked taller, when I got there. And the church looked three times bigger than it used to be. And it seemed to be standing right at the other end of the kerkplein from where it had stood in the old days. And why it all looked like that to me was because the church had been rebuilt on the other end of the plein. And it was three times bigger.
~
That should have put Chris Welman in his place. But it didn’t. Instead, a twinkle came into his eye.
‘Where was the bar, Oupa Bekker?’ he asked. ‘I hope you found that all right. I mean, they didn’t go and shift the saloon bar too, did they, where you couldn’t find it?’
Oupa Bekker said he was coming to that.
First he had walked about the kerkplein a good while, searching for the site of the old church.
Then he came across a row of stones that were half-buried in the long grass, and that he knew were the foundations of the old church. He went and sat on a stone, Oupa Bekker said, and a –
‘And a host of childhood memories came back to you,’ Jurie Steyn said.
Then Oupa Bekker got really huffy.
‘Look here,’ Oupa Bekker said, ‘I only hope the same thing happens to you, all of you, as happened to me. I only hope that one day, when you take it into your heads to go and visit your childhood homes again, you’ll also find everything as changed as I found it, that’s all. Then you won’t see anything to laugh at, in it.
‘And I only hope you also feel as lonely as I felt when I turned away from the kerkplein, and walked down the main street of the village, and everywhere I saw only strange faces, and strange buildings, and there was nobody to whom I could say – and there was nobody who was even interested – that this was my home town.
Dream by the Blue Gums
by Herman Charles Bosman
In the heat of the midday – Oom Schalk Lourens said – Adrian Naudé and I were glad to be resting there, shaded by the tall blue gums that stood in a clump by the side of the road.
I sat on the grass with my head and shoulders supported against a large stone. Adrian Naudé, who had begun by leaning against a tree-trunk with his legs crossed and his fingers interlaced behind his head and his elbows out, lowered himself to the ground by degrees; for a short while he remained seated on his haunches; then he sighed and slid forward, very carefully, until he was lying stretched out at full length, with his face in the grass.
~
‘It’s not so bad for you, Neef Schalk,’ Adrian Naudé went on, yawning. ‘You’ve got a big comfortable stone to rest your head and shoulders against. Whereas I’ve got to lie flat down on the dry grass with all the sharp points sticking into me. You are always like that, Neef Schalk. You always pick the best for yourself.’
By the unreasonable nature of his remarks, I could tell that Adrian Naudé was being overtaken by a spell of drowsiness.
‘You are always like that,’ Adrian went on. ‘It’s one of the low traits of your character. Always picking the best for yourself. There was that time in Zeerust, for instance. People always mention that – when they want to talk about how low a man can be …’
I could see that the heat of the day and his condition of being half asleep might lead Adrian to say things that he would no doubt be very sorry for afterwards. So I interrupted him, speaking very earnestly for his own good.
‘It’s quite true, Neef Adrian,’ I said, ‘that this stone against which I am lying is the only one in the vicinity. But I can’t help that any more than I can help this clump of blue gums being here. It’s funny about these blue gums, now, growing like this by the side of the road, when the rest of the veld around here is bare. I wonder who planted them. As for this stone, Neef Adrian, it’s not my fault that I saw it first. It was just luck. But you can knock out your pipe against it whenever you want to.’
This offer seemed to satisfy Adrian. At all events, he didn’t pursue the argument. I noticed that his breathing had become very slow and deep and regular; and the last remark that he made was so muffled as to be almost unintelligible. It was: ‘To think that a man can fall so low.’
From that I judged that Adrian Naudé was dreaming about something.
It was very pleasant there, on the yellow grass, by the roadside, underneath the blue gums, whose shadows slowly lengthened as midday passed into afternoon. Nowhere was there sound or movement. The whole world was at rest, with the silence of the dust on the deserted road, with the peace of the blue gums’ shadows. My companion’s measured breathing seemed to come from very far away.
Then it was that a strange thing happened.
What is in the first place remarkable about the circumstances that I am now going to relate to you is that it shows you clearly how short a dream is. And how much you can dream in just a few moments. In the second place, as you’ll see when I get to the end of it, this story proves how, right in broad daylight, a queer thing can take place – almost in front of your eyes, as it were – and you may wonder about it forever afterwards, and you will never understand it.
