Christina Lokk (student in MA programme Atlantic Studies in History, Culture and Society)
Herman Charles Bosman, Cold Stone Jug: Introduction
At the age of 21 Herman Charles Bosman was arrested for murder and sentenced to be
hanged. After a month on death row in Pretoria Central Prison he was granted a reprieve and
his sentence was converted to ten years of imprisonment. Due to mitigation of sentence after
four and a half years in prison he was a free man again. Twenty years later the South African
writer and journalist came to terms with this dark period of his life and wrote an
autobiographical account of his prison experience, Cold Stone Jug, which was published in
1949.
Herman Charles Bosman was born 1905 in Kulis River, a small village east of Cape
Town. On his mother’s side, he was born into a wealthy and one of the most influential
Afrikaner families in South Africa. His ancestors and relatives were successfully engaged in
politics and journalism as well as in literature and arts. There has always been a competitive
sentiment in this family and especially Herman and his brother Pierre must have felt a strong
pressure to make something of themselves, because their father was ‘only’ a miner. Due to the
father’s occupation the family of four soon moved to the Transvaal Province and later to
Johannesburg, where Herman spent most of his childhood and attended school. He developed
an early passion for literature and especially liked reading American authors; he admired
Edgar Allan Poe and his stories of mystery and horror. Bosman’s first stories were published
in the school magazine as well as in the city’s Sunday Times. He has been described by his
peers as a rather disturbed but also very intelligent adolescent who liked to explore the dark
sides of life and was fascinated by strong feelings (cf. Gray 45-65) One of his friends, Edward
Roux, later wrote about him in a letter to Lionel Abrahams, dated 1955:
In my opinion almost all the queer things Bosman did, during the earlier part of his life at any rate,
were done out of sheer cussedness, or from a desire to experience sensations. In 1921 […] he lent
me a book which he thought extremely good […]. It described the thoughts and feelings of men
awaiting execution. When, some years later, I heard that he had shot his step-brother, I felt he had
done so, partly at least, because he wanted to experience the sensations of a murderer in the dock.
(Ibid. 60)
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From 1923 to 1925, Bosman’s widowed mother (his father had been killed in a mine
accident) sent him to the University of Witwatersrand to train as a teacher. However, he did
not take his student life very seriously – he was a rebel and liked to get himself into trouble
through playing pranks. Determined to have a literary career, Bosman continued writing,
concentrating mostly on poetry. His mother had meanwhile remarried and Bosman got a new
stepbrother and two stepsisters. At first, Bosman tried to be part of the new family but later he
kept having quarrels with his stepfather and stepbrother. After three years of university he
received a position in a primary school in the remote Marico Bushveld, a district furthest to
the west in the Transvaal Province, which was only accessible by ox-wagon. Despite the fact
that Bosman stayed there for less than five months, this is the place which provided the main
scene and characters for one of his most successful works, a collection of short stories, the
famous Mafeking Road (Ibid. 66-89).
In March 1926, Herman, now a young school teacher, came to Johannesburg for the
Easter holidays to visit his family. On the night before he was supposed to return to his school
in the Marico District he shot his 23-year-old stepbrother, David, in the right arm with a
hunting rifle while the latter was in the middle of a fight with Herman’s younger brother,
Pierre. The bullet went through David’s heart and he died almost immediately in the arms of
his father, William Russell, who called the police a few minutes later. Bosman was brought to
the cells in Marshall Square, the setting of the preamble in Cold Stone Jug. What Bosman
does not reflect upon in the book is the trial during which he constantly claimed that the
shooting was an accident and that he did not mean to murder David. However, the evidence
against him was compelling enough for the judge to believe the shooting had been a deliberate
act and to consequently find him guilty (cf. Ibid. 99-121).
After the time in prison Bosman’s brother helped him to arrange his return to
Johannesburg by introducing him to important journalists, publishers and writers in town. In
the 1930s, Bosman worked as a journalist and continued pursuing his career as a writer. Most
of his work was published in literary magazines. The literary critic Stephen Gray refers to
Herman Bosman of the 1930s as a rather narcissistic dandy:
The madness which had threatened to overtake him in Pretoria Central Prison […] was perhaps
manifesting itself now in a serious genius complex. Clearly his attitude of the early 1930s was that
he was disdainfully above it all. (Ibid. 159)
Bosman did not reconcile with his family, had ongoing financial problems as well as
problems with the public authorities and he was constantly jealous of others’ success. After
numerous disagreements with his publishers he went to Europe in search of fame and fortune
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but returned as soon as the Second World War broke out. Back in Johannesburg he then began
to change his life style trying to adapt to society. This was also the most productive time in
terms of his writing activities. He published Jacaranda in the Night, Mafeking Road and Cold
Stone Jug and became an acknowledged talent in Johannesburg’s cultural scene, which was
still in the early stages of its development. Bosman was committed to the task of bringing
forward South African independence in the field of literature. In a literary magazine, he
proclaimed, “An Indigenous South African Literature is Unfolding” (Ibid. 257), demanding
improvement of standards of critical writing as well as publishing in South Africa in order to
be able to compete with America and Europe. At the same time, he called upon South African
writers to free themselves from colonial thinking, assert their independence, and not to seek
approval from overseas but rather to form a local readership.
