Materia Medica

Africana Votes & Views #11

The ills that afflict the human condition must be an eternal subject of interest to most people. Just listen in when a bunch of ‘mature’ people get together – first up on the agenda are the aches and pains that are experienced, as well as the miracle - or other cures that have been found.
So we’ll have a look at medicine in the Dark Continent, as well as a few related matters. I’ve always thought of the personage who used to be known as the District Surgeon, as a romantic figure who drove a clapped-out Ford or Studebaker sedan over unspeakable tracks in the Bush, with a black orderly/assistant next to him, and a rifle handy on the back seat among the paraphernalia of his profession. This was the Bundu Doctor, and I met a number of these worthy gentlemen in the flesh during the mid 1950’s.
It was with great delight that I actually found a book with just that title only a month or two back, written by a pukka sahib, Colonel (Dr) J Whitby (R Hale, 1961) covering his experiences in Botswana, Zambia and Zimbabwe, whence he had been posted after extensive duty in the Far East. I immersed myself in the book without further ado, expecting a bizarre array of cases, circumstances and humorous anecdotes. Despite the title, I was a little disappointed. Although the good doctor had a truly sympathetic touch with sufferers from a host of maladies, his writing is infused with racial stereotyping, generalisations ad nauseam, military and colonial attitudes and a fine disregard for the spelling of place-names. His chapter on witchcraft and the results on the affected tribespeople is of interest, and his description of setting a patient’s broken leg via radio instructions to a panicky wife, is an absolute howler, while one or two episodes described smack of being ‘bundu legends’.
The author spent time in his mobile surgery in the ‘doctor’s bogie’, a special wagon hitched onto the train that traversed the country from south to north. It would stop at every small station and the ailing populace would flock in for treatment, often necessitating the bogie’s being left behind in a siding to be hooked up by the next train. Altogether the book is a fair reflection of life in the colonies in the late 1940s, and it paints a good picture of the little settlement of Maun in the Okavango, as well as the Zambian Copperbelt.
Subsequently he was to enter the services of WNLA as the Medical Officer who checked out the avalanche of humanity absorbed by the Witwatersrand gold mines, only to be spat out when their contracts had expired. He devotes more than a whole chapter to the methods used by this organization, as well as the many benefits that the Africans enjoyed due to the system, which operated from a numbers of centres in the Caprivi, Barotseland, Southern Rhodesia and Mozambique.
A medico of an entirely different calibre is Alberto Denti di Pirajno, who wrote two books: A Cure for Serpents (Andre Deutsch, 1955) and A Grave for a Dolphin (1956), on his experiences. The good doctor starts his first book with charming reminiscences
among the Berber and Tuareg people of Tripolitania. None of the dour medical details, but intimate cameos of a kaleidoscope of patients, interspersed with snippets of local folklore and flavours from the Arabian Nights. While his treatments might not always have had the full endorsement of the British Medical Association, his cure for impotence, to which the title of the book refers is certainly a novel one which smacks of the time-honoured sleight of hand used by quacks to extract demons or extraneous objects from the patients’ bodies. An endearing quality of Pirajno’s writing is the lack of judgmental pontificating – as he cheerfully treats prostitutes, beggars, villagers or pashas, acknowledging their common humanity.
His next appointment was in Eritrea, this time as Regional Commissioner, but he still had to deputise occasionally for the MO. A hunting trip into the inhospitable desert; a bevy of beautiful women weaving their intrigues; tribal feuds and hashish smuggling all feature in this eventful period at Massawa, before he was transferred to the capital of Asmara for a spell before WWII. The book ends on a sombre note as the good doctor had been posted to Tripoli as the city’s governor and he had to surrender it to Montgomery’s forces.
The second book is a strange tale of a foundling Venus, a love story, of dolphins and of magic – very difficult to classify as to genre – but not really particularly relevant to the author’s medical career. Nonetheless, a most readable offering, which left me with more questions than answers.
A little less colonial, but still a chronicle of pioneer doctoring in the wilds, is Con Weinberg’s Fragments of a Desert Land (Timmins, 1975). He was decanted fresh from Medical School into the small village of Gibeon in 1926, where he was installed as relieving District Surgeon. There was one automobile in town; alternative transport being horseback or on foot. The nearest hospital was in Windhoek, over three hundred kilometers away, and he notes that while there was a telephone in town, one had to shout very loudly into it to make oneself heard in Windhoek!
Weinberg also had his medical caboose, still of pre-war German vintage, which would be hitched onto the passing trains and he would be transported to hold clinics, or to attend to emergencies up and down the line between Keetmanshoop and the capital. While I was reading this, I repeatedly bumped into shadows of my own family history, as my grandfather had been the travelling medic during the construction of the railway line between Luderitz and Keetmanshoop some twenty years earlier – possibly even working in the same caboose, and almost certainly sharing quarters with the author in Keetmanshoop. An entertaining book, full of incident and written with enough skill to let one feel the grit of the sand between one’s teeth.
Medicine in tropical Africa during the 20th century has been overshadowed by the monumental persona of Albert Schweitzer; theologian, musician, philosopher, missionary and doctor. By 1905 he had already achieved great stature as an authority on church organs and music, as well as being a professor of theology. He felt called to become a doctor so that he “might be able to work without having to talk….but (by) this new form of activity I could not represent myself as talking about the religion of love, but only as an actual putting of it into practice”. He qualified as a surgeon and doctor seven years later and wasted no time in departing, accompanied by his wife Helene, for Lambarene on the Ogowe River, Gabon.
Though he had been promised a mission building, this was not to materialize and his first patients were treated in a disused fowl-house. WWI came and Schweitzer and his wife were briefly interned as German citizens by the French, but his deprived patients caused such a furore that they were soon set at liberty. It was during the war years that Schweitzer had time to philosophise, and he founded the concept of ‘Reverence for Life’ as an embodiment of his faith and work. Nonetheless he returned to Europe for a spell and only resumed his work at Lambarene in 1924. He funded most of his work from his own income as a lecturer and musician and the hospital grew to some seventy buildings in the next forty years of his labours. He received numerous honours including the Nobel Peace Prize, and died in 1965 and was buried at Lambarene.
I have no idea how many books have been written about the man and his work. Two I have worked through are G Seaver’s Albert Schweitzer, the Man and his Mind ( A & C Black, 1948), and C R Joy & M Arnold’s The Africa of Albert Schweitzer ( A & C Black, 1949). The first is somewhat heavy reading, as are Schweitzer’s own books, Civilization and Ethics, My Life and Thought, The Decay and Restoration of Civilization, which cover his philosophical work, his biographical writings: Memoirs of Childhood and Youth, From My African Notebook, as well as his two most popular and readable works On the Edge of the Primeval Forest, and More from the Primeval Forest. Whether one likes philosophy or religion, or one merely stands in awe of the man, his humanitarianism and towering intellect, one should try to read one or the other of his works.
Just as Schweitzer battled the horrendous tropical scourges that afflict the inhabitants of West Africa, so did Michael Gelfand in South Central Africa. He wrote a goodly number of books dealing with subtropical medicine, as well as traditional healing and witchcraft practices among the tribespeople of Zimbabwe. The Sick African (Stewart, 1943) is too clinical for the lay reader, but Medicine and Custom in Africa (E & S Livingstone, 1964) is an account of the 'medical anthropology' of Africa, in which he examines the history of healing and materia medica, as well as occult practices. In another quite interesting title, Livingstone the Doctor – his Life and Travels (Basil Blackwell, 1957) he gives a critical evaluation of the great missionary/explorer’s medical role during his African sojourn. Another work, Mother Patrick and her Nursing Sisters (Juta, 1964) paints a faithful picture of the first attempts at providing a medical service to the new colony that was Rhodesia; as does the book A Service to the Sick (Mambo Press, 1976) in which he relates the development of medical treatment for Africans between 1890 and 1953. Medicine and Magic of the Mashona (Juta, 1956) delves into more ethnographical fields, as does Witch Doctor (Harvill Press, 1964) for good measure. As far as I’m aware, his last book in this vein to appear was The Traditional Medical Practitioner in Zimbabwe (Mambo Press, 1985), but the indefatigable doctor also collaborated with P W Laidler in writing South Africa, its Medical History (Struik, 1971). Gelfand’s books certainly belong onto the shelves of anybody interested in indigenous medicine and ethnography, while all collectors of Rhodesiana should follow suit, more especially since he also wrote a handful of other historical works.
There are a large number of little memoirs written by and about doctors in private practice in small towns and in the cities of the subcontinent. I can’t claim to have read that many, since a little medicine tends to go a long way with me. The best tales are usually those which are light on technical detail and rich in human tapestry. One of the former is D Gamsu’s Adventures of a South African Brain Surgeon (Hugh Keartland, 1967) which is ill-named, since it is more of a whodunit, recalling the most memorable manslaughters, murders attempted and successful as well as fraudulent claims for injuries never suffered. It reads more like Benjamin Bennett than Chris Barnard. Speaking of the latter, one needs to have been born in Beaufort West to enable one to wade through the pages of this flamboyant heart-throb of the female gender (if he is to be believed). Much more charming was the little volume entitled Salt River Doctor by B A Mackenzie (Faircape, 1981), or Dr Dingle’s cheerful memoir And the Doctor Recovered (Timmins, 1959). One of my firm favourites is C Louis Leipoldt’s Bushveld Doctor (Jonathan Cape, 1937) in which he describes his years after the end of the Boer War, ministering to the needs of the poor rural Afrikaner and especially their children in the Northern Transvaal. Many of these waifs were miserably ill-nourished, malaria and bilharzia-ridden, and in some cases scarcely able to assimilate any knowledge during their school hours because of their physical condition. A thoroughly engaging social document of the times.
There is no shortage of historical material on the theme. The Victorian medical men – and women – were not reticent about their activities. Some of the good doctors cured men’s bodies so that they could indulge in scientific adventures with the proceeds, as Emil Holub did. He intermittently dosed, patched and otherwise cured prospectors at the Diamond Fields for years before amassing enough funds to be able to lead three expeditions to the upper reaches of the Zambezi, where he made a name for himself as an explorer and recorder of strange peoples, animals and plants; which he ably describes (at some length) in his two-volume work Seven Years in South Africa (various German and English eds). J W Matthews’s work Incwadi Yami (Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1877 & Africana Book Society, 1976) is in a similar vein, based mainly on the Diamond Fields, but the author prefers at least a modicum of the comforts of civilization, so he did not take to the wilds. Still, a lively and entertaining book on conditions in the ‘Wild West’ of South Africa. Another book dealing with this period and region is Lure of the Stone by W M & V Buss (Timmins, 1976), which chronicles the career of our own ‘Lady of the Lamp’ Sister Henrietta Stockdale, who was instrumental in bringing some relief to the diggers who were struck down by the major killers of the time, pneumonia, typhoid, typhus fever and dysentery. Sister Henrietta nursed and taught others to nurse for some two decades, right through the siege of Kimberley, and comes across as rather a martinet from this short biography, which reads something like a medical Who’s Who of the times.
Speaking of those times – the Anglo-Boer War was a period of intense medical activity, on both sides of the conflict. While the British potentially had a well-equipped medical service, with staff, equipment and medicines, they had not reckoned with the far-flung nature of the conflict across the subcontinent. The Boers, on the other hand, were short of trained personnel, which was in part supplied by sympathizers from a number of European countries, many of whom left memoirs of their years in the field. A vast amount of this information has been assembled by Kay de Villiers in his monumental work on the history of military medicine in the Anglo-Boer War, entitled Healers, Helpers and Hospitals, 2 Vols (Protea Book House, 2008). For anybody with an interest in the conflict, these works are an absolute must; the reader interested in medical history will find a feast, and the student and researcher will find much well-researched and documented fact, and even the casual browser will find a wealth of interesting anecdote, to be dipped into time and again – a tour de force in this genre.
There are the stories of the men and women who healed their fellow man. Then there are the stories of the institutions. The South African Institute for Medical Research has a very special place in my heart, because my mother worked there and in the serum laboratories at Rietfontein; so I have spent many hours wandering round the corridors of the august edifice designed by Sir Herbert Baker and built on Hospital Hill, as well as among the animal cages during my youth. M Malan’s book In Quest of Health (Lowry, 1988) traces the history of this world-renowned institution from its earliest beginnings due to fears of infectious diseases among the mineworkers in Johannesburg. During the period between the wars, extensive research was done with plague, relapsing fever, histoplasmosis, sporotrichosis, bilharzia and numerous other diseases, but what brought the institute to world attention was the production of a controversial vaccine against poliomyelitis, that dreaded killer of children in the early fifties. My sibling and I were probably among the first batches of schoolchildren to be inoculated with this virus, so once more it is of personal interest – but more of polio vaccine later. Lately the institute is engaged in research into the immunology of the AIDS pandemic. The book is no easy afternoon’s read, but for the interested layman and medico, a serious contender for their attention.
Certainly there are a number of histories of hospitals and medical schools, but none better to mention here than the definitive work on the history of Groote Schuur At the Heart of Healing (Jacana, 2008) by Anne Digby and Howard Phillips. The authors have written a scholarly yet very human history of this iconic institution and the caring people who staff it from the most menial positions to the top consultants. They trace the rising fortunes of the hospital when money poured in after the blaze of the spotlights had focused on the revolutionary heart transplant successes, and the gradual decline in funding during the latter years, as management struggled to come to terms with the integration of patients and staff in the New South Africa.
Lastly, to return to polio vaccines, and the rumours that it might be an ‘escaped’ plague – an experiment that went wrong. For readers who really love a challenging read, I would suggest you try E Hooper’s medical whodunit entitled The River (Penguin, 2000). The author is a medical sleuth, hot on the trail of the root cause of AIDS - epidemiological detective work; a truly remarkable attempt to trace the possible origins of the world pandemic, as well as its diffusion, from postulated beginnings with a live polio vaccine derived from chimpanzees (who have become acclimatized to their own form of SIV), which was supposedly distributed among Central African villagers. Probably there are huge holes that need to be plugged in the theory, but I have to admit I was hooked from beginning to end, though the medspeak left me bewildered on more than one occasion.

And now I am going off to have a drink to your continued good health!

PAGE RAGE

Africana Votes & Views #10

The time has come to share with you all, readers and writers alike, some of the characteristics, failings and foibles of authors and publishers, that absolutely stick in my craw and refuse to be ingested without a Herculean struggle. 

Some of my pet aversions are purely personal - such as my dislike of dustjackets or dw's as they are often referred to. I love the feel and look of a book attractively bound in cloth, paper or leather-covered boards instead of a slithery plastic-coated concoction in garish colours, frequently bearing advertising, bar codes, pictures of authors, their biographies and forthcoming attractions, over the cheapest possible machine binding job you can get. The dw costs a great deal to produce, I believe; money that could much better be spent on materials and binding of the volume it covers. Once the book has been read a few times - or even just removed from the shelf and replaced again, the dw starts getting first edgeworn, then a few tears appear, making it tatty or scuffed; a few more passages from hand to shelf and extended rips appear, and possibly even a chunk is torn off to scribble a telephone number on or to be used as an instrument of cleansing - making a description of torn & chipped inevitable. Readers have become brainwashed to the necessity of having dw's to such a degree that such deficient pieces of scrap paper are occasionally pasted down onto other sheets so as to reassemble to best ability the jigsaw puzzle they have become; they are lovingly encased in plastic protectors, (as if this confers de facto virginity to them once more), and more disturbingly, crime has raised its ugly head with forgeries starting to appear on the market, courtesy of high quality copying machines. Ag shame!

