BOOKS: Herman Charles Bosman’s Marico Moon
Herman Charles Bosman, one of SA’s most loved and evocative writers, has been given an update. Archie Henderson discovered how
For the past four years or so, publisher Trevor Emslie has included Herman Charles Bosman stories in his weekly podcast and e-mail, the Cape Rebel. "It has been nothing short of a delight to rediscover the genius of this SA writer," says Emslie in the introduction to Marico Moon and the Afrikaans version, Volmaan oor die Marico. They are collections of Bosman extracts, published by the House of Emslie. But Bosman country is difficult terrain, much like the Marico bushveld, where the stories are set, or the character himself, who died at age 46 in 1951 from what was suspected to have been either a heart attack or a hangover. Can Bosman still be enjoyed in our racially polarised society? Some of his language is offensive, but scholars have usually come to his defence. The renowned late foreign correspondent Richard West said that in modern SA, more than in Britain or the US, there is a "prudery about race relations comparable to the prudery over sexual matters in the Victorian age". R...
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