The Mark of Cain

For me as a teenager, reading voraciously on the Natal sugar farm that was then my home, what gave Herman Charles Bosman an edge over other writers was that he was a murderer. That he was also one of a handful of South African writers who could confidently be called ‘major’ seemed incidental. From my adolescent perspective, lounging in a rattan chair on the veranda, with the sea of sugarcane swaying in the distance, it was his infamy that was beguiling.

The scene of the crime was a suburban house in Johannesburg, where late one night in 1926 Bosman shot dead his step-brother. It was a fractious household, set up after his father’s early death and his mother’s marriage to a widower with children of his own. Hearing in an adjoining room his brother exchanging blows with their step-brother, in a mad impulse of fraternal loyalty the 21-year-old Bosman kicked open the door and fired a shot. As it later emerged, this reaction was part of a pattern, for there had been other occasions when he had displayed a similar explosiveness followed by a trance-like state of bewilderment. He was in the house because he was on holiday from the Groot Marico, a deeply rural bushveld district in the western Transvaal, not far from Bechuanaland, where he had begun a career as a teacher. The murder weapon, purchased from a farmer, was a rifle which together with a hat bristling with guinea-fowl feathers he had brought home in a display of frontiersman bravado. In a holding cell at Johannesburg’s Marshall Square police station, Bosman found himself among a dozen inmates. After some desultory conversation, a dapper little man, who was particularly talkative and who seemed to exercise some form of leadership in the cell, began to circulate, asking each inmate why he had been nabbed. ‘Liquor-selling,’ said the first. ‘Stealing a wheelbarrow from the Public Works Department,’ said the second. ‘Drunk and disorderly and indecent exposure,’ said the third. ‘Forgery,’ said the fourth. ‘And what are you pinched for?’ he asked Bosman, eyeing him narrowly. ‘Murder,’ Bosman replied, as courteously as he could, trying not to glower too much, and added, ‘And I’m not feeling too good.’ ‘Struth!’ exclaimed the interrogator, and all the other prisoners edged to the furthest corner of the cell. In the sensational trial, Bosman insisted that his crime was motiveless and so declined to defend himself. As if to seek to convince the judge that a dangerous writer was in the dock, the prosecutor read out a story of Bosman’s, written not long before and probably influenced by his hero Edgar Allan Poe, about a murder and the dismemberment of a corpse. Before delivering his verdict, the judge acknowledged the particular pathos of the case, but nevertheless found the accused guilty and sentenced him to hang. Poised to descend the stairs to the cells, Bosman asked if he might make a statement. He spoke briefly in a clear, cultured voice about ‘this strange world of laughter and sighs’ and of the ‘tragic moment, the happenings of which are still not quite clear to me’, when ‘I was impelled by some wild and chaotic impulse, in which there was no suggestion of malice or premeditation.’ The judge was visibly moved and assured him that his sentiments would be conveyed to the Governor-General. Transported in a Black Maria to Johannesburg’s prison, pending his move to Pretoria where the executions were carried out, Bosman was led through a group of onlookers who ghoulishly had assembled for a last glimpse of the condemned. Among them was a young girl who was red-eyed and disconsolate. With the jauntiness that was so prominent a part of his perplexing nature, he caught her eye and winked at her, and she burst into tears. In the citadel-like Pretoria Central Prison, Bosman discovered that as a death-row prisoner he was one of an élite minority. Because of the nature of the penalty, most murderers were first offenders, and though their garb was the same as that of bank robbers and illicit diamond buyers, as a sign of their status they were allowed to grow their hair longer. Also, so he sensed, there was about the condemned a loneliness, for on their brows they bore the mark of Cain. Subjected to the glare of electric lights and to surveillance by warders, they lived in a strange zone, without days or nights, but with a rhythm of its own. With Bosman on death row was a fellow-prisoner, whom he calls Stoffels, and with whom he struck up a friendship. Divided only by two rows of bars, they enjoyed an easy familiarity, amusing themselves by manipulating the warders. Most accessible were the guards who, in four-hour shifts, were confined to a narrow passage between the cells, and among these was a simple-minded rookie whom they dubbed the Clown. One night, as Bosman relates, with unsubtle flattery he and Stoffels convinced the Clown that he had an aptitude for dancing. They also confided in him that his ballroom accomplishments had made the other warders insanely jealous, for why else, behind his back, were they saying that he danced like a sick hippopotamus? Persuading the Clown to give a demonstration, they watched as he took off his heavy warder’s boots, and with his toes protruding like potatoes through the holes in his socks gave a rendition of the Black Bottom, a popular dance at the time. Bosman and Stoffels laughed uproariously, not, they explained to the Clown, because of his dancing, but because it was ludicrous to think that his colleagues, blinded by jealousy, could not see his talent. Thereupon the Clown joined in the laughter, making Bosman and Stoffels laugh louder still. Disturbed by their mirth, the head warder appeared and upbraided them. The hard-labour convicts, they were told, needed sleep because they had to work all day. Men like them on death row had it too easy, just smoking cigarettes and cracking jokes. If the Governor found out that they kept the whole prison awake night after night, romping about and laughing in the condemned cells, they would get into serious trouble. Early one morning Stoffels was led away. From his cell, Bosman heard