  Even the fundis of the bookworld differ on this subject. That bible all bibliophiles should possess, John Carter’s ABC for Book Collectors, (Oak Knoll, 1992 6th Rev ed) has the following to say: Professors Tanselle and Gallup…have spoken up for the recognition of the jacket as, in bibliographical terms, an integral component of the modern book, yet that this insistence sometimes becomes rather hysterical is also true. On the previous page he says: …dustjackets were – and functionally still are – ephemera in the most extreme sense: wrappings intended to be thrown away, before the objects they were designed to accompany were put to use. My pet hate is in good company – I rest my case.
  Let us linger on the exterior of the book. How about size? The first book that leaps to mind is Rourke & Lincoln's tome Mimetes (Tiyan Publishers, 1982). This book weighs in the region of 8 kg, and my colleague who has a copy, informs me that it is about 70 x 50 cm in size. His classic comment was that "All the publisher needed to do is to sell four legs along with the book to make it into a coffee-table". A A Balkema published a few so-called 'elephant folios' in his time - reprints of Angas' The Kafir's Illustrated, and Daniell's African Scenery and Animals; themselves no lightweights and only a few centimetres smaller in each direction. Problem is, you need to have a clean table, big enough to hold the thing, you must have both hands free to turn the page (for fear of tearing it) and preferably you should have someone with good eyesight standing on a chair next to you, who would be able to bend over the book far enough to be able to read the text at the top of the page which is not within range of your bifocals. Then you have the problem of storage. No bookshelf will hold it, as it would protrude far enough to snag every passer-by, leading to eventual damage. You can put it on top of a cupboard to gather dust and fishmoths, but that way you can't enjoy the book, and the same goes for putting it into a drawer for safety. When I have copies of these monstrosities in my shop, they are stood on the floor, leant against this wall and that one; being turned about weekly, so that they don't develop a permanent slouch. Meanwhile I pray that no stray tomcat will come in to mark off the outer limits of his territory in time-honoured fashion against the priceless volume.
  Seriously though, size matters. A book of a thousand pages or more is fine as a reference book, not as a bedside companion. If you would dare to fall asleep while reading one of these lying down, you could end up with facial surgery. The abovementioned dw's are another plague while reading larger books in a prone position. They tend to slither and slide out of their jackets, while the wrappers themselves are not immune to the abrasive qualities of bunched-up bedclothes. Then there are softcover books; at best a necessary evil, which to me will always reek of 1950's shilling dreadfuls like Peter Cheyney's Dark Wanton or Dangerous Curves - but not Wolpoff's six-hundred page quarto tome entitled Preliminary Publication of Paleoanthropology (McGraw Hill, 1994), which is a textbook that is intended to be consulted often and enthusiastically. To add insult to injury, there is that pervasive practice of cheap and nasty bookbinding called 'Perfect Bound'. Anything less perfect is difficult to imagine. The pages of the book are assembled, clamped, ruthlessly guillotined on all four edges if necessary, a lick of sticky, hot gunge is applied to the long side, and a softcover sleeve is applied with some pressure to make it all stick together. Hey presto - you have a book. Or do you? The unsuspecting purchaser doesn't always look at the spine, or the construction, especially if they are bewitched by the resounding title on the cover and the promise of virgin literature on the pages, so they take it home and read it. The monstrosity might survive, one two or even a few more readings, then suddenly a page drops out, the another, then twenty or thirty, as the space-age glue hardens, dries out and loses its tack - rather like space-shuttle glue holding on ceramic heat-shield tiles - you remember the scenario?
  One last peeve concerning the book's exterior: since I read books in a number of languages, I have perforce to browse shelves on which the titles are displayed in various ways. Generally I prefer a label or a horizontally broken-up and printed title and author. That is good if the shelf is in front of me, at eye-height. It is an unfortunate fact that my eyes are fixed in my face and do not run up and down my body on tracks at will - meaning that inevitably, the book I want to look at, is at the height of my knees or lower, and if I bend down, the title is upside down, which at my age, shape and station in life, does not facilitate browsing. If the title is too long or the book is thin, the other convention is to have the wording run from left to right, if one is holding the book front cover upwards in front of one. Not so the Germans; they run the title from right to left - as does Anderson with his book Blue Berg - Britain takes the Cape (Privately published, 2008) as well as a few other authors in various languages that I have run across. This makes for cricking noises of the neck, something that all browsers of boxes of books on the tables at charity and other sales have experienced, as the books' titles are displayed this way, and then face about. Most vendors just don't seem to realise the basic fact that they should try to make the browsing of their stock as painless as possible for their clients - thus achieving maximum sales. Instead it becomes a circus of cerebral contortions until the hapless buyer gives up in considerable discomfort.
  All sorts of sizes are problematical. Why produce an A4 softcover of fifty pages, when you could just as easily fold the text in half and have an A5 which will stand properly (even in softcover), and on the spine of which you can legibly inscribe a title and an author? What does one do with an oblong quarto, or even an oblong folio? You either have to have a special shelf with extra depth to prevent the problem mentioned above with those whoppers, or you have to park the offenders on edge, spine upwards, where you also can't read the title as it is obscured by the shelf above. At the other end of the scale there are tiny books, some no higher than 100 mm, about half the height of a normal octavo. These tend to get lost among their tall companions on the shelves, like toddlers in a crowd of grown-ups. Equally bad are books which pretend to be octavo in height, but their depth is half that of a normal book, making them a bastard-size which is just asking to be squeezed to the back of a shelf, thus making it impossible to find.
  From the exterior, which is after all, only skin-deep, let us delve into the innards of the beasties. A well-designed, considered publication is most desirable; preferably on paper that looks as if it could have had a tree or vegetable fibre as a parent material instead of some of this fashionable shiny junk that owes most of its components to a mine, that won't burn properly, weighs more than a brick, and refuses to take printers' ink without fading to some anaemic grey. Paper should be of sufficient bulk and opacity to prevent the print on the other side from interfering with the text. It should be slightly matt, if at all possible not the dead white which reflects any incident ray of light causing eyestrain to the reader, rather shading into ivory - but avoiding fancy bubblegum colours so beloved for the kiddies' library - or even worse, what I call negative printing, that is white font on a shiny black background as favoured by publications like the National Geographic Magazine and other glitzy productions. Trying to read a nine point font of this type with artificial light is nearly as bad a trying to read the tiny white English subtitles in a Bollywood film production filled with people dressed in white robes, striding through blinding sunshine. Fancy fonts may have their place on greeting cards, advertising signs and directions to the nearest toilet in public places, but they make reading a chore when it should be a pleasure. I don't profess to know much about typography, but an 11pt Garamond, Ariel or Times Roman or suchlike, with a decent spacing between lines, say single or one and a half, means that even those who are not fortunate enough to have 20/20 sight can enjoy the read.
  I have been told by reliable sources that there are conventions in publishing. I attach so little importance to these that I can't actually remember exactly what they are - but here goes. Your top margin is, let's say X mm, then your bottom margin should be bigger, say X+5 mm, on the left hand page your outer margin should be Y mm, while the inside margin should be Y + 3 mm, and the opposite should apply to the facing page. All this is surely based on some deep-seated logic which evolved somewhere in the 15th century, but I fail to see the relevance to anything except individual aesthetics. What I do remember is the completely irrational rage I felt the first time I looked through one of those Scripta Africana reprints. Here is a set of so-called de luxe editions (poorly bound) with a poor facsimile of text lifted from a page 22 x 15 cm (including margins) and plonked down in the same size in the middle of a page the size of a toilet lid, resulting in margins about half as wide as the text, or more, all round. What a waste of paper! Other volumes from the same publisher, like Conan Doyle's The Great Boer War, go to the other extreme, and you have the same large pages with huge blocks of text and very small margins. On the other hand, I must admit to binning books which have ten millimetre margins at the spine, and being bound so tightly that you would need stalk-eyes to be able to read the text to the end of the line, since you can't open the thing wide enough to make out the last word. Talking of which, I have just seen the most awful product that it has ever been my misfortune to view: a combination of three books in one, entitled History of the BSAP 1889-1980 by Gibbs & Phillips (Adcraft Publishing, 2000), which sports 5mm wide margins top and bottom of the page, while the side margins are about ten mm wide. That is taking economy to ridiculous lengths.
  One can understand the amount of physical effort, trial and experimentation that was needed in days of yore and lead slugs for type, to obtain text that was properly justified on both sides. However, I can refer you to numerous books on my shelves, that were published in the 18th century, which are all perfectly set out - so why was it that some indolent slobs of typographers were permitted or encouraged by their bosses the printers and publishers, to foist a bunch of untidy, unfinished-looking prose on the purchasers of their wares? In this regard, our own Guus Balkema was a prime offender, with several shoddy works among a goodly number of workmanlike volumes. I seem to recall trying to read an experimental book once, which was printed like modern poetry - lines of any length, no punctuation, no capitals. Talking of which, I abhor correspondence which I have to read, written without using capitals. Aw, come on, it doesn't take that much effort to press the shift key. Whenever I get a missive like that, I am tempted to reply in full upper case. It's damn nearly as difficult to read - don’t ask me why, but my brain must have become fossilised in 'standard mode'.

  There is a justification for breaking up text on a page into narrow columns, like in a newspaper. I have been told what it is - but I forgot. Whatever it was or is, books are not newspapers, so there is presently no need for this. A very beautifully produced book I have recently looked at (and sold) had this type of configuration. On each landscape small quarto page there were three columns divided by vertical lines - but the text columns aren't justified, making the whole thing look ragged, though in all fairness stretching and squeezing the text alternately to make it fit in between the tramlines would have looked pretty awful too - so why columns? I believe it is easier to place illustrations using this configuration, but here lies another problem for me; imagine an ordinary page, divide it vertically into two, then spread a picture across the middle, with two blobs of text in two columns on top, and again at the bottom. Now how do you read this? Do you read the first blob, top left, then skip the picture and read the blob at bottom left - or do you read the top left, then go across the page to the right hand top blob, read that, and then go back to the bottom left, then the bottom right? See what I mean? You can imagine how lost I can manage to get on pages with multiple columns and multiple pics like in an encyclopaedia.

  Now let us tackle the main course of this discourse: the contents of the book. In these days of computers and instant gratification software, not to mention the Internet, Google, Wikipedia etc, there is really no earthly reason for getting one's facts horribly wrong - repeatedly. To err is human, and I have heard that the completely fault-free book has not yet been produced, and I can believe that. In spite of two proofreaders an editor, a slew of publishing staff and my own very earnest attempts at eradicating every possible typo, erratic spelling of names, punctuation, footnotes and pagination, there are a minimum of three mistakes in something I produced last year. I won't bore you with the details, but I'll whisper them in you ear if you ask me personally. So, I start reading a book with an open mind. To illustrate my gripe, it would run something like this: on page ten I find a misspelling of a Latin botanical name, two pages later there is an omitted letter in a word, three pages later the author tells me that a certain person was born in Austria when he came from Switzerland, and on the next page he finds that the spelling of Bovril is beyond him and he doesn't know the difference between it's and its. Well, you can imagine that my confidence in the author's research is by now shaken, and my ire is stirred. By the time I reach the twentieth mistake without having had to consult a single reference book, I discard the book as 'complete rubbish and paper-waste', CRAP for short. One of my ex-clients springs to mind; after much purchase of books as references, he produced a book on the stirring annals of the building of the railway line between the southern and northern extremities of our continent. I do not remember the exact number of his transgressions, but they were legion. His piece de resistance was the spread of pages on which he portrayed a perfectly clear picture of a Lake steamer, with its name proudly displayed for all to see on its bows, he then spelt it differently in the picture's caption, and to top it all he found another two spellings for the same vessel's name in the next few pages. Elsewhere in the book he would have quaggas running around the jungles of central Africa, and he had a type of pony climbing trees under the misconception that the word meant civet cats or something like that. That sort of sloppiness would be inexcusable in a Victorian novel meant for boys under the age of thirteen, not to speak of a book purporting to be a serious history.
  Especially authors dealing with historical subjects need to check and recheck their facts, and especially spelling. One such author who brought his work for me to sell on his behalf, chronicled the valiant exploits of a distaff military ancestor. Now what I know about matters military is dangerous - but I picked up mistakes in the spelling of an international incident, a renowned engineer, an iconic machine-gun as well as a batch of typos and one glaring factual faux pas - all in the space of half the book. I lost all confidence in any information he presented. To be sure, the author was very grateful to have these problems pointed out to him, but that should have happened before the book got into print. Another beautiful production, a quasi-scientific botanical work on a region that interested me greatly, was sent to me on publication and I started devouring the contents with great enjoyment. Much to my disappointment, lack of proofreading became all too evident within the first fifty pages, with some dozen or two mistakes being spotted and this spoilt the whole, otherwise very worthwhile effort, which represented years of work. When in doubt, get someone to proofread the thing, then get someone else, then ask your worst enemy, then your best friend - then pray that the printer doesn't make a hash of it. When all else fails, put your computer to work and ask MS Word to do a spell-check - trust me, it works wonders, though I must admit to the basic human failing of having the inability to spot my own typos, even if they are underlined in red by the programme.
  As I get older and crankier, I frequently find myself in a quandary as to whether a word should be ending in -ize, or ise, such is the pervasiveness of the American word, both spoken and written, that one begins to wonder who has the etymological right of way in this and many other aberrant versions of common words. After all, what is correct, is merely a matter of opinion in the compilation of dictionaries. However, if spelling should not be an entirely arbitrary matter, open to the whims and vagaries of any who would put pen to paper, then surely a similar courtesy should be afforded to foreign languages. I am in full agreement with writers who insist that English doesn't have adequate words to express the nuances of words like weltschmerz, schadenfreude, zeitgeist, soupçon, raison d'être, cris de coeur, praia and a host of other choice, foreign mouthfuls that one can choose from; but then one should at least take the elementary precaution of checking the spelling. If an author doesn't have a dictionary of say, Amharic, Finno-Ugric, or Bulgarian - help is at hand - Google has an idiot's manual programme which will actually translate in a very rough-hewn way almost anything you enter into the search form, or give you the correct spelling thereof. Which does not mean you can go ahead with that typically British insouciance and permit your literary creation to state emphatically something idiotic like der Sonne scheint und die Mond strahlt, since some languages actually use gender-specific articles, and the sun is feminine while the moon is masculine to all good Germans, although the exact opposite applies in France and Spain, while the English have managed to neuter both heavenly bodies by some Anglo-Saxon alchemy. John Buchan, who happened to be one of my early favourite authors (though his corona has waned a little with the passing of decades), managed to imprint himself indelibly on my youthful brain with a supposedly German injunction uttered by his spy: 'Schnell, schnell, der Boot' in The Thirty-nine Steps.
  Maps are a necessary adjunct to any book which deals with history, exploration, natural sciences, even biographies and a host of other subjects. A book with maps as endpapers is not to be despised, as long as the scale is adequate, and the legend is legible. A map, or multiples thereof loose in a pocket at the rear of the volume, is a risky business, as all too often they/it go AWOL, and the incautious purchaser ends up with a deficient work, of little value. This happens regularly to bookdealers, believe me. On the other hand, a map folded three times horizontally and eight times vertically unfolds into a huge and unwieldy thing requiring a double bed or a large dining-room table to be spread out properly. In addition it needs to be made of the flimsiest material so that all twenty-four thicknesses of it don't exceed the total thickness of the book, so as you unfold his diaphanous creation, you are greeted with the sweet, low sound of tearing paper, as the right angle at the hinge parts under the strain of your amateur ministrations. I've repaired dozens of maps with Japanese tissue on both sides - so I know all about it. On the other extreme, the canny publisher has shrunk his map to a mere fourfold size of the book, but in the process the font labelling the rivers, mountains and dorps has shrunk to about 2pt, which means that even with a microscope you cannot make out the letters between the fibres of the paper. I've tried that as well - promise.
  Lastly, let us consider the crowning glory of the book, the illustrations. Finely crafted colour plates by virtuoso illustrators and artists will always enhance the look as well as the value of a book. From early woodcuts, to coppergravure and steel, on to the different lithographic techniques, many of which resulted in intricate and finely reproduced work (with the inevitable poor examples scattered among them); from simple sketches, cartoons and vignettes to elaborate hand-coloured plates - there was sure to be something that would delight and charm almost any discerning viewer in an illustrated volume - but alas, no longer. The advent of photography has obviously revolutionised printed illustrations. From the poor, grainy, black and white images, to remarkably fine sepia and collotype reproductions and on to the early colour photographs to spectacular modern photography as cameras and chemicals reached their zenith of development, right into the digital age, when computers can embellish, edit and indeed, create scenes for our edification. Why then is it seen fit to produce large, so called coffee-table books, consisting mainly of illustrative material with very little text to flesh out the pages, in which almost every page consists of a photo containing a large expanse of out-of-focus foreground and background, with about half of the actual subject matter (totalling maybe 5% of the surface of the picture) actually properly visible ? If any feature of a book is guaranteed to evoke page rage in me, this is it. This is not arty; this is not clever; this is ineptitude on the part of the photographer; this is sloth or carelessness on the part of the editor and publisher, and it is an abomination in my eyes.
 There, I feel a lot better now that I have got all of that off my chest !