Well, as I was saying, what with Adrian Naudé lying asleep within a few feet of me, and everything being so still, I was on the point of also dropping off to sleep, when, in the distance – so small that I could barely distinguish its outlines – I caught the sight of the mule-cart whose return Adrian and I were awaiting. From where I lay, with my head on the stone, I had a clear view of the road all the way up to where it disappeared over the bult.
But as I gazed I felt my eyelids getting heavy. I told myself that, with the glare of the sun on the road, I would not be able to keep my eyes open much longer. I remember thinking how foolish it would be to fall asleep, then, with the mule-cart only a short distance away. It would pull up almost immediately, and I would have to wake up again. I told myself I was being foolish – and, of course, I fell asleep.
It was while I was still telling myself that in a few moments the mule-cart would be coming to a stop in the shadow of the blue gums, that my eyes closed and I fell asleep. And I started to dream. And from this you can tell how swift a thing a dream is, and how much you can dream in just a few moments.
For I know the exact moment in which I started to dream. It was when I was looking very intently at the driver of the mule-cart and I suddenly saw, to my amazement, that the driver was no longer Jonas, but Adrian Naudé. And seated beside Adrian Naudé was a girl in a white frock. She had yellow hair that hung far down over her shoulders, and her name was Francina. The next minute the mule-cart drew up, and Jonas jumped off and tied the reins to a wheel.
So it was between those flying moments that I dreamt about Adrian Naudé and Francina.
‘It’s difficult to believe, Francina,’ Adrian Naudé was saying, nodding his head in my direction. ‘It’s difficult to believe a man can sink so low. If I tell you what happened in Zeerust …’
I was getting annoyed now. After all, Francina was a complete stranger, and Adrian had no right to slander me in that fashion. What was more, I had a very simple explanation of the Zeerust incident. I felt that, if only I could be alone with Francina for a few minutes, I would be able to convince her that what had happened in Zeerust was not to my discredit at all.
But even as I started to talk to Francina, I realised that there was no need for me to say anything. She put her hand on my arm and looked at me; and the sun was on her hair and the shadows of the blue gums were in her eyes; and by the way she smiled at me, I knew that nothing Adrian could say about me would ever make any difference to her.
Moreover, Adrian Naudé had gone. You know how it is in a dream.
~
Then it all changed, suddenly. I seemed to know that it was only a dream and that I wasn’t really standing up under the trees with Francina. I seemed to know that I was actually lying on the grass, with my head and shoulders resting against a stone. I even heard the mule-cart jolting over the rough part of the road.
But the next instant I was dreaming again.
I dreamt that Francina was explaining to me, in gentle and sorrowful tones, that she couldn’t stay any longer; and that she had put her hand on my arm for the last time, in farewell; she said I was not to follow her, but that I had to close my eyes when she turned away; for no one was to know where she had come from.
~
It was a vivid dream. Part of it seemed more real than life, as is frequently the case with a dream on the veld, dreamt fleetingly, in the heat of the noonday.
I asked Francina where she lived.
‘Not far from here,’ she answered, ‘no, not far. But you may not follow me. None may go back with me.’
She still smiled, in that way in which women smiled long ago, but as she spoke there came into her eyes a look of such intense sorrow that I was afraid to ask why I could not accompany her. And when she told me to close my eyes, I had no power to protest.
And, of course, I didn’t close my eyes. Instead, I opened them. Just as Jonas was jumping down from the mule-cart to fasten the reins onto a wheel.
Adrian Naudé woke up about the same time that I did, and asked Jonas why he had been away so long. And I got up from the grass, and stretched my limbs, and wondered about dreams. It seemed incredible that I could have dreamed so much in such a few moments.
And there was a strange sadness in my heart because the dream had gone. My mind was filled with a deep sense of loss. I told myself that it was foolish to have feelings like that about a dream: even though it was a particularly vivid dream, and part of it seemed more real than life.
Then, when we were ready to go, Adrian Naudé took out his pipe; before filling it he stooped down as though to knock the ash out of it, as I had invited him to do before we fell asleep. But it so happened that Adrian Naudé did not ever knock his pipe out against that stone.
‘That’s funny,’ I heard Adrian say, as he bent forward.
I saw what he was about; so I knelt down and helped him. When we had cleared away the accumulation of yellow grass and dead leaves at the foot of the stone, we found that the inscription on it, though battered, was quite legible. It was very simply worded. Just a date chiselled into the stone. And below the date, a name: Francina Malherbe.