what sounded like a quick scuffle, then many footfalls. And then a muffled noise in which I recognised Stoffel’s voice, but with difficulty, for only part of that noise seemed to come out of his throat. The rest of it seemed to have come out of his belly. More heavy footfalls and doors creaking on hinges. And still no rapped-out words of command. Then a mighty slam that shook the whole building, rattling the pannikin on the floor of the cell in which I was.

Eventually, Bosman was reprieved and given ten years’ hard labour, of which he served just less than half. However, it took him nearly two decades to write Cold Stone Jug, his memoir of his imprisonment. He is most celebrated for his stories about his alter-ego Schalk Lourens, a deceptively simple Boer farmer, which were collected and published as Mafeking Road, A Cask of Jerepigo and Unto Dust, but it is his prison experiences, set in the shadow of the gallows, which have always seemed the most compelling to me. After several years of ill-health, Bosman died in Johannesburg in 1951 of a heart attack, aged 46. His had been a raggedy life, in which he had used laughter as a bulwark against melancholy. Married three times, intentionally childless, he had scratched a living as a journalist, proof-reader and printer, living predominantly in Johannesburg but also in the Northern Transvaal and in London. But despite his bohemianism and flightiness, there was about his writing a single-mindedness, and in the mahogany row of South African literature his place is assured: the Afrikaner who toiled in the English idiom, and forged a distinctive voice. Three decades after Bosman’s death, when I was a conscript in the South African Army, I found myself billeted in Pretoria. Late in the afternoons I would go jogging, usually along a circuitous road between the defence headquarters and the prison complex. Apartheid was then entrenched, and the landscape was one of drab military supply depots, mountains of ordnance and rows of vehicles. Towards the end of my route was the old citadel-like Pretoria Central Prison where Bosman had been incarcerated and where Cold Stone Jug had been conceived, with beside it its larger successor, all walls and lights and watchtowers. On some days, while the sun was setting, as I jogged past the forbidding agglomeration of buildings, I heard singing. It was a beautiful sound welling up from deep within, but muffled by the fortifications. What’s it all about? I never learnt the answer. Years later, reading the memoir of a former political activist who had served time in Pretoria Central Prison for sabotage against the apartheid state, I discovered that what I had heard were hymns. Sometimes, so the memoirist described, they were like a distant hum, and sometimes they swelled and resounded through the prison. Scores of men were on death row, each awaiting his turn, and it was the singing during their last night that buoyed them through the double doors. Without knowing it, I had been listening to a requiem. And early the following morning, when less than a mile from the gallows I had been stirring in my bed, the trapdoors would have slammed open, as they had for Stoffels, making the pannikins rattle on the floors of the cells.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 50 ©  John Conyngham 2016