VICTORIAN/EDWARDIAN FICTION IN S A

AFRICANA VOTES & VIEWS VOL 1 # 9

Let us consider the Victorian novel as placed in a South African environment. After all, so many of the soldiers, administrators and business-people were educated men; men who could write a fair description of an outlandish scene, people and their habits. So where and when did writers start using the subcontinent’s veld as a backdrop to their works of imagination? No, I’m not going to put my foot in it and declare this or that author and title to be able claim primogeniture, as such; that is too dangerous, and just asking for a rebuttal by someone with a better knowledge of the genre than myself. What we shall do is to browse around the shelves; revisit old favourites, and discover a few which are gems, and many that are not.
To date I have not come across any early books for the very young with a local backdrop or from the pen of a local writer. It would seem that the classic nursery tales, rhymes and fables of European origin were thought to be quite sufficient, or alternatively it may have been judged that the rough, colonial scene was not fit for the tender hearts and ears of Victorian sprouts. So it is only in the first decade of the twentieth century that we find a collection of adaptations from native tales by E J Bourhill and J B Drake, called simply Fairy Tales from South Africa (Macmillan, 1908). I can find no further information on the two authors, except that the introduction ends with the legend ‘Barberton, Transvaal, 1908.’ Speaking of introduction, this one goes to great lengths to explain the way of life of the black people, how each little tribe had its chief (hence all the kings, queens and princesses in the tales); how a man’s ambition was to have an impi of warriors to fight for him in his many battles; how they hardly ever worked except for a little cattle-herding, as work is what wives were put on earth for; that they had two or more wives, for whom they had paid lobola, and how they only lived in the idyllic surroundings of the Eastern Transvaal, Natal and the Eastern Cape. All a little patronising and full of generalisations and most certainly not PC – however, I must applaud the writers for a labour of love that might have been a very worthwhile introduction for a European child into another culture and belief system at the time. The tokoloshes might have become fairies, the chiefs great kings and the ntombis are all princesses; while the unspeakable cruelties and bloodshed are glossed over skilfully so as not to shock and offend, but something of the flavour of tribal legends has survived, and the book is a milestone of sorts in Africana Literature.
Catering for slightly older tastes, the institution of boarding-school life, so dear to the heart of the Englishman, doesn’t escape the colonial writers’ guild either. I cannot profess enough interest to have scoured the shelves in search of the subject, so I can’t speak of its full extent in the subcontinent, but I did run across one quite readable little effort by one ‘Natalian’, actually a gentleman by the name of Albert Weir Baker, who seemed to have been more famous for writing on serious subjects, such as the ‘effects of liquor on the natives’, ‘the evils of Freemasonry and its incompatibility with Christianity’ as well as a personal statement of faith, when he was director of the South African Compounds Commission. The book in question was A South African Boy; Schoolboy Life in Natal, (Marshall Russell, 1897). While the plot made no lasting impression on me (at a distance of some 12–15 years of having last read it) it was entertaining enough to keep me at it throughout, and I found it reflected the flavour of schooling in what must have been a vastly different environment from even what I experienced some sixty years later.
Some of the earliest works written to appeal to young minds, which I read, must have been those classics by G A Henty – With Buller in Natal, The Young Colonists, and With Roberts to Pretoria are three with a South African flavour that come to mind. All jolly good fun, British imperialism, courage, honour, adventure and the like; the baddies, ie Boers/Zulus etc got their come-uppance and the young hero either settled down to a long, productive and esteemed existence, or else he returned Home and became a sitting MP or JP or something. During my pre-teenage years I could find no fault with these adventure yarns, but even then the basic similarity of the above stories, each in a slightly different Victorian historical scene, came to my attention, and their attraction waned.
R M Ballantyne was another notable Victorian who wrote books with African, and in three instances South African background. He was a scion of a reputable firm of printers and publishers, and had the great good fortune to do an early stint of work in Canada, which stood him in good stead when he decided to devote himself to writing juvenile literature. While a large number of English-speaking people will have read at least his most famous work, Coral Island (1857), he wrote more than a hundred books, mostly characterised by meticulous attention to detail (said to stem from his making one colossal error about the thickness of a coconut shell in Coral Island) and he tried whenever possible to write from personal experience. Of his South African books, Hunting the Lion and The Settler and the Savage are pretty standard fare, while his third book is, in fact, the story of his Six Months at the Cape (1879), a light-hearted reminiscence of an extended vacation in the Eastern Cape and Karoo; an interesting and entertaining read for readers of all ages. The rest of Africa is not ignored, and we can find another half dozen or so novels, set in the Dark Continent. One of these, dealing with slavery, Black Ivory (1873), was in all likelihood inspired by David Livingstone and his crusade against this evil, as the author wholeheartedly endorsed the latter’s views. Ballantyne inspired not only generations of youngsters, with the dictum ‘that he believed that boys must be trained up from boys to be true men and not just left on their own to be boys’ , he also inspired other writers, among whom was Robert Louis Stevenson, who reputedly incorporated several of Ballantyne’s ideas in Treasure Island.
Almost certainly the next in line were those wonderful books by H Rider Haggard. She, King Solomon’s Mines, Alan’s Wife, Allan Quatermain, Ayesha – and dozens more titles that flowed from this talented man’s pen. His phrase of ‘She who must be obeyed’ has passed into the English language as all that stands for female authority over the hapless male of the species. Haggard spent a while in the Transvaal, where he had a position under Sir Theophilus Shepstone in the years leading up to the First Anglo-Boer War. During this period he met a number of the hunter-adventurers, like Selous and Burnham, on whom his most endearing character, Allan was based. There was romance, tragedy, battle, adventure and lost treasure and lost civilizations galore – but I have a sneaking suspicion that old Haggard actually had talent. While I find the MGM versions of King Solomon’s Mines and Mogambo a bit insipid after two viewings of Deborah Kerr and Grace Kelly each doing her vapid siren-thing, even separated by some thirty years; but I can still read his description of that noble Zulu warrior, Umslopogaas, swinging his deadly war axe and picking off enemies at will while chanting that wild war-song; and get a thrill from the heroic prose. Two of his books, Swallow (Longmans Green, 1899), dealt with the Great Trek, and Jess (1887), were probably aimed more at the fair sex, I seem to recall, being the adventures of young heroines. His books did not all end well, or tamely, nor did they always promote British suzerainty over the remote regions touched upon. I seriously doubt that they were intended to portray life as it was lived in the second half of the 19th century, but they were imaginative, well-written adventure yarns, which deserve to stand next to classics like Stevenson’s Treasure Island.
Still on the subject of juvenile literature, let us consider that phenomenon which is Jock of the Bushveld. Not a Victorian novel, you will say – well, almost, would be my reply. Though it was published in 1907, the experiences which led to the writing of the book were during Fitzpatrick’s years on the Eastern Transvaal Gold Fields from 1884 onwards, and when he accompanied Lord Randolph Churchill to Mashonaland in the late 1890s. Although presently not considered PC, as it reflects terminology, social attitudes and racial stereotyping which were common during the period, it is unlikely that even attempts at sanitising a book of such stature will succeed in killing off its popularity. This book has a genuinely wide appeal. Although written for the ‘lickle people’, ie Fitz’s children, there is enough meat on the bones to arouse every hunter’s and bush lover’s enthusiasm – anybody who wants to experience the flavour of the Gold Rush, the smell of the campfire, the heat of the fever-stricken Lowveld and the rough camaraderie of the men of the trails and tracks. The book certainly has enough literary merit to survive for many more generations. A less widely known work of fiction, which predated Jock, was published in 1897. It consisted of a number of short campfire-stories, quite readable and entertaining, entitled The Outspan – probably the best of a number of such volumes from different authors of the period.
Just from the above three authors and their dozen-odd books one can already see a theme developing. The subcontinent was portrayed as a blank canvas for adventurers; scope for explorers, prospectors and hunters. There were wild beasts aplenty, and wild people too, that would need subduing. So primarily the backdrop was portrayed as being attractive to the young would-be adventurer; there were riches to be found and fame to be won. South Africa was a man’s country, and a steady stream of hunting, travelling and soldiering books emanated from the gentry that forsook the shores of old Blighty, so perforce the tellers of tales had to follow the same paths, with their inventions ever surpassing reality. While a few hardy ladies followed in their footsteps, the raw environment did not endear itself to the female novelist as a backdrop.
A Victorian lady who entered the early literary fray was Harriet Ward, wife of an officer stationed on the Eastern Frontier. Her first effort was Five Years in Kaffirland (Colburn, 1848) in which she faithfully describes the ‘War of the Axe’, and displays great sympathy for soldier and colonist alike. This was followed by her editorship of a minor work on The Past and Future of Emigration, before she launched into a work of fiction, which was very much in the male domain of the ‘wild frontier, peopled by savage warriors and an intrepid bunch of colonists’ entitled Jasper Lyle; a Tale of Kaffirland (G Routledge, 1851–2). I have to admit that the lady’s style, plot and execution was not to my taste and some forty to fifty pages of her work were sufficient for the day for my needs. Nonetheless, I recall that her book did present life as it was then with a touch more realism than was generally incorporated in the fiction of the period by her male counterparts.
Olive Schreiner can be considered a rare exception with her books Story of an African Farm (1883) and Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland, but while the former faithfully describes the dreary lot of womankind and tackles the issues of the period, the latter was not just another tale of derring-do in the wilds with a political agenda thrown in for good measure, but a rather wearisome allegorical satire against the greed of one C J Rhodes in nabbing an entire country from the inhabitants. So one could say that Schreiner was the first to break out of the adolescent view of the Dark Continent and who painted the human canvas within the strictures of culture rather than physical environment.
Another fine craftsman of the adventure yarn was John Buchan. Although his book Prester John did not appear until 1910, the writer’s experiences during the last phases of the Boer War, and his later travels around the Transvaal, gave him the rich background into which he placed the young Scottish lad, David Crawfurd, who became embroiled in an uprising of the black tribes under the leadership of the messianic John Laputa. The setting is absolutely authentic; the two main characters are utterly believable and the plot is not that far-fetched that it could not have happened somewhere in Africa under British colonial rule, although some of Buchan’s work is nauseatingly jingoistic and racist, with archetypal villains – Jew, Levantine, Bolshevik, Portuguese halfbreed, Boer drunkard, Fuzzy Wuzzy and Boche or Hun – leaping off every other page. I have to concede that he writes a mean adventure yarn, which involves the reader sufficiently to make the book enjoyable almost a hundred years after it first appeared. His other books, though featuring a touch of South African flavour in the personages of Richard Hannay and the aviator Pieter Pienaar, have very little to do with Africa, and are thus outside the focus of this essay.
It would seem that a number of sportsmen, after having had their fill of the chase, decided to settle in their upholstered chairs and to allow their memories and imaginations free rein. One of these was the renowned naturalist and hunter, Henry Anderson Bryden, a great friend of Selous’, with whose cousin, Percy, he collaborated on a volume entitled Travel and Big Game, in addition to a number of hunting, natural history and historical books. In his latter days he also decided to branch out into fiction, and the result was the rather disappointing volume, From Veldt Camp Fires (1900), a rather nondescript collection of anecdotes. I read it recently, and apparently he wrote a few others, Don Duarte’s Treasure (1904) and The Gold Kloof (1907), which I have not seen to date, but I doubt that they contributed much to twentieth century literature.
A little earlier, similar tales were penned by one Captain Alfred W Drayson, who found enough time in his busy military schedule to embark on several hunting trips in the Eastern Cape and Natal. His real-life adventures are ably described in the hunting book Sporting Scenes among the Kaffirs of South Africa (G Routledge, 1858), even though the finish of his book left a lot to be desired due to the ghastly colour plates that adorned its pages in greasy splendour. Obviously his imagination became inflamed with all he had seen and heard, so he followed up his success with a series of books filled with ‘sporting narrative and daring adventures among savage beasts and hardly less savage men’, such as Tales at the Outspan (1865), White Chief of the Caffres (1887), Diamond Hunters of South Africa (1889), and From Keeper to Captain (1889) – the latter being the only volume I have actually looked through. Generally fairly standard adolescent fare for the period, but one does glimpse a few passages where the soldiers’ and hunters’ lots are sketched without the addition of excess purple prose.
The able historian, Joseph Forsyth Ingram, started off his literary career with an eminently collectible work with the snappy title of The Land of Gold, Diamonds and Ivory – being a comprehensive handbook and guide to the colonies, states and republics of South and East Africa (W B Whittingham & Co, 1889). It would seem as if Ingram assembled a wealth of material which he was unable to place in his tour de force, so he was motivated to offer his readership a collection of tales under the title of Story of a Gold Concession and other African Tales and Legends (W H Griffin & Co, 1893). The book is a strange mixture of fact, legend and pure fiction, which is very difficult to classify. The first tale, after the title of the book, is obviously fiction as it deals with the fate of a crazed prospector and his fabulously rich gold find in the Lebombo mountains of Swaziland. Another such prospector’s tale, this time set in Natal, also smacks of a fertile imagination. Then follow a number of tales with a tribal setting. Some of the personages mentioned are historical, and the stories run very much along the lines of a Victorian reinterpretation of African fireside tales. Lastly, there are a few oddments, about Paul Kruger, an Arab slaver, and hunting trips along the Pongola and Zambezi rivers. An odd assortment indeed. After this brief flirtation with fiction, he returned to write another three books on the early history of Natal, Pietermaritzburg and Durban, respectively; each a serious and sought-after work of Nataliana.
The institution (one hesitates to call it a firm) of the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge also played a role in publishing a number of, presumably inspirational works, on a number of subjects, which one would not necessarily associate with devotional teachings. There were biographies of numerous missionaries, and heroic descriptions of their good works; one described the Herculean task of shipping a motor boat cross-country from the Cape to the Vaal River and then on to Mozambique; travels in the Transkei after the great famine caused by Nonquause’s prophecy; Mrs Charlotte Barter’s lone travels in Zululand; African language primers and dictionaries; works with some ethnographical pretensions, as well as a little piece of fiction, by a Charles Henry Eden, entitled An Inherited Task (1874), sketching the miseries of life as a missionary in Natal under the rule of Shaka. This author too, had a serious geographical work on the continent to his credit, while he also wrote another romance entitled Ula in Veldt and Laager (1879).
Lastly, let us consider one of my all-time favourites – William Charles Scully. In some of my other writings I have already waxed lyrical about his engrossing autobiographies, as well as his sole hunting title, Lodges in the Wilderness (H Jenkins, 1915). But Scully had a lively intellect and imagination, as well as having his work bring him into contact with many different people under varying circumstances. His work as a magistrate probably gave him a certain number of leisure hours, not least in Namaqualand, where, if his autobiography is to be believed, he was almost marooned in his house due to his feud with the mine manager. Whatever the reasons, he wrote three works of fiction before the turn of the century: The White Hecatomb (1897), A Vendetta of the Desert and Between Sun and Sand (both 1898). The first book consists of a number of short stories with an Eastern Cape background, as he had been stationed in various locations as magistrate for a number of years. From these years among the tribespeople, another book, Kafir Stories (1895) also emanated, and it is considered to be one of the early records of black folklore. The latter two novels are based on his Namaqualand and Bushmanland stints. The former is an adventure yarn of revenge and pursuit into the inhospitable wastes across the Gariep, while the latter is a romantic tale of the love between an itinerant trekboer’s daughter and a young Jewish smous, set in the now ghost town of Namies, near Pofadder. Both are well worth reading as they give the reader a fine snapshot of the meagre society and landscape that they have been set in. Another volume of short stories was to follow in 1907, entitled By Veldt and Kopje, and after many years of self-imposed silence due to his disgust with the way the British treated the Cape Boers during the war, he finally sent The Harrow to the publishers in 1921 – a book which castigated British authority and military to the utmost. In 1923 his last work of fiction, Daniel Vananda, was published. This can be called a precursor to Alan Paton’s Cry the Beloved Country, with a similar theme, that of a rural African running afoul of European culture, with dire results.

BOOKSENSE - A SHORT GUIDE TO HANDLING YOUR FAVOURITE BOOKS

AFRICANA VOTES & VIEWS VOL 1 # 8

This is a short, basic manual to keeping your library in a good condition. It does not pretend to be a comprehensive course in librarianship, conservation or archival methods – it is purely some commonsense and knowledge that I have garnered from many people, but most of the information came from my late wife, my friends Cyril Adriaanse and Peter Coates, both of whom worked at the SA Library, my sister Dr Cora Ovens (a lifelong librarian) and Frank Johnston a bookseller from Central Africa, where the bugs bite bigger and better.

Know thine enemy: The three main culprits under our South African conditions are a) Moisture b) Light c) Biological attack. There are many more, but most of these are found in association with the first three, so let us investigate these threats.

Of the tens of thousands of books that have been presented to me by prospective sellers, the greatest number of no-no’s have been books which have been exposed to moisture. In its grossest form, the volume has been dunked, or had water poured over it; there are water-marks across the pages; colours have run, the textblock is rippled; at worst, the pages are stuck together. A more subtle exposure to damp can result in the textblock absorbing so much water from the edges inwards, that the margins of the pages display a ‘high tide’ mark right around, in extreme cases. A hot steamy climate has the further effect of ‘foxing’ the pages of books, that is, the growth of those unsightly brown blotches that seem to get worse year after year. The quality of the paper that the book is made of, has something to do with the degree of foxing, since badly bleached and insufficiently sized paper is most prone; but the micro-organisms that cause the discolouration will grow on even the best cotton-rag paper, or a modern high-gloss paper, given enough time, heat and atmospheric moisture.

Mould is, of course, biological and the companion to severely drenched books. The remnants of this will also stain paper, mostly with green, blue or black shades – all equally unpleasant to look at. I have heard of desperation measures applied by an archivist to his precious documents when they were under a leak in the roof – he bundled the whole lot into a clean deep-freeze. The sub-zero temperatures prevented mould from forming, and slowly the moisture was evaporated from the paper and deposited on the walls of the freezer as ice, leaving the documents in reasonably good shape. It works the same way as putting a slice of bread in the freezer, forgetting about it for three months and then pulling out a dessicated piece of toast. I haven’t tried it myself, but it might just save a precious book. I wish I’d known the trick when we moved into a rented house in White River, Eastern Transvaal, some decades back. All of my books were standing in the lounge in tea crates. Our neighbours invited us over for supper, during which time a small tornado blew the roof off our house and dumped about 150mm of rain onto our goodies. I seem to recall I chucked away several hundred good books. All one can do with an area of mould on a page, is to brush it away gently, without inhaling the stuff. It really is not good for the lungs.

So, water and heat are bad, especially in tandem. What about cold? Well there seems to be some consensus among librarians that a chilly environment is really good for books, but most users would complain loudly if they had to wrap up in anoraks and shawls to do their research. In practice, seventeen degrees is a reasonable compromise – but a very far cry from a Bloemfontein or Johannesburg winter when it can get to way under the zero mark, or an Empangeni or Kalahari summer, when you’re pushing the mercury at forty plus, with about 95% humidity thrown into the bargain in Natal. What do they say?: climate is what you expect; weather is what you get. So you deal with whatever our fair country dishes out by way of ambient temperature. Most of us don’t go as far as airconditioning for our library, but it’s a thought. On the other hand, it’s not essential to be uncomfortable in your reading room, even if you are surrounded by books; to have frozen toes, nose and fingers while you are trying to concentrate on some work, or recreational reading, is no fun. I have a little fan-heater tucked away under my desk – just so that I can kick the switch to on when the cold bites a tad savagely. Talking about heaters though, there is a caveat – fireplaces, though comforting to the body, a treat to the senses of smell, sight and hearing – are a strict no-go area. Unfortunately one only has to look at the ceilings of rooms with open fireplaces to see what happens. A little smoke always escapes from the open hearth, and if there are books in the room, they not only absorb smoke and tars like blotting paper, which then react with cloth, paper and leather in a number of complicated and unwanted ways, but the books smell of smoke. Speaking of which, I have to act the reformed smoker part and thorough spoil-sport: smoke from cigars, cigarettes and pipes descends gently onto any exposed part of a book which is in the same room, it glues itself onto all the abovementioned materials with tenacity, and stinks, forever, quite apart from darkening and damaging bookcloth as well as the edges of the textblock.

Dry heat is probably the least problematic condition to deal with. Although certain older, and certainly most inferior types of paper, get brittle in a dry, hot climate, as long as the books are handled with care, they will rehydrate when the ambient humidity rises again. Leatherbound books do need some special care under those conditions though, since even opening such a volume under those conditions could cause the hinge to break, resulting in very expensive damage. This does not mean one should apply liberal dollops of dubbin or saddle soap to those ancient treasured tomes. There are a number of good products available, unfortunately mostly from overseas sources, which further complicates matters, since a number of these substances are in liquid, flammable form, which precludes the bibliophile importing even the tiny amount needed per mail. In effect you have to find a runner, who will smuggle the stuff out in their personal toiletries, disguised as after-shave or something, when they return from their holiday in Britain, Germany, or USA. The British Library does sell a solid wax, though, and this is best applied very sparingly with a soft cloth to the leather, especially at the hinges. Books so treated should be left to stand separate from their shelfmates for a few days, to prevent any possibility of them sticking together. The liquid lotions ( I use a brand from Germany, which my late wife smuggled into South Africa) one applies by wetting a sponge slightly, squeezing it repeatedly until it foams and then applying it in even strokes to the leather. It is left to dry, and then the book is buffed lightly with a soft cloth.

Now let us deal with threat no 2 – that wonderfully abundant sunlight, which makes our country such a bright, cheery place to live in – in general – sunburn, melanoma and severe ‘sunning of the spine and covers’ apart. Any sunlight is taboo on the bookshelf, except possibly if sanitized by passing it through some total sun-block film on the window panes – if that should exist. Even if filtered through a semi-transparent curtaining material, the ultraviolet is still present in quantities that will at first bleach, and in time, totally destroy the cloth covering the boards of your books. Even sunlight reflected off water or a light-coloured painted surface, still has some destructive force left in it. The old builders and architects had good ideas during Victorian times – they surrounded most houses with wide verandahs or stoeps, which gave shade to the walls and interior of the house, as well as keeping stray sunbeams from intruding through the apertures. Nowadays we like to live behind walls made of glass, or sliding glass doors, under skylights or in houses with interior courtyards and patios. This new lifestyle results in much more exposure to the potentially harmful effects of the sunlight on your furnishings and other property viz your library. Without getting paranoid about it, choose a south-facing room where possible, or at least a wall that gets no sun, not even a passing sweep in the late afternoon. If you must face any other direction, you must have some form of blind, slatted, or rolling, if you don’t want to be in deep gloom behind dark curtains.

A last word on sunshine: if perchance you should leave a book out in the sun (as I’m sure we have all done on occasion) and you come back to find that the top cover has curled beautifully like a calamari steak ten seconds after it has hit a hot pan; all is not lost. Generally it just means that there has occurred a sudden imbalance of moisture content between the outer and inner layers of the cover, causing the outer (dry) to shrink, while the inner (ambiently moist) has remained roughly the same as it was previously. Do not try to rehydrate the poor cover by some precipitous means such as spraying it with water. The best cure is to put the book back into your library and to leave it alone for a couple of days. The covers’ moisture content will balance out again in a few days, and once the book has been returned to its place on the shelves, it should resume its correct shape. A similar effect is found occasionally when endpapers are replaced. If too much glue is slapped onto the inside face of the cover before the paper is applied, the paper is wetted, and expands. Once the glue dries, the paper shrinks and you have a book with permanently bow-legged covers. Not much you can do to that except to start over again.