Lore of the Wild
From No Outspan
by Deneys Reitz
The moment Parliament rose, the new Board of Trustees held its first meeting, and we set to work with a will. There was much to do. In the Kruger National Park there were as yet no roads, no bridges, no pontoons across the rivers, and the sole means of access was on foot or by pack donkey.
The Low Country lies east by west from the Swaziland border along the Komati plains, thence over the Crocodile, the Sabie and the Olifants Rivers up towards Tzaneen and the Zoutpansbergen, a distance of about three hundred miles. South to north it is held between the great escarpment of the Drakensberg and the Lebombo range, a breadth of a hundred miles. This great area was still little known, and the larger portion of it lay inside what had now been proclaimed the Kruger National Park. Within its confines were elephant and lion, hippo and giraffe, roan and sable antelope, zebra, sassaby, kudu, wildebeest, waterbuck, and a great variety of other fauna such as probably no other portion of the world, of equal size, can show.
Our mandate as a Board was to create a refuge where henceforth the royal families of all the mammals could live in peace; our mandate was to put a stop to hunting and poaching, and to open up the Reserve so that the public could visit it and learn the beauty of the wild life of South Africa.
At the conclusion of the meeting it was decided that the Members of the Board – there were eight of us – should proceed in twos, each couple to take stock of a different portion of the Reserve, to prepare the ground for the laying down of roads, the building of rest camps and, above all, to provide crossings over the rivers.
Paul Selby and I were deputed to the Crocodile River area along the eastern borderline of the Park. He was an American by birth and a mining engineer by profession, and he had spent most of his vacations in the Low Country studying its animal life and taking photographs. For these reasons he had wisely been nominated to the Board. He was a man of resource. He had started ahead of me, for I was detained, and when, ten days later, I alighted at a railway siding nearest to my destination in the Reserve, I found that he had succeeded in towing his car through the Crocodile River, the first car that ever entered the Park, and that he was at a spot known as ‘Dead Man’s Bush’, so called after three poachers who had recently been shot there.
He had discovered a suitable spot at which to place a pontoon, and already he had made blueprints for its construction and had mapped out a road to the Sabie River on which a gang of workers were hewing down trees and blazing the trail. I enjoyed the life and saw much game. Giraffe, sable, wildebeest and buffalo fed in sight of our camp, though lion were not as plentiful as they have since become. We spent many hours taking pictures.
In those days game photography was in its infancy. Few people had realised how little attention wild animals pay to motor cars, and it was a novel experience for us to find that we could drive up to a troop of waterbuck or a herd of wildebeest while they grazed unperturbed. We thought at first that our success was due to the pains we took to cover the ancient Ford from stem to stern with boughs and foliage, under which we sat crouched behind an old-fashioned box-camera swivelled on a universal joint like a machine-gun. Since then we have learned that these precautions were unnecessary, for game seems to register no emotion on the appearance of a car; but at the time we went to great trouble to camouflage our vehicle, and as we rattled and jolted over antheaps and fallen logs, we thought we were very clever when we manoeuvred ourselves near enough to take a shot.
At present, every second tourist in the Park takes photographs of lion and other animals from his car with a pocket kodak, but Selby was the pioneer. His studies received wide notice, and I basked vicariously for having helped him.
There was a troop of buffalo in Dead Man’s Bush led by a bull whose horns we considered to be a world record. We spent much time trying to photograph him, but he always hugged the deeper shadows.
For many years, poachers from the adjacent Portuguese territory had been raiding over the frontier to shoot game. They were generally half-breeds in command of gangs of Shangaans. Their practice was to come with pack donkeys and, after shooting all they could, they loaded the meat and decamped across the border. A sort of sporadic guerrilla warfare had been carried on against them with frequent casualties on both sides.
Selby and I planned the development of this section of the Park and I like to think that our labours have borne fruit. At all events, visitors now run in and out by car, and they go to Lower Sabie and Skukuza in a few hours by the roads we laid down where it took us a month to hack our way through the jungle.
This was my first expedition as a Board Member, but I was to go on many another similar journey. In time I learned the lore of the wilds, I learned to track game, and I even became somewhat of a lion hunter.
Increasingly, I became a devotee of the Low Country.
Universities
By Herman Charles Bosman
You can only know a university if you have attended classes in it as a student. Otherwise you can only prowl around it as a visitor, and that, of course, doesn’t count.
