When Bosman emerged from prison in September 1930 he recuperated for a month on his uncle’s farm at Bronkhorstspruit, east of Pretoria. Thereafter he moved back to Johannesburg, where he teamed up with John Webb and Aegidius Jean Blignaut to launch the monthly literary journal The Touleier. The first three issues of the periodical (December 1930, January–February 1931 and March 1931) contained Bosman’s first two Schalk Lourens stories, “Makapan’s Caves” and “The Rooinek” (in two instalments). Grandly conceived as a successor to the famous Campbell–Plomer–Van der Post Voorslag of 1926, The Touleier was very much a showcase for Bosman’s burgeoning talent, and the first issue also contained reviews and a poem by him. After just five numbers, however, the periodical sank under the weight of its overheads and debts, but not before it had published another Oom Schalk classic, “The Gramophone” (in May 1931). Webb attempted to resuscitate the venture under the name The African Magazine, which duly carried Bosman’s “Karel Flysman” in its first and only number (in June 1931). In between The Touleier and The African Magazine, Bosman and Blignaut seized the opportunity occasioned by the demise of Stephen Black’s The Sjambok (and shortly thereafter of the man himself) to launch their New L. S. D. (‘Life, Sport and Drama’), named after another ill-fated Black periodical of 1913–14. The New L. S. D. carried two little-known Schalk Lourens stories, “Francina Malherbe” and “The Ramoutsa Road”, as well as the very sketchy “Veld Fire”, omitted here as it is not certain that Oom Schalk is the narrator.
The Bosman–Blignaut partnership regularly landed the pair in gaol, and in early 1934, in what was clearly a bold attempt to break with his past and his gaolbird cronies, Bosman left South Africa for London with his second wife, Ella Manson. In November of that year, Bosman’s old school-friend Bernard Sachs launched The South African Opinion, a periodical professedly ‘non-political’, but clearly Left-leaning in orientation. It was to provide Bosman with perhaps his finest creative platform. With the sharpness of vision that distance brings, tinged with rich nostalgia for the country he left behind, Bosman was to write his best-known Oom Schalks at a rate of more than one every two months between December 1934 and July 1937. Indeed, the first fourteen, from “Veld Maiden” to “Starlight on the Veld”, were produced on a monthly basis – a spurt of creativity not to be matched until 1950–51, when Bosman wrote his weekly ‘Voorkamer’ pieces for The Forum.
By late 1939, with war having been declared in Europe and down on their luck, the Bosmans took advantage of an offer by the South African High Commissioner in London to repatriate them to South Africa. They were back in January 1940, and Bosman returned to the world of journalism, eventually taking up the editorship of the Pietersburg-based Zoutpansberg Review and Mining Journal in March 1943. The period between July 1937, when “On to Freedom” appeared, and March 1944, when the revived South African Opinion started reappearing as a monthly (and in which the signature-piece “Starlight on the Veld” was reprinted), was a particularly lean period for Oom Schalk stories. The only one to appear was “Martha and the Snake”, which was printed (probably without Bosman’s knowledge) in October 1939 in another of Jean Blignaut’s ephemeral ventures, The Ringhals (again borrowed from a short-lived Stephen Black periodical of the same name of early 1931). After what was an effective seven-year silence, the new S. A. Opinion provided Bosman with a welcome opportunity to reacquaint post-war South Africa with his master storyteller. He reprinted ten of the earlier Oom Schalks here, but this was no mere act of ‘recycling’, as several of them were significantly edited down by Bosman himself before being deemed fit for publication. Interspersed with these republished pieces were seven new ones, including the powerful anti-racist statement “The Prophet” (significant, given the pro-Nazi sentiments of many Afrikaners during and immediately after the war) and the subtle masterpiece “Seed-time and Harvest.”
Following a disastrous six-month business venture in Cape Town, in which he was contracted to translate literary classics into Afrikaans and then find a market for them, Bosman and third wife Helena returned to Johannesburg penniless. Bernard Sachs had amalgamated the now-defunct S. A. Opinion with Trek (formerly the Cape Town-based Independent), which also shifted its operations to Johannesburg, and he invited Bosman to join him. Trek was a monthly review that had attracted some notable Leftist intellectuals to its pages, including Dora Taylor, Eddie Roux and Jack Cope. Lily Rabkin, who would become a staunch supporter of Bosman’s work, joined the team as assistant editor on cultural matters. Along with several ‘Talk of the Town’ columns that he contributed over the years, Bosman provided five new Oom Schalk stories, among them “Dopper and Papist” (which originally appeared in Trek under the mystifying title “Dopper and Baptist”), and perhaps his most famous story, “Unto Dust.”