Biological attack is next. I am sure there is no book collector alive that has not been rewarded by the quicksilver flash of a fishmoth (aka silverfish, Ctenolepisma longicaudata and several other species worldwide) slithering out of the just opened book and almost miraculously disappearing from sight again. The signs are there, usually on the edges of the endpapers, where the textblock doesn’t lie quite snugly against the boards due to the bookcloth having been folded over; or where a map is folded into the textblock; an exposed edge may be riddled with holes. Even some covers don’t escape the attentions of these voracious beasties, as they manage to chew away the starchy size between the threads of the bookcloth, leaving faint whitish trails which almost look like scratches. A very helpful Iziko website suggests you make a mixture of the following:
5 parts gum Arabic
5 parts sodium fluosilicate
4 parts flour
6 parts sugar
40 parts water (enough to make a thick paste)
Stir for hours (since the sodium fluosilicate hadly seems to dissolve at all) dip strips of card into the mixture and leave to dry. Hang them up all over your bookshelves. If you have difficulty finding the latter ingredient, you’re in good company; if you do find it, the chemist will be strangely reluctant to give it to you.

Other sites’ suggestions range from sprinkling whole garlic cloves (!!), to salt, boric acid powder or diatomaceous earth around your library, or leaving rolled up damp newspapers (which the silverfish are supposed to frequent for a drink, supposedly) and then burning it the next day without unrolling. Of course, you would never know how successful you have been, would you? Jokes aside, my conservator friend says crushed mothballs, sprinkled in a thin line on the shelf behind the books, keeps silverfish away – if you don’t mind the characteristic smell of naphthalene, or the fact that this lingers on the pages of the books, might make you sneeze when you read – and increases the combustability of your home, as it is volatile and forms a flammable vapour. I rather like the smell; it takes me back to my childhood, when granny took out her double fox-furs and slung them over her shoulders to keep out the cold on a winter’s day. Choose your weapons. Or you can ignore the pests.

One doesn’t hear too often of bookworms any more. Actually they are beetle larvae; from the death-watch beetle, Xestobium rufovillosum, or the furniture beetle, Anobium punctatum and I am certain, a whole horde of other species native to Africa. The tell-tale tracks of these are small holes, sometimes less than 1mm in diameter, running often at right angles through hundreds of pages, mostly near the spine. I only once, in the spirit of investyigation bought a book which had been infested with this plague. However, when I took it to pieces trying to find the culprit, I had no luck. Most likely the larva had pupated and flown the nest. Obviously if one sees little heaps of sawdust on one’s bookshelves, prepare to go to war with a vengeance. Infested books can only be successfully treated with fumigation using some really dangerous stuff, so best to leave it to professionals.

Termites are a scourge in the southern United States nowadays, primarily since their houses are constructed mainly from wood; less so in South Africa since we have stopped living in wattle and daub huts with cattle-dung floors. However these stealthy invaders tunnel away so craftily, from floor up into the vertical supports of bookshelves, from where they will branch out laterally into stopes to reach pay-dirt – to whit, the books. The only way of detecting them is to turn up your hearing aid, so that you can hear them as they chew away on dark nights (honestly) or to read your books frequently, so to discover their mining activities before an entire seam of books has been reduced to hollow shadows of their former selves. I recall a passage written by, I think, one Annie Martin in her charming book Home Life on an Ostrich Farm (G Philip, 1891) where she describes these repeated termite incursions and subsequent loss of her bookshelf. Her solution was to suspend a shelf by means of four wires from the ceiling beams, thus robbing the insects of their tunneling route. Only problem was, her brak roof then leaked copiously, right above her bookshelf. Makes one wonder how any books survived the African onslaught for longer than a hundred years or more.

A real home-wrecker is the cockroach. I’m talking of these large black, flying jobbies, the size of a small bat – which issue from the city sewers and drainpipes when darkness falls. There is no warning; suddenly you have a book that almost looks as if a rat or a small Chihuahua had been chewing at it. The cloth is in tatters, or patches of it are eroded to a latticework of threads, and it’s a matter of re-binding if you want to save your treasured collectors’ item. It is almost impossible to guard against them. Keep your library doors and windows closed at night; if there is a bathroom, plug the drains; above all, be watchful and whack the damn things whenever you see one. For all the above living pests, I do the following: every three months or so, I buy a couple of packets of Fumitabs from the chemist. These ominous looking (and smelling) globs come in foil-packs of three. They contain some pretty potent poisons, so don’t lick your fingers after handling them. Place one or two of the family-sized pills on a brick in each room, depending on size, seal all airbricks and other apertures in the room, light them, and scarper quickly. They emit a choking smoke for a few minutes, after which they self-extinguish. You may then leave the house for the rest of the day, making certain that your dog/cat/canary/child have all left the building. Do not leave your wors in the kitchen to defrost, or your bread, or any other loose comestible which you intend to partake of. Everything is bathed in deadly fug, and hopefully some six or eight hours later you can come back and reoccupy your home after opening all the doors and windows. Problem solved – for a while. One of my clients from Zambia has just sent me this hot tip – he recommends Bayer’s "Max Force", a cream injector syringe which enables one to run a bead around the bottom edge of a book case which keeps them at bay. I shall certainly try this as soon as I can lay my hands on some.

Rodents are not normally a real threat to books in modern homes. Those occasional lovely little grey house mice that some years ago wandered into our house and set up home in the fibreglass insulation of the kitchen stove, confined themselves to the crumbs of the table, so to speak, until the cats made short work of the whole family, which had increased to seven at one stage. They would take turns in popping up out of the spiral plates (cooled) of the stove during meals – as if to see what was on the menu. Anyway, rodents don’t eat books unless a famine strikes; at worst they may convert one into nesting material, or they might test their incisors on an edge, leaving characteristic chisel-marks. Free range pet birds, such as parrots, can be a menace too, according to a colleague who was asked to value a severely nibbled collection of books. Dogs have the delightful habit of lifting the odd leg here and there to demarcate their territory, while cats spray with wild abandon when the moon is right. Both are to be distinctly discouraged in a library unless they are adequately trained in human etiquette.

Now for some more general, and probably very obvious hints on book handling and storage. Metal shelves are best. That’s official; but I don’t care, I like wood, proper wood. Luckily I used to be a sawmiller, so I gathered a whole batch of strange timbers, Kiaat, Chestnut, Camphor, Cedar, Cypress, Cherry etc, all of which have been used to manufacture the shelves all over my house and business. Most of the shelves have no backs, but they are fastened to the walls by means of sturdy bolts ten millimeters away from the walls, as I suffer from a fear of falling bookshelves. This means that even if one of those occasional Northwest gales should occur, which has on one occasion been so strong that it drove the accompanying rain right through a double brick wall in my lounge (on the wall where my books are); the water could run harmlessly down the walls and onto the floor, without getting the books wet. It doesn’t need a disaster to wet your books. Walls are damp structures all too frequently, and books act like blotting paper. If your shelves are against the wall, nail a strip of timber along the back of each to keep your books from touching the masonry. If your bookshelf is backed, see that there is a space between the wood and the wall to allow for ventilation.

Don’t jam your books in too tightly. It’s not good for them, and it’s even worse when some ham-handed person insists on using a probing digit to extract a volume that is tightly jammed into place. Hence ‘slight damage to top of spine’. Better that the book should come to you willingly, that it should slide out of and back into its place. On the other hand, having gaps in your collection, resulting in the classic picture of a few upright volumes with one or two leaning at any angle against them, is not ideal either. The leaning books tend to get a permanent cocking of the spine which is difficult to remove once set in place. Best then to use a bookend, but if you haven’t got any, a pile of horizontal books will do just as well to hold the others upright – and the titles are still readable on the spine. Books should not be inanimate ‘collections’ for display purposes only. They should certainly be taken out, handled, opened, browsed through, and replaced. Within bounds, this is good for a book and I am not about to bring on the white cotton gloves – but clean hands are essential, and if you smoke a pipe, this most definitely applies, since the finger or thumb you use to tamp your ‘baccy down, leaves a horrible mark on a page as you turn it. The handling means that the volume is inspected periodically for damage, which may be caught in the early stage and remedied, the pages are aired, which helps to protect them against foxing, and the work could even be left standing on edge overnight (between some supports if it is a large book) with the pages slightly ajar as it were, if there is even a suggestion of a musty odour.

Heavy, old books should be opened and read in a book-cradle. Opening them on a flat surface puts a strain on elderly bindings, and could crack the glue used on the back of the textblock. Large folio size volumes are the most difficult to handle under the best of circumstances. A big table is a prerequisite; but in some cases the books are so large, and the paper so heavy and fragile, that one should think about using both hands to turn a page – one at the bottom corner and the other at the top. Even moderately large books can be damaged by the reader who persists in wanting to turn a page by inserting his thumb somewhere round about the middle of the bottom margin, and flipping the page from right to left. This frequently results in tears on the bottom edge of the page near the spine. The correct manner is to feel your way into the textblock at the top right hand corner of the open book, insert the hand fully and help the page over to the left. Left-handed people had better get used to this – there’s no alternative – except taking up Hebrew.

Dust is another, albeit minor, enemy. It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath, and also into every nook, cranny and book, if you leave it in any place for long enough. Let us say your library has matured for another year, loved and admired, and occasionally perused in part. A little housekeeping is indicated, say once a year, or maybe every two or three. A feather mop will do at a pinch, but it’s going to be a sneezy, wheezy sort of job, really only fit for outside the house; which in turn, is not ideal for the books. So technology should be called in – a vacuum cleaner, of the small, hand-held sort, one with a little doodah at the business end, which has got a nice soft Führer moustache, with which to kiss your books. If the item to be cleaned has a dustjacket, lay the book down, open the front cover, flap back the dustjacket, use said vacuum cleaner to remove dust, dead insects etc from covers, replace dustjacket, close book, turn it over and repeat the performance for the back cover. That way you have examined the entire book. But wait, the edges of the textblock, and especially the top edge, gather large quantities of dust, which eventually seep in between the pages and so dirty the entire volume. So once again the vacuum brush is employed, either while the book was lying flat with its dustjacket flapped out of harm’s way, or after the first action is completed, one takes the book and vacuums the entire textblock edge, taking care not to damage the precious dustjacket in any way. This is a lengthy process, best handled by a minimum of two people, who enjoy each other’s company and have something to chat about as they go about this exquisitely boring task.

Lastly, let us consider a little library hygiene of a different sort. Ordering your collection in some fashion so that you can actually find that reference book that you need right now, or that beloved novel that you incautiously (as even friends can’t be trusted to return books) want to lend to your best friend who has come to visit. The librarians devised the so-called Dewey system (or rather Dewey did), which is all very good, and those accession numbers on the spine, which so grate the buyers of antiquarian books who buy library discards, are all good, useful stuff. Problem is, nobody except librarians can be bothered to swot up a book of some hundreds of pages, and to memorise all the guff within. So one reverts to an alphabetical order. Ah, but there are so many different subjects – best one keeps each of them separate, in alphabetical order, so one allocates a few metres of shelf space here for this subject, followed by another few metres there for the next. Uh, small problem, Subject A has a few large folio volumes, which only fit into the shelf earmarked for Subject D; the same applies to Subject C. So already Subject D looks like a dog’s breakfast, three subjects in it, either with dividers between, or in general disarray – but at least alphabetical. Problem is, how do you remember five years on which subject has a few books tucked away on an odd shelf among a bunch of other stuff? Then there is the problem of allocating a volume to a certain category. Take the category art - possibly antique furniture, being a craft should be in another, or maybe it should be in architecture, as the objects are found in houses, or maybe even in history. There is no hard and fast rule as to what is right or wrong. One has to please oneself, but some order is essential, as is some record of what you own. Almost every month clients clamour to buy books, that I can positively prove to them, they have already bought from me a few years back. So frail is the human mind; mine included. Which is why I have invested a certain amount of money and time and effort in maintaining a database record of every book that I have in my possession, as well as its whereabouts. That’s still not infallible – but it helps. If your collection contains a treasure or two – or many, then keep some sort of record of what the value is, in case some form of public transport should prematurely curtail you natural span. It will help your executors in disposing fairly of your assets after your demise, and it will prevent your lovingly amassed collection from landing on the dump.