I have frequently prowled around Oxford as a visitor, but I was not able to gather much about the place except that it was conveniently situated in fairly close proximity to Morris-Cowley’s motorworks. I thought that this was rather useful, because if an apprentice to the motor industry found that the task of turning out brass screws of various intricate dimensions on a lathe was beyond the range of his intelligence, he could switch over, instead, to the University, and learn something easy, like Latin and Greek.
Every time I returned from a visit to Oxford I felt glad that I had not gone there as a student. Because I was satisfied that I would never have been able to learn anything there. I would have been too much impressed with the buildings, which were not in any way what I had expected them to be, but were all low unto the earth, with rough-looking walls – real mediaeval bricks covered over with a yellowed mediaeval plaster.
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I have seen many a stately pile, heavily encrusted with history, thick with dust and tradition, sanctified through the intimacy of its association with a nation’s fortunes, through the centuries a silent witness of dooms and splendours – I have seen such a building, cathedral, abbey, palace, mausoleum, and I have not been impressed.
But because the walls of Oxford did not tower, but seemed sunk into the earth, almost, and because with what was venerable about the masonry that had lasted from the Middle Ages there went also a warmth and richness of life that time could not chill, I realised that if I had gone there as a student, I would never have been able to do any work in the place. I would have gone to Oxford and spent too many years in the more idle kind of dreaming.
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Then there is Wits. I was a student at the University of the Witwatersrand in the early days, when there was still the smell of wet paint and drying concrete about the buildings at Milner Park. There was something in my eighteen-year-old soul that revolted at all this newness. When I went there recently, to attend a play in the Main Hall, I was still appalled at the feeling that Wits had not acquired any of the external characteristics of poise and suavity. The girl who sold me the programme was gauche.
When I was a student at Wits I had a contempt both for the buildings and the professors. I could not reconcile myself to the idea that any really first-class man from Europe would bring himself to apply for so obscure and – as I then thought – Philistine an appointment as a professorship in a South African mining-town university where the reinforced concrete slabs were still wet inside.
Needless to say, my views in this regard have since that time undergone a very profound change. I have seen some of the things that first-class men get reduced to doing in this life. Myself included. And I feel only a sense of humble gratitude towards those men from overseas who came to the University of the Witwatersrand when it was first started, bringing with them that vital breath of culture that includes the Near East and Alexandria and the Renaissance, that rich Old World of thought in whose inspiration alone the soul of man can find a place for its abiding.
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It is strange how the past all looks like the other day. Before they erected the main gate you could wander all over without knowing when you were inside the University grounds. I remember once when I went to look for a department that was housed away from the main building. I must have got to the wrong place. Because I asked a man in charge there: ‘Is this the Wits Philosophy Department?’ And he said: ‘No, this is the filling-up section of the Lion Brewery.’
It was only then that I noticed all those bottles stacked around, and I realised that not even a philosophy class could get through that quantity.
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It all depends, of course, on what your view is as to what a university should be. If you believe that a university is an institution where you go to acquire technical knowledge, then it does not particularly matter what the buildings and their surroundings are like. On the other hand, if you believe that you go to a university in order to have things done to you that will make you useless for the requirements of practical life, deepening and enriching your spirit in the process – and either view of the functions of a university is legitimate – then the atmosphere of the place in which you are to spend a number of years is highly important.
There must be tall, old trees through whose branches the sunshine falls dappled on the walks. There must be winding lanes and unexpected vistas and sequestered nooks. There must be mildew and ruin and dilapidated facades. There must be aged and crooked corridors and aged and crooked professors. All these advantages – or disadvantages – will no doubt accrue to the University of the Witwatersrand in time. For while there are two schools of thought on the question as to whether or not a university that is a non-technical seat of learning should be lousy – and I can quote highly venerable authority in this connection – it is unanimously conceded that it should be mouldy.
The University of the Witwatersrand will grow mellowed with the centuries, with the generations of men and women passing through the doors, and I wish that its future may be fortunate, that the enduring things of the mind may remain, the imperishable nobilities of the spirit that will live on, when the gold mines of the Rand have been worked out and forgotten, when the mills that crushed the ore have fallen into a long stillness.
And those solecisms about the University of the Witwatersrand that distressed me as a student will belong with the unremembered past, also.