In the 1940s Bosman started visiting some of the places of his youth like the Marico
District or his old school, which led him to the more troubling part of his life: his time in
prison. In 1946, he wrote the first draft of his autobiographical prison account that was to
become Cold Stone Jug. (cf. Ibid. 131-197; 256-286) Autobiography is an ambivalent genre
as it is “not quite history” (Starfield quoted in Gready 490) and “not quite fiction” (Lütge
Coullie quoted in Gready 490). On the one hand it provides readers with first-hand
information but on the other hand it has to be read with particular alertness as to the writer’s
subjectivity. An autobiographical writing gives the readers a unique, intimate insight into the
author’s life but what they also need to keep in mind is that only the author gets to decide
what is to be revealed or what is to be left out (Gready 490 f.) The anecdotal structure of Cold
Stone Jug especially calls the reader’s attention to the ambiguous character of the genre. In
fact, Bosman himself gives us a hint that he is not always a reliable narrator when he makes
autobiography a subject of discussion in Chapter eight. Gray, one of Bosman’s biographers,
even found out that Stoffels, who appears in the beginning of the book as Bosman’s fellow
inmate in the condemned cell, apparently did not exist in reality as he does not appear in the
official documents of Pretoria Central Prison. (cf. Gray 125) A classmate of Bosman’s once
said about him: “I won’t say Bosman was lying, but he was one of those types […] who’d
adjust the facts if it made a better story.” (Ibid. 69)
The public reaction to Cold Stone Jug was mixed. Reviewers liked the “brutal realism”
of the book but many were shocked by the “coarse language and stories” (Ibid. 319). Bosman
did not hesitate to portray the cruellest and most disturbing scenes and to reflect upon the –
for that time and place – most outrageous topics like smoking marihuana, homosexuality, or
prostitution. And he did not need to put the misery and dehumanisation of prison life into
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words – his soberly reflected stories and incidents told in a dry matter-of-fact tone speak for
themselves. Those who have read Bosman will know the bold, ironic style, which is typical of
most of his writings and it is remarkable that he did not abandon it in the account of his life in
prison. However, Bosman does not seem to be the only author to use humour in order to cope
with the hardship of prison days. Watts points out that humour is a common feature of
autobiographical literature written by South African prisoners, who now and then “permitted
themselves the luxury of a laugh” (Watts 122) as some kind of protective mechanism from the
physical and emotional pain they had experienced.
In the era of apartheid, prison writing as a form of political resistance became very
important as many intellectuals, writers and artists were imprisoned for criticising the system
and writing was the only weapon they had against the discrimination established by law. (cf.
Roux 29ff.) Autobiography was one of the most popular genres of protest from prison as
“prison enjoins a preoccupation with interiority and self, if only it wrests people out of their
organic communities, restricts the mobility of bodies and discourages solidarity between
prisoners” (Ibid. 546). Also, it could be helpful in the search for an identity, which was
constantly rewritten by the most ludicrous laws of the regime: “Writing becomes a request for
reassurance that they in fact have an identity, that they have rescued the fragments and shards
of a personality from the systematic official attempt to eradicate it” (Watts 115). Although
Bosman was not a very political person (cf. Gray 325) and most probably did not primarily
attempt to make his prison narrative a political statement, Shava, among other literary
scholars, classifies him as one of the authors of the South African “literature of protest”
(Shava 1). Given the historical background, Cold Stone Jug may be read as a representation of
the South African political context as the most central themes of the book are betrayal,
injustice, absurdity of law and abuse of power embodied by the characters of the warders. The
prison can be seen as a “microcosm of the oppressive macrocosm” (Ibid. 39). Despite the fact
that the book was written before the official establishment of apartheid, the structures and
institutions of the repressive system had already existed way before and were not newly
invented but were rather taken over and extended (cf. Roux 551). With the rapid
industrialisation and urbanisation in the first half of the 20th century, processes of racial
segregation had already started back then and continued into the time of apartheid (cf. Shava
15).
After Bosman’s sudden death of a heart attack in October 1951 (cf. Gray 9), one of the
obituaries in a magazine read:
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Herman Bosman will, I am quite certain, one day be recognised as a major short story writer.
Recognition until now has been very partial. His was the comic eye – the ruthless ironic perception
coupled with the loving understanding – an approach startling perhaps in a man who had touched
depths of tragedy in his own life. (Ibid. 12)
In the Epilogue of Cold Stone Jug Bosman speaks of prison as his first love. It certainly had a
huge impact on his later personal development and emotional life and his strong feelings
about it are one powerful feature of the book. Although Bosman did not become famous
abroad, he has a reputation as “possibly the most loved and least known among South
Africa’s writers” (Heywood 129). He published three novels, 44 stories, 45 sketches and 52
poems (cf. Ibid.).
Works Cited:
Gray, Stephen. Life Sentence: A Biography of Herman Charles Bosman. Cape Town &
Pretoria: Human & Rousseau, 2005, 45-65.
Gready, Paul. “Autobiography and the ‘Power of Writing’: Political Prison Writing in the
Apartheid Era.” Journal of Southern African Studies 19.3 1993: 489-523.
Heywood, Christopher. A History of South African Literature. Cambridge et al.: Cambridge
University Press, 2004.
Roux, Daniel. “Writing the prison.” The Cambridge History of South African Literature. Eds.
David Attwell & Derek Attridge. Cambridge et al.: Cambridge University Press, 2012,
545-563.
Shava, Piniel Viriri. A People’s Voice: Black South African Writing in the Twentieth Century.
London: Zed Books & Athens: Ohio University Press, 1989.
Watts, Jane. Black Writers from South Africa. Towards a Discourse of Liberation.
Houndmills & London: Macmillan, 1989.
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