THOSE BL...D MISSIONARIES

AFRICANA VOTES & VIEWS VOL1 # 7

Love them or hate them, revile them or praise them – missionaries played an immense role in the colonisation of Africa, as well as in the introduction of European culture, ideas, practices, prejudices – as well as vices, to the indigenous populations which they came to uplift and enlighten. These fervent spreaders of the Gospel, often themselves ill-educated men with but a few artisanal skills, braved a hostile environment among alien peoples whose languages they could not speak, whose customs appalled and whose very mode of existence was an opposite to the settled agrarian life of northern Europe whence these teachers came. They were ill-equipped with materials and funds, practical knowledge and teaching skills – yet they taught their flocks simple agriculture, carpentry, building, language, and later reading and writing. They struggled valiantly to assimilate local languages, in the quest of that Holy Grail – the testament in the vernacular, to make it intelligible to all their parishioners.
Mostly they were supported by wives; often all too short-lived, as they succumbed to illnesses or childbirth. When one reads of the last days of some of these worthy women, one can only marvel that any were to be found who would trek alongside their menfolk into the howling wilderness of the hinterland. Some widowers then married Khoi or slave women, who became valuable aides in the exchange of culture in both directions, however much the practice was frowned on by the government or society of the day.
Above all, the missionaries wrote. Firstly they had to report back to their mission societies, either in South Africa, Moravia or in London, from whose records much of the regional histories can be reconstructed, or if they were fortunate enough to be able to return to their homelands on retirement, they sometimes penned their memoirs. It is mostly from these writings that we know today how life was lived then, how people found food, water and shelter; how they celebrated, how they mourned; how they played and how they warred with each other. Imperfect the records may be, filtered through the dour dogmas of the faiths these men professed, and coloured by their narrow views, but the reader should find information, adventure, natural history, ethnography and yes, entertainment and humour among the ‘missionary labours’.
Georg Schmidt was the first of this illustrious band to come out to the Cape. Although he was not of the ‘official’ reformed church, he was found acceptable to the establishment and settled first at Riviersonderend, and later Baviaanskloof, which became known as Genadendal. Although his baptismal practices brought him into conflict with the establishment, he spent seven years in South Africa, and though his converts were few, his reputation probably eased subsequent entry by other Herrnhut brethren into the country. This simple farmer’s diaries and letters are available in the book Dagboek en Briewe van Georg Schmidt (Wes Kaaplandse Instituut vir Historiese Navorsing, 1981). A hiatus of almost fifty years followed before the next batch of Herrnhuters established themselves at Baviaanskloof, where their work flourished during the changes of government from Dutch to British, not without some suspicion by the European community, but also earning some commendation from notable travellers such as Lady Anne Barnard and the governor, the Earl of Caledon. In 1808 the Moravians were permitted to open a station at Groene Kloof, or Mamre, as it became known.
Meanwhile, a South African Missionary Society had also been founded by interested locals, and the renowned London Missionary Society entered the field. Before the end of the 18th century, two men, Kicherer and Vanderkemp, assisted by Messrs Edwards and Edmonds respectively, went to work in the northern Karoo and in the Eastern Cape. Although Kicherer made much of his work among the ‘Bushmen’, his efforts scarcely reached the few remaining tribespeople, nor did he convert any. He did parade a couple of converted heathen in Cape Town and even Europe, but from the book by Karel Schoeman J J Kicherer en die Vroë Sending 1799-1806 (S A Library, 1996), it would seem as if he had very little taste for the heartbreaking slog of teaching the nomadic flotsam that inhabited the region between the Zak and Orange Rivers, and that he preferred the lecture halls of the great cities. Vanderkemp achieved fame, or rather notoriety at Bethelsdorp, near Port Elizabeth, where he lived and worked in the same humble circumstances as his converts, and even married one – as did one of his fellow missionaries, one Read. The former's controversial career is described in the book Doctor Vanderkemp' by A D Martin (Livingstone Press, 1948).
By 1810 there were a number of workers in the missionary field of the subcontinent; the Albrecht brothers, Anderson, Edwards, Kok and Seidenfaden pioneered briefly in the north, while two men who left a lasting impression on the region, Ebner and Schmelen, also arrived at this time. The former wrote one of the first ‘missionary memoirs’, which appeared under the snappy title Reise nach Sued Afrika und Darstellung meiner waehrend acht Jahren daselbst als Missionar unter den Hottentotten gemachten Erfahrungen ( L Oemigke, 1829). While the book is a chore to read, even to one who has no problem with Gothic font and antiquated German language, in between the pages of pious drivel and biblical references, there are signs of a man with keen observational powers, intellect and the ability to paint a vivid picture of the Namaqualand scenery and people during the period 1812–1820.
During this time, the LMS sent a couple of inspectors to tour the pioneer mission establishments, and to report on how the directors’ money was being spent. One of these was the irrepressible Dr John Campbell, who travelled widely and left an endearingly breezy record of his journey (which predated Ebner’s book by many years). Travels in South Africa (1815 & 1822) proved to be a hit with a public hungry for news of the opening of the pearly gates for the heathen. The book was reprinted several times in the next few years, expanded, and even published in a miniature ‘pocket’ version for the use of scholars and travellers. It remains an eminently readable work to this day, and is even available in a recent reprint.
The good Reverend Latrobe did a similar task for the Moravian brethren when he visited Mamre and Genadendal in 1815. He then penetrated further east and chose a new site for the Enon station in the Uitenhage region. His book, Journal of a Visit to South Africa (1818 & Struik 1969) has endured as a classic work on the Southern and Eastern Cape, as Latrobe was an educated, tolerant, kindly and observant man, as well as a writer of considerable talent. His book is prized for its illustrations, which he takes pains to explain ‘were all made on the spot’ probably using a camera obscura, and though they seem to have been redrawn by others, Latrobe’s artistic talents would appear to have been considerable. The book is essentially a humanist’s record of the people that he met with, their way of living, their culture or lack thereof, described in a gently humorous vein, which should entertain most readers as well as supplying a record of the Cape of the period.
Back to the early workers in the field. Johann Heinrich Schmelen, who accompanied Ebner, as recorded above, worked at various missions in Namaqualand and Namibia during an eventful career spanning some thirty years. Unfortunately none of his writings have been published, and we are limited to the few scraps of information contained in books such as H Kling’s Onder die Kindere van Cham (Nasionale Pers, 1932), W Moritz’s Auf dem Reitochsen quer durch’s Südwestliche Afrika (John Meinert, 2004) and U Trueper’s The Invisible Woman – Zara Schmelen (Basler Afrika, 2006). His main legacy is the mission station and settlement at Komaggas, which survived even the apartheid era as a ‘coloured reserve’, as well as the oldest extant building in Namibia, at Bethanien – the so-called ‘Schmelen House’. With the aid of his Nama wife, he did succeed in translating a Dutch catechism into the Nama language, even though the ‘click’ sounds he transcribed were not successfully rendered in the printing of it. Schmelen’s experiences told in his own words would have made a memorable book, I feel.
The Wesleyans were among the next few prominent churchmen to make their mark; both Shaws – Barnabas and William – were fated to do important work, and to leave written records. Barnabas settled at Leliefontein and started a station among the Nama who had been granted a reserve there by Governor Ryk Tulbagh. He had to contend with the nomadic lifestyle of his flock, and managed to introduce them to agriculture – a not altogether wise choice, with hindsight, since the poor soils, scanty rainfall and growing population made this type of economy unsustainable – even in present times. Shaw wrote a book after his retirement, Memorials of South Africa (Mason, Hamilton Adams, 1940 & Struik 1970), which is almost readable – depending on how interested one is in the practical aspects of changing an entire economy of a people. The mission proved to be an important way-station for missionaries on their way to the interior, and numerous others who worked there left records of their sojourns.
William Shaw came a few years later with the Sephton party of 1820 Settlers, and worked among them for a short time before embarking on an almost fatal missionary venture to the pestilential swamps of Delagoa Bay. He returned to the Eastern Cape and spent the next thirty-odd years establishing a network of Wesleyan missions, of which he became superintendent. He did valuable work in establishing educational facilities, and became involved in the politics of the region in the aftermaths of several frontier wars. His book The Story of my Mission in South Africa (Hamilton Adams, 1860) did not manage to capture my attention in its entirety, though I read a few chapters to get the ‘feel’ of the author. Possibly it would be a different story for readers with a greater interest in Eastern Cape matters.
The next few decades saw a proliferation of missionary efforts. The London, Rhenish, Berlin and Paris Missionary Societies, as well as the Wesleyans, all entered the fray, so to speak, and while relations among these Protestants were usually cordial and co-operative, some sniping and poaching of converts did start. Messrs T Arbousset and F Daumas, from the Paris Society, settled in Basutoland and in 1836 they set out on a journey to explore the regions to the northwest, between the Vaal and Orange Rivers. Theirs was no missionary enterprise – their book Relation d'un Voyage D'Exploration au Nord-Est de la Colonie du Cap De Bonne-Esperance (Arthus Bertrand, 1842) is a work of considerable value as it contains much reliable information on the natural history, as well as on the tribes of the region and their ethnography. While no thrilling read, it is worthwhile to have a look at the modern English reprint Narrative of an Exploratory Tour to the Cape of Good Hope (Struik 1968), especially for first-hand accounts of the founder of the Basuto Nation, Moshesh, as well as the rise of the Zulu nation, Mantatise's Tlokwa, the Bechuana and other tribes they came into contact with.
The year 1817 also saw the arrival of a number of worthy men, among whom several made a lasting name for themselves. One was a callow youth, James Kitchingman, who wended his way toward Namaqualand and Namibia in the company of Robert Moffat. He was one of the less hardy souls who found the tough region and nomadic flock more than he could handle, and he departed within a short time for the kinder climes of Bethelsdorp, where he did considerable work during several stints until his early death. The Kitchingman Papers by le Cordeur & Saunders, eds. (Brenthurst Press, 1976) are a trifle tedious collection of writings which are probably of more interest to historians interested in his correspondents, Messrs Read and Philip.
Moffat, on the other hand, is a completely different proposition. He also earned his spurs in Namaqualand, but before long he was off to Great Namaqualand to the kraal of the Nama robber-chief Afrikaner. After a short and uneasy partnership with the aforementioned Ebner, he explored the country to the east, which later became known as Griqualand. Moffat displayed great leadership in rehabilitating Afrikaner, and by establishing a mission at Lattakoo among the Batlhaping under the chief Mothibi. In 1823 the missionary assumed the de facto generalship of a combined force of Griquas and Bechuanas who beat off a huge force of Mantatise’s pillagers and inflicted heavy losses on them – so altering the balance of power in the entire region. He firmly established the mission at Kuruman, and this became a hub of civilization, exploration and in time religious conversion. He also became a political power-broker between tribes and the British, as well as using his influence to exclude the expansion of the Boers from the republics eastwards and north. His book Missionary Labours and Scenes in Southern Africa (John Snow, 1844) does not make for the easiest reading, as like most of his brethren, he is inclined to sermonise. He does, however, include a wide scope of history in the narration of his personal story, and some of the passages are descriptive writing of a high order, with even the odd humorous glimpse.
It is almost obligatory to mention Livingstone at this stage – connected as he was to Moffat through his marriage to the latter’s daughter. During my younger days I avoided the great man’s writings like the plague. I could never understand why he was called a ‘missionary-explorer’, since those two titles are not compatible. If you explore, you beat your way through the jungles or slog through the sands of inhospitable deserts; if you are a missionary, you stay put, plant pumpkins and pray with the locals while trying to learn the lingo to translate the bible – period. I would have forgiven him the odd weekend jaunt, or 19th century long-leave equivalent thereof, but after he got a whiff of travel fever, he was off trailing that unfortunate woman and kids for a spell, before dumping them in England so he wouldn’t have them hampering those heroic footsteps. So caught-up with his own importance was our Davey, that he forgot entirely to mention his wee wife or his nuptials in what was supposed to be his biography. It took a gentle nudge from his publisher, John Murray, to put that right, resulting in the hilarious situation that subsequent impressions of the book have the thrifty Scottish solution of three page eights following each other, thus obviating the expense of needing to redo the entire typesetting of the book.
All-right, so he did a little dilettante converting when he stopped for long enough, but for a couple of decades he was much too busy earning fame and his place in the resting-place of kings. Then, at a time of having nothing better to occupy me, I read Missionary Travels and Researches in Southern Africa (John Murray, 1857 and dozens of reprint versions) of which I happened to have a tatty copy in stock at the time. To say that I was surprised would be putting it mildly. I was touched by the miseries and heartbreaks of the slavery he describes, I was engaged by his indomitable spirit that persisted against hunger, disease and dreadful travelling conditions, while his descriptions of the country traversed and the people he met with, kept me interested for all but the inevitable ‘and so I preached a sermon and we sang and prayed etc etc’, which was, after all, his stock-in-trade. It was only after reading the work that I could understand how the man had managed to become the beau ideal of missionary endeavour, the champion of the poor, enslaved and oppressed, the teacher of the ignorant as well as the magnetic beacon that would inspire others to plunge into the wilderness that was the centre of Africa. He’s still not my favourite man of the cloth, but hey, he publicised his professed trade better than anyone else did; he awoke compassion in people, and great good came from his life. Try reading him sometime.
By the middle of the 19th century missionaries were two a penny. In addition to those groups already mentioned, the next fifty years also saw the entry into the field of the Americans, the Anglicans, the Scottish Presbyterians, the Norwegians and the Catholics. It would be a very difficult and lengthy process to review the millions of words that made it into print by the efforts of these worthies. A number of them became astute politicians (perhaps they were born to it), and as their circle of influence spread among their parishioners, they grew powerful and assumed duties and rights which were not theirs over their little fiefdoms. They took it upon themselves to travel to the Cape, to lobby the government – yes, even as far as Britain they went, to try to persuade the old queen’s men to annex their sphere of influence, or to declare a protectorate over it. One such man was John Mackenzie, who laboured at Kuruman, a successor to Moffat. His work-rate was prodigious, his influence vast, but the various books written by him and about him are more of a picture of political machinations than missionary work with human beings. The volume written by his son, entitled John Mackenzie, South African Missionary and Statesman (Hodder & Stoughton, 1902) has a fitting epitaph for him: ‘to have been the man who first forced Great Britain to face her God-given task of controlling the destinies of the entire region from the Cape to the Zambesi’. Ja, well, no, fine – didn’t Mr Rhodes have similar ideas? If Mackenzie influenced the southeast of Bechuanaland, his colleague J D Hepburn struggled to play a meaningful role towards Lake Ngami. His book, Twenty Years in Khama's Country (Hodder & Stoughton, 1895) gives an interesting picture of the country and its people, but the poor man strove in vain to come to terms with the powerful chiefs like Moremi and the almost legendary Khama, and finally he had to decamp back to Britain to nurse his disappointment.
I have kept my most favourite piece of missionary literature for last. One Benjamin Ridsdale, a young Wesleyan minister, arrived in the Cape at the end of 1843, and he was almost immediately despatched via Leliefontein towards Nisbett Bath (Warmbaths, Namibia ) with his wife. Here was a lad with a cheerful outlook on life, who was not shy to enthuse about having a picnic in a lovely spot, or describing his antics when they had to cross the Gariep on a swimming log. He claimed to have been the first to sail on the Great River in a boat assembled by him with whatever materials he could find, and powered by a scrap of sheeting flapping in the breeze. The young minister slaved away in the torrid heat, often sustained by no more than a bowl of milk that someone saw fit to give him during the day, and the pair endured for four years before his health could no longer take the strain. Ridsdale and his wife had endeared themselves to their flock during that time by unselfish devotion, hard work and a real effort to understand their nomadic ways, and the scenes he describes of his departure in a mutual flood of tears is quite touching. His Scenes and Adventures in Great Namaqualand (T Woolmer, 1883) has become a prized rarity available at eye-watering prices, but for those who can put up with it, you can buy a horrible softcover scanned reprint from Kessinger, USA, as I did. – just to have an occasional read of a few pages of thoroughly heart-warming stuff.
This essay is not a history of missionary endeavour; neither would I condemn their efforts to obtain basic human rights for the fragmented, downtrodden and displaced people among other, strong, traditionally ruled nations in the subcontinent; nor is it an endorsement of the perceived benefits of conversion to another belief-system and a break-down of traditional ethics and morals. Rather, I hope to have given the interested readers an idea of what they are likely to find between the covers of the books written by some extraordinary – and some very ordinary people – who were also pioneers, travellers, explorers, ethnographers, biographers and historians, without whom the early literature on the Dark Continent would be much poorer.

FOR MAN MUST EAT

AFRICANA VOTES & VIEWS VOL 1 # 6

I have a secret addiction - cookery books. I must confess here and now that I don't actually READ them, page after page, but rather prefer to handle them lovingly, to flip through the pages (often stained with spatters of grease and droplets of food) picking up a word here and there. Once my attention has been captivated, I dwell lovingly on a whole recipe, combine the ingredients in my mind, savour the aroma, imagine the taste, sigh contentedly and pass on to the next culinary delight. It is rare that I cook a recipe exactly as it appears in a book. Since I am perforce a bachelor, my shopping is not terrible methodical, and too often I find that I haven't got one or the other ingredient called for - so something else will have to do; at times a dish ends up being something completely different from what had originally been intended - occasionally resulting in a serendipitous combination that is consigned to the 'Repertoire de Moi'.
South Africans are spoilt for choice. We are placed at the crossroads of the greatest culinary migrations of mankind; our population has been swelled by cooks from all over the world flocking to our shores in their droves. The foodstuffs that are available consist of indigenous crops, classical European staples, exotic Middle and Far Eastern spices and fruits, as well as the cornucopia of the New World. What more could one want? From 1890 onwards, a steady stream of cookery books became available, from the simplest primer for the newly-wed to a book featuring fancy restaurant dishes.
Aunt Allie Hewitt's ground-breaking book, 'Cape Cookery - Simple but Distinctive' (Darter Bros, 1890, & D Philip, 1973) claims to have the distinction of being the first in line, though I would ascribe that honour to A R Barnes' 'Colonial Household Guide' (1st ed Darter Bros 1889)which predated the former by a scant year. No matter; Allie's book is delightfully introduced by her grand-nephew, Robert Ellis, and he paints a loving picture of the little, fierce old lady slaving away over her hearth. While the fish recipes (mostly of the boiled variety) don't exactly stimulate the gastric juices, when it comes to the meat dishes, she comes up trumps with (now) exotic foods like korhaan, porcupine or beef muisjes. Her bredies, 'bobotees' and 'sassatees', mutton hams are sure to be of interest to those who wish to taste the early Malay influences on Cape cooking. The choice of vegetable dishes is slim, it seemed to have been a case of 'rys en aartappels' with the odd stewed-to-death veg melange added on Sundays and feast days. However, when it comes to sweet dishes, she really shines. 'Macaroons for a regiment' starts with 500 almonds - you can imagine the rest. There are Most Bolletjies, Matabele and Boer's Birthday Cake and a wealth of konfyts, chutneys and the like. Altogether a worthy book for any serious collector of the genre.
The book mentioned above, 'Colonial Household Guide' by A.R.B (Mrs Barnes), who refers to herself as a 'housewife of the Colony', contains a wealth of information for even the most inexperienced cook. Starting off with good Olde England standard fare of the times, such as a cuppa tea, a boiled egg, potato chips and bubble & squeak, she swiftly progresses to more ambitious projects such as kidneys and ham, stewed oxtail and even exotic stuff such as Scotch Haggis. Obviously Mrs B. was raised in the school that thought Brit was best, especially when it came to cooking. She does, however daringly branch out a bit with some local fare, such as 'cabbage brede', 'wild buck to roast', 'baba' (barbel fish, which she claims is similar to eel, and I concur heartily), but almost all the dishes contain only the main ingredient, fat, water and salt - possibly a dash of pepper. Her vegetarian side dishes are several pages of European veg, invariably followed by the word - 'boiled'. Where she does open a window into the past is with her pastry and bread recipes. Again she starts with basics - the construction of an outside oven, the firing of it and temperatures needed to achieve optimum results. A number of yeast and sourdough recipes follow, as well as one for unleavened bread.
There is a wealth of recipes of Victorian sweets, from puddings to tarts, buns to cakes, biscuits to compotes and jellies. In this subject she is most diverse, rounding off her list of delights with some fine pickles and preserves. From creation to destruction. The reader can pick up handy tips on the extermination of all manner of creepy crawlies and fungi, as well as the eradication of spots, stains and rust-marks, after which she gives a beginner's class in how to 'Cowdung Wash' your kitchen floor for that aromatic antiseptic look. Mrs Barnes would instruct the newcomer to the colonial kitchen in such arts as 'drenching horses through the nose, without killing them' or more robust pastimes such as 'killing tigers', and occasionally she comes up with bizarre abilities, such as how to make ice using hot water and refined nitre (??). This one I'd really love to try and I would appreciate it if one of my chemically inclined clients could elucidate how this process works. Many pages are devoted to the ills that would have inflicted the colonists, and especially their children, and there are a goodly number of simple remedies to aid the reader.
While the book has only a curiosity value as far as most recipes go, the whole gamut of tasks that are taken for granted in the late 19th century kitchen are a true eye-opener, and I can heartily recommend the good lady's work to all enquiring minds as well as those who enjoy a good laugh. Nonetheless a valuable social history document.
The next culinary writer whose work appeared in print, Hildagonda Duckitt, wrote two books that have remained classics for more than a hundred years. Her first, 'Hilda's Where is it of Recipes' ( Chapman & Hall, 1891), was the result of collecting recipes, both local and English, in ingredients and flavours, from among the extended circle of acquaintances which frequented her social circle. Her cooking skill, simple descriptions and mouth-watering results must have gladdened many a family's table at the Cape. Her second book 'Diary of a Cape Housekeeper' ( Chapman & Hall, 1902) is a much more personal document, which allows us a peek into the Cape Kitchen at the end of the 19th century, as well as sketching life on the family farms at Constantia and Grootte Post, between Mamre and Darling.
Hilda divides her culinary year into seasons, and recommends fitting dishes to suit both availability and climate and she does not shy away from advising you to wear your winter flannel underwear in July, while March is described as 'often very hot and trying' - and so it would be if you are slaving over a huge cast-iron stove in a farmhouse kitchen. Nor does she disappoint when it comes to a few hints on invalid care - in fact she recommends that every woman who expects to live in some out and beyond place, should 'spend a few months previously in nursing training, so as not to be entirely ignorant of the elements of what good nursing means!' She obviously had a tender heart for the beasties too, since she has included a chapter on 'to spare animals unnecessary pain', ie how to kill anything from a crayfish to a calf. In this book she has become more chatty and for anyone interested in the art, it is a pretty good read, even if only taken in small doses at bedtime. For those interested in Hilda's background, Mary Kuttel, one of the descendants of the Melck family, who were great friends with the Duckitt's, edited a little Balkema reprint of selections, entitled 'Hildagonda Duckitt's Book of Recipes', which is a little easier to find than the original books.
A little oddity is next. The printing firm D F du Toit and Co, in Paarl, were the publishers of the first dictionary of Afrikaans - then a language in the process of being born - when they issued the 'Patriot Woordeboek' in 1904. However, they published a recipe book a few years previously in the same language. It was entitled 'Di Suid Afrikaanse kook- koek en resepteboek, byeenversameld en geskrywe deur mejufvr E J Dijkman' (Patriotpers, 1891). The only copy I have ever seen had no title page, nor a front or back cover, the spine was missing as was the last page or two - but it still found a home with a client who was as mad about cookery books as I am. Unfortunately I can't recall much about the contents, except that the recipes tended to be good, plain burgher fare, imported from Europe in the main, but showing a few glimpses of country life and culinary arts that were transmitted back into the cities after the great era of pioneering had passed. This little volume was also reprinted a number of times in the Cape Dutch/Afrikaans language, and even in the changes of the title one can see developments in spelling that occurred during the period 1891-1922. The book proved popular and was either translated or rewritten by the redoubtable Mrs Dijkman herself in the English language under the title 'Mrs Dijkman's Cookery and Recipe Book' (Paarl Printing, 1905).
From the relatively large numbers of cookery books that have passed through my hands since I became interested in the art, it would almost seem that Mesdames Barnes, Hewitt, Duckitt and Dijkman satisfied the market for advice in the kitchen during the last decade of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th century. I have only come across two new publication on the subject in the latter period - Mrs M ( P W) de Klerk's 'South African Cookery Made Easy' (Juta, 1912), and F G Oakley's 'Homestead Cookery '(Maskew Miller, 1917). The former is full of standard starchy fare, cakes, biscuits, puddings, breads and the like, with only a hint of the exotic such as 'Mossbolletjies' or 'Boer biscuits' - until one comes to the selection of Breakfast dishes, when she surprises with offerings such at 'sasaties', 'hotom' (actually just plain flour porridge) 'poor man's friend' (quite an elaborate dish, I'd say) and 'Turkish Dolmans'. Some of her tips on curing and smoking of meat and fish are not to be despised, while her cool drinks and liqueur recipes leave one a little puzzled, since her 'Apple Cider' contains nothing even vaguely resembling that fruit as an ingredient, nor does Boston Cream contain any of the latter part, as one would expect.. As refreshing drinks, one can imagine better solutions than Toast Water, Lemon Kale or Oatmeal Water for that hot summer's day - but then possibly our taste-buds have been altered by global warming. Mrs de Klerk also does her bit for the health of the nation, advocating such remedies as 'a bottle of gin combined with the grated peel of a black radish and a bunch of stinging nettles' for the agonies of gallstones. Hm, yes, I'd say the gin alone ought to do the trick of putting one into a stupor. She has advice if you should swallow anything from a wasp to a coin or a fish-bone - or if you need to loosen a rusty screw - Mrs de Klerk is at hand.
Ms(?) Oakley's ingredients, though, have a much more local flavour. We find Cape crayfish, kabeljau and snoek in the first few pages; Rhodesian eggs, ostrich, penguin and plover eggs just a few pages later. Here is treasure indeed among the unassuming pages. Even her vegetable dishes are full of innovation: beetroot fritters, celery cheese, curried cucumbers and vegetable curries make an appearance, while carrot and parsnip salad is another unexpected dish. Fruit salads appear among the traditional puds, and even treats such as marula jelly, 'kie apple chutney' and paw-paw seed pickle (this one I've got to try out!) among a host of interesting concoctions. She concludes her really interesting little book with two unusual items to try, namely condensed milk and melon butter, before she adds the obligatory few household hints - but one can see that her real enthusiasm is for cooking. Reading through these recipes was a revelation to me, and henceforth I shall dip into Mrs Oakley's work more often.
We have come to an end of an era. World War I has come and gone, and so has the good life for many people, in Europe as well as the colonies. Presumably recipes have adapted to the times - no longer would they start with the familiar Victorian or Edwardian phrase "Take five dozen eggs…." and so on; families were smaller, ingredients became more diverse. Sometime in this period, a volume appeared by a lady with the imposing name of Susanna Johanna Elizabeth (nee van Hoogenhouck) van Tulleken. I have been absolutely unable to find any record of the first editions of her 'Practical Cookery Book for South Africa', which was in its 28th edition by 1951, or of the Afrikaans edition entitled 'Praktiese Kookboek vir Suid Afrika' of which I have a copy, sans title page, but with a foreword by Isie Smuts dated 1922, in which she applauds the first appearance of the book in that language. Possibly some of my learned clients in the library business can remedy my ignorance in this regard - I've not been able to trace her in SABIB.
Gen. Louis Botha cake, Gen Hertzog teekoekies and Gen Smuts teekoekies all certify the good lady's patriotism, but the local flavours only really start among the seafood dishes, where crayfish, snoek, even unspecified 'riverfish' and a dozen recipes using oysters, which are fried, poached, braised and stewed to a sanitised death, which would lack appeal to modern palates, I would think. Her poultry recipes are fairly standard, but I would mention that in her book, as well as many of those previously mentioned, pigeon features quite regularly in dishes. Looking at the huge flocks populating our cities, I do wonder that no enterprising restaurateur has stationed hordes of small boys armed with 'catties' to supply some of this 'unnatural bounty' to the tables of the discerning diners. She offers a plentiful selection of meat recipes, mostly fairly standard fare, and here I see biltong make an appearance, as well as wors - but either 'net wors' or 'bees en varkwors' - not a boerewors recipe in sight. Her veg dishes show some interesting variations the modern vegetarian would approve of. Among bean fritters, a dozen dishes using green mealies can be found, kale, marakkas, spinach, parsnips, kohlrabi, pumpkin and aubergines are all used to varied and good effect - a good balance to the inevitable stodgy meat and starch components of the meals. There is a plethora of sweets, conserves, pickles and sauces - too many to mention - but then there is soap as a separate subject. I was surprised to read about all the varied materials one could use, ie potatoes, prickly-pear leaves, ostrich eggs, pumpkin, resin, sour milk and even mealiemeal porridge! After a quick gallop through the pages, I can well see why this remained a firm kitchen favourite for many decades.
Another writer made her appearance during that period. The modestly entitled 'Household Science Cookery Book' (CNA, 1914) by Porterville lass, Jeanette C van Duyn, was obviously intended as a serious contender on the cookery scene. Its material was painstakingly assembled by the author while she wrote a column for the Transvaal Agricultural Journal. The first edition's three-hundred page content had swelled to six hundred pages only six years later in a subsequent edition, and Ms van Duyn wrote a whole slew of other learned works on preserving, canning, sweet-making and so on. Where or how Ms van Duyn metamorphosed into Mrs H M Slade, I cannot say, but 1936 saw the 6th edition of her work under a new title, 'Mrs Slade's South African Cookery Book', under which name it appeared until the late 1950's, after which the good lady had another change of name and the book became 'Mildred Slade's Cookery Book' (Timmins, 1976). In general, I would say that van Duyn/Slade's work is clinical, focussing on correct preparation, classic dishes, with very little 'homey' flavour, though I did find a Boerewors , Pierneef biscuits and the odd interesting combination like beet and pea salad. A worthy teacher of the culinary arts she may be, but her tomes, to my taste, lack the 'sizzle of the steak'.
So we come to a new chapter in the culinary arts in South Africa. I am not suggesting that there were no chefs active in the subcontinent, but rather that there was no male star on the firmament until C Louis Leipoldt wrote his 'Kos vir die Kenner' (Nasionale Pers, 1933). In this guise I first came across the man in Lawrence Green's books a goodly number of decades back, for Green was a foodie of note, and the gastronomic expertise of Leipoldt and his Congolese assistant Tito, features in half a dozen or more of the writer's works. It was only relatively recently that I actually held a copy of this precious and rare work of Africana in my hands for the first time. Suddenly I was in a different world. Leipoldt didn't try to teach you basic cooking - he assumed you knew how to do that; he wanted to teach you to appreciate, savour, capture the nuance, enhance the flavour - and try the odd ingredient you had never considered as a comestible before. In a brusque preamble the author states that as most culinary terms have Latin and French origins, he will explain these terms, and in fact he creates an entire Afrikaans vocabulary to encompass the processes of the art. Then a short injunction to warn against the substitution of substandard or lesser ingredients - and we are off into the mysteries of soupmaking.
Almost immediately the recipe for 'Suringsop' and 'Wateruintjiesop' catches my eye. Not your everyday ingredient, even though the tart leaves of the Oxalis species is well-known to most of us who chewed them as children, and some of us might have even rinsed the little bulbs before we popped them into our mouths. Nor does the chef shy away from the indigenous foodstuffs, which have been a mainstay of the Khoisan people for thousands of years. Though possessing a strange smell (which should be ignored), there are half a dozen dishes containing tortoise or turtle meat (which is not to be recommended as the beasties are protected species nowadays), monitor lizard is deemed fine fare, though he seems to have missed out on snakes - most likely so as not to offend the more delicate sensibilities of his readership. Flamingo breast rubs shoulders with Frascati eggs, penguin jostles with pilaf, while the common tinned sardine can be found as a starter - or as a savoury after the main course. The man blows away any preconception you may have had about what is and what is not fitting. Who would dream of deep-frying paw-paw pieces in batter ? Would any cook believe that mustard, sugar, vinegar, ginger, nutmeg or tomato sauce were all fit accompaniments for a piece of avocado? Almost every other page delivers a culinary knock-out blow.
As Lawrence Green noted, Leipoldt's knowledge of local fish and the dishes one could conjure up from them, must have been enormous. From the now almost unknown Dageraad, 'Bottervis', 'Kliptong' and Maasbankers, the author urges us to try even such bony offerings such as Yellowfish from the rivers, or in contrast, a sumptuous, steamed crayfish pudding. His treatment of octopus and perlemoen is much gentler than I have read elsewhere, as he speaks of 'tapping it gently with a wooden hammer until tender', before simmering it gently for an hour over a slow fire. Neither the garden snail nor its relative the alicrock are ignored, and mussels are prized along with raw oysters. A few wise words on wine and its indispensability on every table and in every kitchen follow among a number of other drinks recipes - not least among which is one for 'Wine and Milk' which are boiled together, after which it is left to cool, the clear liquid on top is poured off, and the remainder is drunk (??) For all South Africans who are able to read Afrikaans, and who are curious and adventurous in the matter of food and its preparation, I can really recommend this as a book which can be browsed through for years. There is, of course, also a smaller work in English by Leipoldt, entitled 'Leipoldt's Cape Cookery'. The manuscript was discovered among his papers by his executors after the writers death in 1947, and this was published in 1976. Most of the material has been gathered by the author from other sources, and he states that the recipes have already been used in his previous book. Of interest is his introduction to Cape Cookery and a page or so on the Malay influence - which he was able to appreciate at first hand, since he had travelled widely in the East.
This is where we must stop for now. My original intention was to introduce a few of the earlier 'kitchen goddesses' and their works, and instead I have rambled on until the 1970's. On my desk more than a dozen cookery books have been piled for over a week; next to them eight weighty volumes of bibliographies and a few other works of reference had also to be consulted. Enough – but here are still many more worthy writers' works to be discussed. So we shall have to make another date for a further stroll through the kitchen bookshelf.