On Parade was a different sort of venture, although it also had as its purpose the unification of what was becoming, after 1948 with the National Party victory, a society increasingly divided along ethnic and, of course, language lines. Former school-teacher and non-conformist freelance contributor to the press over the years, Ehrhardt Planjé, after two earlier failed efforts in this vein, launched the bilingual On Parade / Op Parade in August 1948, with “Graven Image” prominently featured (it was to be re-used by Planjé after Bosman’s death). Four other Oom Schalks would follow, including the Boer War classic “Peaches Ripening in the Sun”, the penultimate Oom Schalk to appear in Bosman’s lifetime. As an independent fortnightly paper launched at a fateful time in South African history, On Parade aimed to promote goodwill and understanding among all sectors of South African society and to combat racism. With the sturdy support of the Afrikaans-speaking Helena, Bosman was to publish several Afrikaans Oom Schalks in On Parade, including “Tot Stof” (which first appeared in Afrikaans in 1948, significantly) and “Die Storie van die Rooibaadjie” (published only posthumously in English).
The 1948–51 period saw Bosman placing stories in a variety of publications, as the occasion arose. The three Oom Schalks that The Forum carried in late 1949 and early 1950, however, were perhaps more purposefully placed: they were Bosman’s entrée to his ‘In die Voorkamer’ sequence, which ran to eighty items in The Forum between April 1950 and October 1951. This liberal-Left weekly, which would go on to support the new Liberal Party (formed in 1953), attempted to articulate a broad, inclusive ‘South Africanism.’ It had J. H. Hofmeyr (nephew of the famous ‘Onze Jan’ Hofmeyr) as chair of its board of directors, J. P. (John) Cope as editor, and Lily Rabkin, who had defected from the faltering Trek, in charge of the cultural pages.
In June 1950, the secretary of the University of the Witwatersrand’s Council of Cultural Committees asked Bosman to provide a story of around 3 600 words – adding, however, that the Council wasn’t able to pay him. Bosman nonetheless provided one of his most memorable Oom Schalks, “Funeral Earth”, for Vista and was duly paid in the form of two complimentary tickets for the university Arts Festival film evening.
The Cape Town-based large-format pictorial magazine Spotlight had earlier honoured Bosman by reprinting his “The Rooinek” in December 1946. It now took up two sterling late Oom Schalks in January and February 1951 – “The Missionary” and “The Traitor’s Wife” – with Bosman pleased to remark in his contributor’s note to the January edition that his stories were being broadcast by the BBC, no less.
Although all of these stories had to wait some years before finally being published in English, it is significant that Bosman managed to see five of the seven into press in Afrikaans versions: “Dit Spook by die Drif” (April 1948); “Die Kaffer-tamboer” (“Bush Telegraph”, February 1949); “Ontmoetingsplek aan die Vaal” (May 1949); “Ou Liedjies en Ou Stories” (“The Selon’s Rose”, September 1949); and “Die Storie van die Rooibaadjie” (February 1950). These were among the total of sixteen Afrikaans stories Bosman published in his lifetime, all but one of them in On Parade between August 1948 and February 1950.
Bosman probably allowed the English versions included here to languish because during 1948–51 he consciously set out to establish himself as a bilingual writer. His renown in the English language was well established, but his stature as an Afrikaans writer was just beginning to emerge and was what clearly preoccupied him in this period.
The English versions were to lie unpublished in the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin – in some cases for decades. In 1969 Personality published a set of six previously unpublished Bosman stories, one of them the Oom Schalk story “The Question.” The others appeared in later posthumous collections of Bosman’s work, four of them (“The Old Potchefstroom Gaol”, “The Ghost at the Drift”, “Bush Telegraph”, and “Tryst by the Vaal”) seeing print for the first time only in 2001 and 2002, in the Anniversary Edition of Bosman’s works. It is likely that Bosman wanted to polish them a little more before releasing them for publication, but his premature death prevented this.