FOR MEN MUST WORK

AFRICANA VOTES & VIEWS VOL 1 # 5

Since work takes up a large slice of our waking hours, it is fitting that you and I should show some measure of interest in it - besides which it helps to pass the 45-odd years that you are going to be stuck on the old treadmill, beavering away to earn your daily bread. However, I seriously doubt that a person with a fascinating career in insurance broking, undertaking, housekeeping or equally repetitive work, will feel as captivated by their vocation at the end of a useful and industrious life, as someone who, say, has run away from home at an early age to join a circus, eloped with an exotic dancer and slaved on a potato plantation in the pestilential jungle of some far-off land, before taking to the high seas to promote the trade in bootleg sardines, followed by a spell as a hanging judge in a small town in the western USA - or some equally bizarre modus operandi for earning an honest income.
I can count myself among the lucky in that my career-path has changed radically every seven years or so of my working life; partly due to serendipity, partly because I have a really short attention span, requiring new challenges to keep boredom at bay. Still, I enjoy reading descriptions of working careers in a host of categories. Civil engineering might not be to everyone's taste, but you have to admit that there is something grandiose in the idea of a fine bridge spanning a foaming torrent, a sweeping pass hugging the perilous flank of a looming crag or even the building of an unusual habitation. Ben Uys’ book, ‘My Friend Adventure’ (Timmins, 1960)describes a whole slew of such projects that the author tackled during a varied career. He built a number of bridges from Namaqualand to the Northern Transvaal, as well as irrigation works. His modest book includes a number of other interesting interludes, such as riding transport for the Germans in Namibia during the Nama War, a spell as a sawmiller, he washed gravel for diamonds and recruited labour for the mines. A good yarn, full of interesting anecdote and personalities.
The next dam builder gets to be a lot more technical. Henry Olivier’s book, ‘Damit’ (Macmillan, 1975) is not for the faint-hearted in engineering matters. The author writes well and his material is interesting, but the human factor is dwarfed by the scale of his gargantuan projects. Along with a number of pioneering schemes worldwide, he was principally involved in many of the African mega-projects, like the Owen Falls hydro-electric scheme on the White Nile, the great Kariba Dam, the entire early Orange River Scheme and Cahora Bassa Dam in Mozambique. If earth-shaking human activity rocks your boat – this book has it.
Roads and their builders have a romance and fascination of their own. Our country can boast a number of prominent pioneers in that department, starting with Andrew Geddes Bain, who was originally an saddler, but found this too monotonous and became a hunter and explorer, before becoming embroiled in the 6th Frontier War. A short spell of farming was cut short by an about-face of government policy which deprived him of his farm. This is the point when Bain turned to road construction, for which he showed extraordinary aptitude, and a number of iconic passes were constructed during the next twenty years under his supervision. Bain was an immensely talented man, and he achieved much in the fields of geology, palaeontology as well as writing and art. His ‘Journals of A. G. Bain ‘ edited by Margaret Lister (VRS, 1949), as well as numerous other books and articles testify to his lasting monuments in the subcontinent.
His son, Thomas, had some forty six years in the service of the government ( with only a month holiday in the entire working life !!) and the number of projects he executed brilliantly are legion. Probably the best known book about his work is by Pat Storrar – ‘Colossus of Roads’ (Murray & Roberts, 1984), but this short resumè, though an interesting read, hardly scratches the surface of the great man’s endeavour. A later book, which appeared in 2002, by my friend Graham Ross, entitled ‘The Romance of Cape Mountain Passes’ is a much expanded and well-researched volume on all the roads in the province – in the reconstruction or construction of which the author often had a hand.
From construction let us go to destruction. Though I am not a supporter of the art of shortening my fellow-man by means dexterous or mechanical, I do read the odd military work – and find it fascinating to boot. One that immediately comes to mind is Major P J Pretorius’ book ‘Jungle Man’ in which he describes his spying activities in the Rufiji delta, which led to the sinking of the German cruiser, the Königsberg during WWI. Another is Kenneth van der Spuy’s ‘Chasing the Wind’ (Books of Africa, 1966). The author got into aviation during the box-kite stages, so to speak, and during the early days of WWI graduated to chucking buckets full of darts and jam-tins full of explosives at enemy troops below him, and firing off revolvers and sawn-off shotguns at opposing aviators. In the author’s own words “ I was beginning to enjoy myself “ – and so he should. Happy days indeed before the advent of atom bombs and ICBM’s!
Another work I read recently was David Tyndall-Biscoe’s ‘Sailor, Soldier’, in which he chronicles his great-uncle’s military and naval experiences on a wide front, from the bloody battles of the futile Mahdist war in the Sudan and Egypt, to the Matabele Rebellion and the Anglo-Boer War. Taken from the diaries of the long departed old warrior, the book is a must for those who revel in the movements military, of men and ships, the deployment of guns and the spilling of gallons of gore. The book does not mince matters, but it does a fine job of mutilating words.
Building empires is another fascinating job, so popular during the previous two centuries. There were those of the ilk of Rhodes and Jameson, to be sure, and even Bismarck could be jollied into partaking a little of the colonial cake by the likes of Lüderitz and Peters, but with these gentlemen it was more of an obsessive-compulsive disorder than a form of employment. No, I’m thinking more along the lines of a ‘Chirupula’ Stephenson, who set out as a callow lad to do something related to stringing a telegraph line across the lastest of Mr Rhodes’ acquisitions in Central Africa ( or so I seem to recall). He ended up buying himself a ‘local princess’ for the princely sum of ten bob, married her (as well as another lady from a different tribe – or was it two of ‘em?) acquired large tracts of land, and farmed/ranched with the assistance of his descendants and almost the entire tribe he had, so to speak acquired through marriage and become the chief thereof.. Now THAT’S ENTERPRISE for you! He immodestly describes his life’s work in ‘Chirupula’s Tale’ (Geoffrey Bles, 1937) as does K S Rukavina in ‘Jungle Pathfinder’ (Hutchinson, 1951) – in a more fuzzy, romanticized way.
A most admirable man, on the other hand, was Stewart Gore-Brown, who carved a pocket empire out of the Zambian bush on the shores of Lake Shiwa. An English gentleman to the core, with an unhappy romance overshadowing his entire life, he built his African Dream, a manor house on the heights; he experimented expensively with a number of pioneer farming ventures and later entered politics, earning the respect and admiration of colonialists and Zambians alike. Christina Lamb’s work, ‘Africa House’ (Harper Collins, 2004) does credit to the man and his works, a treat to read.
Hans Merensky, on the other hand, acquired fame for his skill at geology, and in particular his uncanny ability to sniff out Mother Earth’s riches. His missionary parents seem to have had little influence on the young man, and after a fitful start at finding his niche, he settled in on his geological path – to whit, at the coalface of a mine in Silesia – literally. This was the sort of apprenticeship students faced in those days and this was followed by technical studies. After completing his degree, he returned to Africa, and was soon fossicking round the Western Transvaal Bushveld. This was to culminate in the discovery of the immense lode of platinum, later dubbed the Merensky Reef, which stretched for dozens of miles. Just a few years later he played a pivotal role in realizing the discovery of the Namaqualand diamond finds. He was the man who figured out the relationship between the fossil oyster beds and the presence of diamonds – something that other prospectors like Cornell, Carstens and Reuning had not connected.
Merensky’s empire, though founded on mineral riches, was something quite different though. It lay on the slopes of the misty mountains of the Woodbush Range, in the kingdom of Modjadji, the Rain Queen, and it was called Westfalia. This acquisition was followed by a whole string of other estates in Germany and elsewhere in the Union and Namibia. Each farm was dedicated to one or other activity, but Westfalia became a sort of personal experiment; firstly with teaching sustainable agriculture to the African inhabitants, and later with a number of crops which he thought might be suited to the subtropical climate and high seasonal rainfall. The lack of sufficient permanent water led to an investigation of how to conserve this precious resource – and he constructed a huge dam, which even today (in its enlarged form ) is of great importance in the region. He planted tens of thousands of trees, to combat soil erosion on the steep slopes, as well as to enrich the topsoil with life-giving humus. A whole book could be written on the man’s life and work – and so it was, by Olga Lehmann in her work ‘Look Beyond the Wind’ (Timmins, 1955). As a youngster I often roamed around parts of his estate and the sawmill that was harvesting the timber he planted, though the doctor had finished his life’s work some years back. It was only many years later that I read his story and it was certainly one of the books that fuelled my desire to become a field geologist, and later possibly a farmer. The former was not to be, except perhaps as a hobby, but I was fortunate later in life, like Karen Blixen, to also be able to say: “ I had a farm in Africa…”
Scientific endeavour and discoveries are fascinating subjects, especially to the layman. While Africa has not produced, to my knowledge, any of the great physicists or chemists, we have our fair share of prominent geologists like Merensky above, and earlier Bain, Atherstone, Mauch, du Toit and Martin, to name but a few. Much of their pioneering work is ably described in Carl Anhaeusser’s book ‘A Century of Geological Endeavour in Southern Africa’ (Geol. Soc of SA, 1997) There were also numerous innovators in the development of the mining industry, an extremely technical field, which probably is not for the general reader. So far I have not come across a book to explain basic mining techniques and the development of some of the deepest mining capability on this planet, and what little I have learnt, has been from the odd older books like C B Jeppe’s ‘Gold Mining on the Witwatersrand’ (Tvl Chamber of Mines, 1946) through which I paged, scanning the numerous diagrams and so picking up a few grains of knowledge without being blasted by the hailstorm of technical terms that I didn’t understand. My days on the diamond drilling rigs of the sixties and seventies, and the long conversations with geologists and miners, have filled in a number of blanks spaces, but much remains a mystery.
The geologists and the mining engineers can be said to be the success stories of mineral riches – the prospectors were more often than not the losers in the game – but their quests are so much more romantic. The epitome of the glorious failure, to my thinking, must be Fred Cornell, whose evergreen work ‘The Glamour of Prospecting’ (T Fisher Unwin, 1920 plus many reprints) relates cheerfully all the ‘slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’ that are slung at the diligent seeker of treasure. There is thirst, fatigue, heat, hunger, cold – and hope, in every chapter and it seems as if the hapless fellow was jinxed as he missed striking it rich at every turn, before being killed in a motor accident in London, when he seemed to have success in his pocket. One of those ‘must read’ books.
Jack Carstens was also dogged by ill fortune, but more cruelly so, since he actually found some of the first traces of the enormous wealth that was to be extracted from underneath Namaqualand – he just didn’t profit from it to any appreciable degree. Others employed him to do their rough work for him, as he ably describes in his book “Fortune Through My Fingers’ (Timmins, 1962), since he lacked the capital to develop his finds.
A totally different prospector was John Williamson. He was a brilliant Canadian geologist, who had a dream, as well as the faith, tenacity and capacity for hard labour under an equatorial sun, which kept him going for year after year, prospecting the incandescent Tanganyikan bush until he actually found his El Dorado. The Mwadui diamond mine was to make a major contribution to the impoverished African nation, and made its discoverer hugely wealthy. His story is told factually in H Heidgen’s book, ‘The Diamond Seeker’ (Blackie, 1959) – or if one prefers to have the story spiced up with a little fiction, one can read John Gawaine’s effort of the same (unimaginative) title, complete with femme fatale and imaginary dialogue (Macmillan, 1976).
The medical field too, holds much of interest. Whether it is a morbid curiosity in all that ails the human body; the freak accidents and disasters that can befall this frail construct, or the human face of distress and succour – there is a never-ending source of information and fascination. Even the relatively placid life of a country doctor, as described by Con Weinberg in his work ‘Fragments of a Desert Land’ (Timmins, 1975) during his stint between the World Wars in the Gibeon and Maltahöhe regions of Namibia, is much material of incident and drama. Another charming cameo work is the book ‘Salt River Doctor” by B A Mackenzie (Faircape, 1981) this time dealing with the afflicted of the Mother City.
The development of neurosurgery comes under the spotlight in David Gamsu’s book entitled ‘Adventures of a South African Brain Surgeon’(Hugh Keartland, 1967)– which seems a rather inept title for such a cerebral tome. However, that aside, the author does succeed in giving the layman a comprehensible insight into a profession, the description of which could be spiced up to be completely indigestible to the ordinary mortal. Much of the work described is forensic, and thus for the criminological fans even more interesting.
In a minor medical key, the calling of the nurse during the early days on the Diamond Fields is painted in the little book ‘The Lure of the Stone’ by W M & V Buss (Timmins, 1976).Sister Henrietta Stockdale had the fortitude to care for the ill and the injured on the dusty, dirt-ridden, overcrowded slum that was the Diamond Fields, where living conditions during the first few years must have been truly horrid. Similar experiences are to be found in Rose Blennerhassett and Lucy Sleeman’s ‘Adventures in Mashonaland’ (Macmillan & Co, 1893 or Books of Rhodesia, 1969). These two intrepid ladies pioneered the first bush hospital at Penhalonga and did valuable service in providing the first medical service of any kind in the territory.
The veterinary field, of course, spawned South Africa’s first Nobel laureate, Sir Arnold Theiler. From Thelma Gutsche’s work, ‘There Was a Man’ (Timmins 1979), I managed with great difficulty to extract a faint picture this extraordinarily gifted man’s vocation and the development of veterinary science in the subcontinent and further afield. Somehow the actual ‘beef and bones’ of the science never appeared out of the flood of soup, and after spooning laboriously through almost five hundred pages of the author’s offering, I was still left in want.
Possibly more in the James Herriot vein, but vastly more entertaining, was ‘From the Horse’s Mouth’ by W J van Rensburg (van Schaik, 1983) in which the author relates in lively and interesting prose, his country veterinarian experiences, as well as a stint at Onderstepoort, like Theiler. Needless to say he did not get the Nobel Prize – but then he managed to avoid Gutsche as well!
Obviously there are still a large number of glamorous occupations that should come under consideration. The transport-riders, as epitomised in Percy Fitzpatrick’s ‘Jock of the Bushveld’, have left a legacy redolent of camp fires and creaking oxwagons, perilous paths and the crack of whips and the shouts and whistles of the drovers. The heroes have their shoulders to the wheel, and the villains zoom through the leafy glades to inject the deadly trypanosome into the straining beasts, or assume the shadowy forms of the great cats lying in ambush along the rutted ways. Ah, what pictures one can see: from Poultney and Bee’s ‘Kalahari Campfires’ (Knox, 1941), to Stanley Portal Hyatt’s books ‘Biffel the Story of a Trek-Ox’, ‘Off the Main Track’ and ‘The Old Transport Road’ dealing with treks in Rhodesia, to works like Cecil Cowley’s ‘Schwikkard of Natal and the Old Transvaal’ (Struik, 1974) and C T Stoneham’s ‘Africa All Over’ describing his working life in post-WWI Tanganyika. There are a number of excellent books available in Afrikaans on the subject of transport-riding; C F Gronum’s work ‘Transportry, Runderpes en Poskoetse’ (Pro Rege, 1975) is a good example.
What would Africa be without its animals? Although the spread of man endangers all other living species on the planet, at least humankind seems to realize there is a problem, and attempts are being made to preserve remnants of former glories for future generations. Enter the conservationist, the game ranger, the anti-poaching patrol, and those kind and loving souls who succour orphaned rhinos, lions and other beleaguered beasties, raise them with the aid of large bottles of Klim plus supplements, and then find that they have to spend the rest of their days looking after them. Surely this heartbreaking work has more glamour and romance attached to it than any other career in the subcontinent; almost any little girl would want to be a veterinarian at some stage in their lives; most boys would want to be game rangers, but of the legion of books that have been written by people in this vocation, many testify to the hard life, dangers and disappointments that come with intensely exciting action, interesting challenges and occasionally a sense of a worthwhile job well done, and with visible, lasting results. A man of legendary status in South Africa is, of course, Harry Wolhuter, who wrote of his experiences as ranger in the early days of the Kruger Park, in ‘Memories of a Game Ranger’. His claim to fame lay not in conservation, but rather in killing the lion that attacked him, with his hunting knife – but he could claim extreme provocation as the said kitty was chewing his shoulder at the time.
A book that made a lasting impression on me just after we came to South Africa, was Mervyn Cowie’s ‘Fly Vulture’ (Harrap, 1961), which chronicled the fight to establish game reserves in Kenya. I must admit to being completely won over by the film version, in which the Hollywood Bunch had the baddie get his come-uppance at the horn of an angry rhino which consigned his truck into a donga. I seem to recall that I erupted into loud cheers and clapping at the sight. Since then I have read more sobering versions of the fight against poaching, which is often paid for by organized crime, such as Richard Leakey’s ‘Wildlife Wars’ (Macmillan, 2001), or D W Potgieter’s ‘Contraband’ (Quellerie, 1995).
There is a long list of authors and locations to choose from: like Nick Steele’s Natal books ‘Gameranger on Horseback’ and ‘Bushlife of a Game Warden’, to George Adamson’s ‘Bwana Game’ in Kenya, Cronje Wilmot’s ‘Okavango Adventure’, Daphne Sheldrick’s ‘Orphans of Tsavo’ and ‘The Tsavo Story’, Hannes Kloppers’ two volumes, ‘Veldwagter’ and ‘Gee My ‘n Man’, dealing with the Kruger and the Kalahari Parks respectively. I have read dozens of these offerings, and found something to keep me at it in each one. The writing may not be exceptional, the subject matter is rarely unique, but each account of the work done by these dedicated people involves the reader to a degree seldom felt with books dealing with other occupations – and so, read on.

AN AUTO-WHATSIS OF THE MAN ?

AFRICANA VOTES & VIEWS VOL 1 # 4

The word autobiography is almost an oxymoron. I mean, how can a person trust anyone to tell his or her own life story as it really was. It's almost certain to be a bunch of gilded fabrications, self-laudatory rubbish, glamour spots in a dull life which was occasionally brightened by the odd ray of brilliance. Trust those vainglorious enough to write such a book only in that they will seek to portray themselves in a favourable light; that they will leave out all their failings except those they are proud of; that they will omit their mistakes, bury their blunders and conceal their crimes. Was it no' wee Robbie that said:

O wad some Pow'r the giftie gie us
To see oursels as others see us!
It wad frae mony a blunder free us,
And foolish notion.

So take heed biographer - auto- or not, for the road is strewn with thorns and rocks.
Let's take the swashbuckling hero, Sir Harry Smith, who had the temerity to write a fairly laudatory story of his own eventful life, which was published posthumously in 1901 ( with a little help from one G C Moore-Smith as editor, who might have been a descendant for all one knows). This book became an instant success as the public took to the man who epitomised all that was brave and British in the Victorian era, for the next decade, as reprint after reprint rolled off the presses. It is still accorded the accolade of being 'a classic of love and war', and I see that you can buy an expensive and nasty paperback edition, complete with all " occasional imperfections such as missing and blurred pages, missing text, poor pictures, markings, dark backgrounds and other reproduction issues " for a tad over $50 delivered in SA. In 1977 another book appeared, under the title " Remember you are an Englishman " by Joseph H Lehmann. This citizen of the good old US of A had a fair amount of admiration for the soldier/lover, as far as I can remember from cursorily reading a chapter or two, but the book seemed much of the same as the autoversion. Not so the volume by one A L Harrington, more aptly entitled "Sir Harry Smith, Bungling Hero" which appeared only a scant three years later. You'd swear it was an entirely different man the book was written about. Gone was the adulation for his reckless bravery, his leadership in suicidal charges where his men (and enemies ) fell in swathes around him; instead we have sharp criticism and insightful analysis of his rash political decisions, which caused his Whitehall masters no ends of headaches, and indeed resulted in his recall from the Cape at one stage. When in doubt - read about a man's life written by his enemy.
But not all is gloom on the autobiographical front. Every now and then a jewel emerges, which is taken to the bosom of the population at large - and it remains there. One such is the slim volume called simply "The Diary of Iris Vaughan" by herself. It takes a child to describe in uncritical, simple terms, the grown-ups around her, her interaction with them and her sibling, the realities of the country towns in which they lived and how the Boer War swept by in a tumultuous wave. Her stern, magisterial Pop, was apt to 'be savige', Mom stern and controlling, while her brother Charles aided and abetted her in all things naughty as children do. She decided early on that 'everyone should have a diery', because if you always told the truth, you were told you were rude and you get into trouble, or you could lie and that was wrong too - so you must either write whatever it was you couldn't say in the diary, or you had to keep quiet. She chose the former, and the result is a hilarious romp through Edwardian South Africa, complete with idiosyncratic spelling and frank pen-pictures of some of the staunch pillars of society. A must for biography addicts.
Humorous tales of this genre are often a fair bet as a good read. Somehow a person that doesn't take themselves too seriously is hardly likely to dwell on the high points and achievements of their own life in favour of the droll events that happened around them instead. So it is with Olga Levinson's "Call me Master", which purports to be full of fictitious characters in a mythical town called Windhoek - presumably in an erehwonian state of German South West. She describes herself as the last and non-rhyming sister in a slew of six girls, all -ita's. Within the first couple of pages she chronicles the arrival of a young man who announces to her parents that he has come to marry their daughter, whom he had met a week before - to whit Olga, and to whisk her off to South West Africa. Before long she entrains for the long and dusty ride to the capital, which does little to endear itself to the city girl, before she is once more relocated - to a farm in the wilds for good measure. Levinson writes mainly about other people, so the book can be likened to Betty Macdonald's famous "The Egg and I", in which the main character becomes a mirror from which to bounce all the other images. A cheerful and amusing book, which can be reread a few times.
Here's the third lady-writer in a row: Elspeth Huxley's twin volumes "The Flame Trees of Thika" and "The Mottled Lizard" are among my favourite personal memoirs of East Africa. Huxley's reminiscences of her early days on the trackless veld, where her family had been deposited in a manner very reminiscent of the unpreparedness of the 1820 Settlers further south. We are taken through the painful learning curves of the aspirant farmers, as they hack a clearing in the savannah, build some kind of shelter and decide on all the wrong choices before finding crops and methods that will work in the alien soil. Her writing is interesting, full of feeling for her adopted country, and her extensive use of dialogue to flesh out the characters and the interaction between them, though fictional, of necessity, never intrudes or gives an impression of a fictionalised account. I can smell her Africa, I hear its sounds and I see the colours shimmering in the equatorial sun. These two books have a virtuosity of their own, which her other non-fiction work never reaches, though a number of her travel and socio-political books are very readable, while I found her novels to be completely indigestible.
Must be my day for the ladies. A few paragraphs back I mentioned one Karen Blixen as another failed coffee planter. She is of course, the renowned author of "Out of Africa" and coined the immortal phrase "Once I had a farm in Africa…" for both which efforts she has been enshrined among the American pantheon of literary deities on African matters, along with Stanley and Hemingway. In the matter of her book, I would hesitate to call it an autobiography - it is too ethereal, too much like a saga, with shifting scenes and actors walking on and off. They make stilted speeches, of deep matters and thoughts, and their sculpted faces are cunningly lit by hidden lights in the wings. That there is some great writing, one cannot dispute; that it be accepted as 'the truth and nothing but,' would be unrealistic. The view presented is from one side of the auditorium only. None of the nasty unpleasantness of reality seems to intrude, least of all the personality of the author, who comes across as a manipulative harridan from hell in the documentary film I have seen on the subject of the last few years of her life.
From iconic books, to an icon: George Adamson, Bwana Game, the lion man. He was born in India and his parents passed Kenya on their way down south, got hooked and bought a farm, a la Huxley's parents. Coffee farming was an ill-researched pastime in those days, and neither Adamson senior nor the Huxleys (nor Karen Blixen, for that matter) got it right. George had an interesting time of it, trying out all manner of agricultural pursuits as he gravitated to his promised land - the Northern Frontier District, NFD for short. In no time he had added the trades of goat-herding, gold prospecting, hunting, and a slew of other exotic occupations to his CV, before finding his vocation as a game warden at the tender age of 32. Disaster was to strike some six years later, when he was confronted by his nemesis, Joy, the Austrian lady of "Elsa - the Lioness" fame, who decided that he was husband material, and who subsequently ditched her then husband to hang George's scalp on her belt - figuratively speaking.
From certain accounts I've read, it was a marriage made in hell - for George, and certainly what I saw of the lady during a documentary film which interviewed both, separately, she was the sort of person I could really take an un-shine to, while the old boy warmed the cockles of my heart in a taciturn, sincere, nature-boy sort of way. Reassuringly enough, other writers on matters Kenyan also tended to take extreme views on this relationship. Elspeth Huxley was very much in the lady's camp, while another author ( whose name was Ricciardi, I seem to recall ) in turn gave me all the dirt on Joy's tricks and made George out to be the good 'un. No doubt the truth is somewhere in between, as it usually is. His book is a thoroughly interesting read; though there is little literary merit, just a life full of incidents, cobbled together into a more or less contiguous narrative. Throughout the work his love of nature and animals are the predominant themes, while his efforts frequently place him as arbiter in the struggle between the tribesmen and the game he protects.
Great events have often triggered worthy books by some of their participants. Wars must rank highly among favoured subject matter, and while not my personal choice, I do occasionally read books of the genre that have caught my attention. Not for me the undoubted military skill displayed by von Lettow Vorbeck and related in his immensely popular book "My Reminiscences of East Africa" - that's more for students of tactics and military science, or serious historians. No, I would prefer a slim volume of personal reminiscences of the same campaign by a South African gunner, ineptly entitled "On Safari" by F. C. if I wanted to get a feel of warfare during WWI in East Africa; the bouts of malaria and dysentery, the poor food, if any, the murderous heat and inimical landscape - added to which was the spice of dodging sniper fire or a full attack.
One of the great autobiographical works on the Boer War must be Deneys Reitz's "On Commando". How well he describes the gung-ho approach to war by a callow youth, which is so quickly bled dry by the heat of the first battle; by the stench of corpses and the howling of Howitzer shells overhead. One can share in his despair of the lost battle, the exhilaration of a charge and the sorrow felt at the death of a comrade. The book exposes the human side of the dogged struggle as experienced by one participant, not an analysis of military tactics, not individual or collective bravery - not right or wrong. Reitz went into exile after the war, refusing to swear allegiance to the British Crown. He, together with his brothers and a few likeminded companions fled to Madagascar, where they eked out a living of sorts on the edge of starvation, before they were persuaded to return by Isie Smuts' letter, which implored them to rather work for the unification of the country. Reitz's two subsequent books, "Trekking On" and "No Outspan" make equally good reading in a lesser vein, as Reitz becomes a fully fledged military man, an MP and minister of state.
As a complete opposite to the above works, my choice would fall on General Manie Maritz's "My Lewe en Strewe". I know I take my life in my hands to criticise this Afrikaner folk hero, as there are still people in Namaqualand and elsewhere, who frankly worship his memory (just as they would take a Lee Metford to Jannie Smuts if he came riding down those dusty track today), but I read his book not once, but twice in the course of trying to get a picture of the war on the region which has become my main interest. The first reading aroused a deep antipathy in me; Maritz's bombast, braggadocio, self-importance, and not to put too fine a point on it - bunch of lies about his personal exploits and their effect on the course of the war - all these put my teeth on edge. Where this ex ZARP policeman got his rabid anti-Semitism from was a mystery to me until I read Lennox van Onselen's book referred to in V & V # 2, which records at length Maritz's interaction and eventual defeat at the hands of the low-life that ruled the Reef underworld before the war. Still, the man must have had something - even the famous prospector Fred Cornell was impressed most favourably when he met the Rebel general at Prieska in 1914, describing him as an " alert, bluff, soldierly man " with "the manner of an educated man". He also refers to his astonishing feats of strength, courage and leadership during the Boer War, as well as during his service with the Germans in SWA during their two colonial wars. Maritz had a solid reputation, so much so that he managed to quell the simmering rebellion that the government faced when they effectively gave the treasure trove of Namaqualand's diamonds to 'foreigners' so beggaring the locals in the 1920's. So then why did he have to exaggerate his undoubted courage (or it could be called lack of imagination) in hand-to-hand fighting, during which he was often wounded grievously, why were there always many more dead enemies after battle, and why was every skirmish a victory ? My second reading was accompanied by all the books of his companions: Reitz, Bouwer, de Kersauson, Meyer and Smith, as well as works by historians from the British side - and the most charitable conclusion I could come to was that Maritz was suffering from some seriously senior moments by 1938, when he was about 62 years old, at which time the book was published shortly before he died in a motor accident.
Enough of all these dogs of war, let's see how the men of science and letters fare. Certainly one of my early favourites was Dr Robert Broom, who dashed off a small volume entitled "Finding the Missing Link" in 1950. A somewhat presumptuous title, as well as erroneous, as was proven later, but in the heat of battle in those pioneering days of palaeoanthropology - it was quite excusable. In this case again, the event overshadowed the person to some degree, and Broom's cantankerous, headstrong nature, his inattention to his personal finances and his eccentricity don't really emerge from the book. Broom, one reads elsewhere, would do his dustiest fossil-hunting wearing a dark suit - but would strip buck-naked when it got too hot. The indefatigable Scot promised that he would "wear out, not rust out", and kept his word. At the age of 85 he had just completed his monograph on the ape-men, when he is reported to have whispered "Now that's finished ... and so am I". He died moments later. Perfect ending.
Take Dr Sidney Harold Skaife; the extremely popular natural history boffin, who lived on the slopes of the mountain above Hout Bay in a house he built himself. I was forced to reacquaint myself with the book yesterday, as I had read it just too many decades previously to remember much of it. While no one can deny that Skaife led an interesting and varied life, full of incident, worthwhile pursuits and groundbreaking discoveries in the entomological field, very little emerges of the man, except that he was certainly gifted, able to communicate his wide knowledge by means of the then 'new' media of radio and film, as well as writing natural history books on a wide variety of subjects. My respect for him increased when I was reminded that he, an Englishman born and bred, also achieved a measure of literary fame with a series of Afrikaans thrillers of the "Skiet, skop en donder" variety. I have a sneaking suspicion I actually read "Adriaan Hugo - baasspeurder" at some stage of my youthful indiscriminate appetites. His autobiography shows none of those skills - instead it consists of short passages of (to me) intensely interesting biological anecdotes and facts, a litany of where he went from where to where and what he did in each place, and a whole autograph album full of names of prominent people even I have mostly never heard of - and I've been around some time. What does that prove? Merely that he should have stuck to his favourite subject - biology. It was the thing he was really good at, and he knows this, as he writes "it has been said that the writing of autobiographies is as common as adultery, and just as reprehensible" at later he confesses that his only excuse was that "it was a pleasant form of self-expression, of recalling happy memories of the past, and perhaps boasting a little - to show off a special talent that we may have". Bravo, Dr Skaife. I find your autobiography eminently credible - even if only because of these expressed sentiments.
The legal fraternity, too, is not shy of recording their illustrious careers. A number of semi-biographical books by magistrates, lawyers and judges grace my shelves. Some are ponderous tomes such as J G Kotze's "Memoirs and Reminiscences" in two volumes, as he obviously acquired a taste for the game and had to bring his audience up to date some five years after the publication of the first volume. Others like Herman's "The Law my Master", Juta's "Reminiscences of the Western Circuit", and Corder's "Judges at Work" and "The Truth and Nothing But", focus mainly on the frailties of others instead of the careers of the arbiters of their fates, and it is that which makes them entertaining. One or two of these 'Frontier Lawmen' stand out in my memory as having written books filled with both dramatic and humorous content, well worth a revisitation now and then. They are F H Guthrie's "Frontier Magistrate' dealing with his experiences in the Eastern Cape and Walvis Bay; and lastly, my personal favourite legal man, William Charles Scully. He went in for ponderous titles: 'Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer' as well as 'Further Reminiscences…', but the contents are generally written in a light, modest vein, with a ribald sense for the ridiculous in the behaviour of the people around him - not excluding himself. Scully led an adventurous early life as a gold and diamond prospector, and missed becoming a rich man by a combination of ill-health and circumstances, as he relates his misfortunes at Du Toit's Pan and Barberton - where he lay within inches of untold wealth. Only after these escapades did he settle down to the humdrum existence of a government clerk, and later magistrate, but one always gets the sense that here was a romantic, waiting to burst out into the world. A number of his novels and stories are also good reads - but once does have to forgive the odd passage of Victorian Purple Prose.
Although it was intended to include an offering in this genre by a poet, writer and/or artist, when it came to making the choice, my eye fell on Guy Butler's trilogy " Karoo Morning", "Bursting World" and "A Local Habitation". As I had previously read no more than an odd chapter here and there, I sat down to them with a will, fully intending to give a blow by blow account of the engagement. Then reality struck, and I must confess that I have chickened out. After reading a hundred or so pages, I was suddenly struck by my presumption and crass stupidity. Who the heck did I think I was anyway ? To take on a long-deceased general with an army at his beck and call, to roast a little old lady in print, or to deflate a pompous politician, all these seem like fair game. To even consider writing a 'literary criticism', however humble, on the work of an esteemed professor of the English language, a noted poet, playwright and writer, smacked not only of foolhardiness but looked like literary suicide. So let me say only that Butler's work deals largely with his experiences in academia and with his work in literary circles, some religion and a liberal dusting of politics with a smidgeon of family life - and with the exception of the latter, I have no knowledge on these matters. Nuff said.

HUNTER BY NATURE

AFRICANA VOTES & VIEWS VOL 1 # 3

Hunting has become unfashionable; abhorred in many circles; part of the instant gratification market - but that bloodthirsty urge that impels little boys to terrorise the neighbourhood's birdlife, and later, possibly the world's dwindling game, just won't go away. Just so we understand each other, 'hunting' does not figure in my vocabulary as equating to a bunch or braying jackasses in red coats, mounted on half a ton of horseflesh apiece and accompanied by a pack of yowling curs, who chase a small carnivore hardly larger than the pet cat, across field and hedgerow with bloodthirsty intent. No, hunting involves a man, a noble beast and a gun. Call it 'bringing home the bacon' or something a little more high-brow, like 'satisfying the primeval instincts', the fact remains that no hunter can explain his addiction to a non-hunter satisfactorily.
Let me give it a go anyway! It goes something like this, according to that great writer/hunter Robert Ruark: one of life's wonders is the potential for a puny man to slay a great beast, like a lion or an elephant - not by means of his muscles, but using his brains. So, instead of using his mental muscle in a nice peaceful game of chess, or for solving a crossword puzzle, man goes out, fashions himself a spear, or digs a game pit - or buys an impressively noisy gun. He then converts some few hundred kilos of more or less aggressive beast into a series of lunches for his tribe, and he can hang some of the inedible bits on a tree outside his hut (or a wall inside if he is so minded) while he brags to all and sundry about his prowess. Better than saying checkmate; or putting down the completed Sunday Telegraph Crossword? I'd think so.
Many of the modern hunters are passionate about the great outdoors, the wild beasts that roam the veld; they want to preserve them for their children and grandchildren to enjoy in the future. Yet when the spoor has been followed, when the quarry is within range, that finely crafted weapon will be aimed, and as the cross-hairs zero in on the lethal spot, the hunter holds his breath and the force that squeezes a trigger comes into effect. In the moment that the bullet strikes and the buck crumples, it is consigned into immortality in the mind of its killer. He owns that glorious particle of the wilds of Africa - even if humanity builds a smoke-spewing power station on the very same spot in the next year. If fate would have it that the beastie took exception to a few ill-placed grams of lead, and a charge resulted, necessitating the expenditure of more ammunition or a bit of frantic exercise, so much the better for that mental photo album in full magnificent technicolour with action-replays galore. The regret at having extinguished a life comes later. Sometimes decades later, or never, for some.
Enough. Those who have done this, will know what I'm talking about, others will shake their heads. Let me just say that some of the earliest books I read on Africa, were hunting books. I hungered for a taste of the wilds, the wide savannah, the cool forests and the lush swamps of Africa; I wanted to feel the heft of an elephant gun, the brute force of the kick, the slap of the bullet as it reached its target, and the sweet triumph of holding the heavy head of my prize - the essence of the romance of the Dark Continent. It didn't always quite work out like that, but hey, it's OK to aim high. One of the highlights of hunting in Africa with said elephant gun, was sitting in the middle of a herd of buffalo on a breathless hot day in the Okavango swamps with my tracker. In front of me was a scrawny bush, and on the other side of it about a thousand pounds of buffalo cow was peering suspiciously at me while her calf grazed a few metres behind me. High drama potential indeed, but when a whiff of us finally reached the herd around us, they just thundered off in a cloud of dust, while we resumed breathing. I hesitate to confess this, but my most life-threatening experience came when a duiker gored me. In defence, I must hasten to say that I had only just arrived in Africa from grey, gritty Germany; I was ten years old and I was trying to feed the supposedly almost tame beastie a handful of grass, when it charged, put two holes in my knee and shoved me arse over tip into a goldfish pond. S'truth - you can ask my sister - she was watching.
Back to hunters. John Hunter was one of my early favourites; a man of action this Scot, a large man in the mould of the legendary hunters like Cummins, Cornwallis-Harris, Baker and Selous. He ran away from home, did all manner of exciting things and then drifted into ivory hunting, rhino and lion control as well as becoming a Bwana Mkubwa in the safari trade. His first book is now a highly prized collectors' item; "White Hunter", (Seely Service & Co 1938) but it lacks any pretension of writing skill; I really enjoyed his second effort, baldly entitled "Hunter" ( Hamish Hamilton, 1952). It may have been that the style really appeals to the young and young at heart, but there must be some merit in the book, since it was translated into several languages - French, German, even Afrikaans. His publishers were obviously emboldened by the success and they managed to convince him to take on a co-author from their stable for his third effort, which was probably a fairly daunting project.
They picked on one of my favourite authors of my youth - Dan Mannix. This was a man who could make any young lad's heart beat faster. He ran away from home and joined a travelling circus. He made it his business to learn a bundle of tricks, including magic, sword-swallowing, fire-eating and light-bulb chewing among others.
(Memoirs of a Sword-Swallower) I suffered from burnt gums and lips and an overactive gag-reflex for some months after the first reading of that volume. Anyway, Mannix did an admirable job with John Hunter, and "African Bush Adventures " was published in 1954. Again they drew on Hunter's experiences of the bush, animals, game control, and even conservation. Mannix later collaborated with a Swiss animal collector and hunter Peter Ryhiner, and the book " The Wildest Game " was the result.
The fourth Hunter book appeared in 1957 with the help of Alan Wykes, who was a recognised author, with a number of titles to his credit; "Hunter's Tracks" is essentially more of the same as dished up in his previous three books. Lots of safari hunting adventures, pulling wounded dangerous game out of thickets for his clients, and fending off dangerous clients' wives while the inept hunters were drowning their sorrows in camp. A lengthy manhunt adds some variety to this volume. Another enjoyable read, probably made more so by Wykes' collaboration.
The latter also wrote two other good hunting biographies: "Snake-Man" (1960), which is the story of C J P Ionides, who was a conservator, a hunter/collector of a number of rare animals in addition to becoming Bwana Nyoka, an eccentric snake catcher in his latter years. Ionides also wrote two books himself, "A Hunter's Story" (W H Allen, 1965) and "Mamba's and Maneaters" a year later - both eminently readable works. Wykes then wrote "Nimrod Smith" which appeared in the next year, and which features the exploits of another Great White Hunter of the early 20th century.
Another early hero of mine was W D M Bell - Karamojo Bell, as he was known from the region, which contained his favourite haunts. His books are mainly on elephant hunting; to him an elephant was 'X' number of pounds of ivory, which could be traded or sold to equip another shooting expedition during the next hunting season, which enabled him to lead the footloose roaming life that he preferred. Bell knew the structure of an elephant's skull better than most other hunters. He hunted with a ridiculously small-bore rifle - 7mm, but his accuracy and skill in getting up close to his quarry ensured his success with a minimum of woundings and dangerous charges. This was a far cry from some of the great nimrods of the previous century, who would at times have to fire several dozen shots to fell one animal, riding hell for leather to get out of the way of the enraged beast between shots, to enable them to reload their ponderous ordnance. Bell chalked up round about a thousand elephants during his career, but his hunting lacks romance, though he is an able raconteur and a master at bushcraft.
Most of the hunting books I read in the fifties and sixties had to have one premier quality - affordability. I would walk past the CNA and look longingly at the Africana Collectanea series displayed there at astronomical prices like 8s.6d. for Baines and Lord's " Shifts and Expedients of Camp Life, Travel and Exploration ", and I would sigh and move on. Those hunting titles that appeared in softcover, priced at a modest 1s. 2d. or thereabouts, were more in line with the depth of my pockets. Still, one could pick up reasonable secondhand bargains if one knew ones way around the city and the antiquarian shops. So it was that over the years I picked up a treasure trove of hunting books, 'Poor Man's Africana' but nowadays quite sought-after titles.
There was "Crocodile Fever' by L Earl (Collins, 1954), featuring hide-hunting of the scaly saurians in Zimbabwe and Mozambique, while Cronje Wilmot's book "Always Lightly Tread" (Timmins, 1956) carried on in the same vein in the Okavango, with game control, meat hunting and a bout of bubonic plague thrown in for good measure. One of the famous books to come from the Transvaal Lowveld of that genre, were A C White's "Call of the Bushveld" , an evocative hunting book by the owner of 'White's Avoca', a game farm near present-day Hoedspruit. The latter two volumes are beautifully illustrated by my old friend Charles Astley-Maberly's drawings. I got to know the old man and his wife on their Duiwelskloof farm when I was a youngster. I often stayed with a neighbour during holidays, and used to visit the old couple for tea and scones, when we would sit outside on the verandah, and as dusk fell, the bushpigs would ghost out of the surrounding forest onto the lawns.
Those times produced a number of interesting titles; T V Bulpin wrote the classic "The Ivory Trail" - the story of S C Barnard, also known as Bvekenya - who played about evading the police round about Crook's Corner in the far north-east of the Kruger Park. Bulpin followed this up with "The Hunter is Death", which was the story of George Rushby, another one of the great elephant hunters of the lion-infested Njombe district in Tanzania. South Africans had a few greats among the 20th century Nimrods as well; J F Burger won renown with his tales of hunting angry beasts - " African Jungle Memories", "My Forty Years in Africa", "Horned Death" and "African Buffalo Trails" - were some of his most successful books. One of the evergreens is, of course, P J Pretorius' "Jungle Man" which not only recounts his hunting exploits, but for good measure, devotes a few chapters to hunting down the German cruiser, the Königsberg, which had holed up in the almost impenetrable Rufiji Delta in southern Tanganyika during WWI. Although one must deplore the slaughter of most of the Addo herd of elephants that he writes about, one can but rejoice about the change of attitudes which has led to their preservation under present-day human pressures.
The East African safari trade was the subject of many books by game conservators, hunters and outfitters. A number of well-known authors come to mind; Donald Ker wrote "Through Forest and Veldt", W D Holmes' "Safari RSVP" was another such, as was Dennis Holman's "Inside Safari Hunting", while the firm of Cullen & Downey wrote a book about the other side of the coin, entitled " Saving the Game". The spice in many of these tales is the human-animal interaction, when city-slicker meets beast. Most of the pro's are not too economical with their past clients' dignity, but to my taste, one Osborne stood out as a hunter who despised most of his clients to such a degree that it spoilt his book "A Guiding Son", which I recently read. One of my favourite tongue-in-cheek writers is Alexander Lake, who penned the tame-sounding title "African Adventures" and the more perilous "African Killers", which I seem to recall had the subtitle "All about killers lying in wait and hunters lying in print" - that had a ring of truth about it.
The omnipresent District Officer in the African colonies, or 'DO' as he was generally known, was another class of hunter that wrote some thumping good yarns. For a part of each year they would be tasked with patrolling their remote region, accompanied by sufficient bearers to sustain life in the wilds, but which also meant shooting a considerable number of heads of game for the pot, as well as despatching any problem animals that plagued the populace. One of my favourites is G Muldoon, who wrote about his game control adventures in Central Africa in his two well-written books "Leopards in the Night" and "The Trumpeting Herd" (both published by Rupert Hart-Davis in 1955 & 1957 respectively). This brings me out of Africa, to one of the most respected hunter/naturalists who had to be judge and executioner in the conflict between man and beast on many occasions. Jim Corbett the slayer of the maneaters of Kumaon, the Temple Tiger and the man-eating leopard of Rudraprayag, among a host of problem cats, was no ordinary hunter, who killed for trophies or glory. His role was as the last resort between a defenceless cowering population of rural Indians, and the few rogue cats that caused panic and disrupted all life in the hill villages. His unrivalled knowledge of bushcraft, tracking and the habits of his quarry are used in describing the hunts in painstakingly beautiful detail - as one puny man pits his wits and quick reactions against a huge predator who sees him as his prey. I am the proud owner of all the books Corbett has written, and I reread them often - sharing in his fears as he stalks, and is in turn stalked by the maneating leopard in the stygian darkness; I marvel at his skill in following the progress of his quarry through the jungle, by track and by the sounds of the other beasts and I delight in his sharing his thoughts and deductions about the behaviour of the animal he is following. I have not read another writer of such talent in that genre, though another comes close - one Hugh Allen, an invalided soldier, who emigrates to India after WWII with his sister, buys a farm in the jungle and attempts to do battle with the deer, wild pigs, monkeys, as well as big cats. His book, "The Lonely Tiger" (Faber & Faber 1960) is a tour de force of one man's struggle against the forces of nature that surround him, which he does not want to destroy, but which he cannot ignore.
While I am on hunters in other parts of the world - let me not forget my hunting hero Bob Ruark. I was introduced to "The Old Man and the Boy" when I was barely in my teens. Strangely enough I didn't like it - then. A year or two later I read the story of his first hunting safari to Africa, "Horn of the Hunter" and I became an instant 'Ruarkophile' to coin a phrase. His zesty language, robust sense of the ridiculous - even when he was the subject of the ridicule, his descriptive passages of the hunts and the philosophical musings in camp after the first couple of Martinis - were all to my taste. I acquired his other hunting books, like "Use Enough Gun" and "I Didn't Know it Was Loaded", as quickly as I could, and the duo of the "Old Man and the Boy" and its sequel "The Old Man's Boy grows Older" last of all. As my son grew up, I gave him copies of both the latter, as well as "Horn of the Hunter". There is much home-spun philosophy, wisdom, humour, etiquette and just plain horse-sense in these books; I felt anybody who reads them can't help but get a little improved by doing so. Well - my boy hasn't robbed a bank yet, he's not an alcoholic or a drug addict ( Bob Ruark fancied his tipple, but not in the hunting field) and last year he shot an elephant cow at a range of about two metres after she had flipped a Yankee student out of the tracker seat on an open vehicle full of kids. I reckon reading Ruark didn't do him any harm.
Back to some of our local talent. One George Michael, a Joburg lad, I seem to remember, became a 'noted' Big Game Hunter in the fifties, and he wrote "African Fury" which did not impress me. Possibly to make up for his defects, his wife wrote " I Married a Hunter" two years later - which did nothing to charm me either. The books were full of cutesy snapshots of Ma, Pa and the babies with some deader on the ground in front of them. At least, that is how I remember the books. One of the few books by a lady author, which charmed, was a cheerful tale by one Sally Macdonald, who joined her husband on a home-crafted safari in pre-war Tanganyika. "Tanganyika Safari" (Angus & Robertson 1948) is an entertaining read, as is her other book, which has nothing to do with hunting - "Sally in Rhodesia".
Then there is the gifted writer, and I believe, talented concert violinist of his day, Victor Pohl. He wrote a number of books of short stories about the Basuto people around his family farm in the Eastern Free State, as well as his family's lot during the Boer War in "Adventures of a Boer Family". However, his real talent came to the fore in the book "Bushveld Adventures" (Faber & Faber 1940) in which he describes his youthful hunts with his black companion and a dog trotting at his heels. Very reminiscent of 'Jock', and a charming read for young and old, hunter or not.
I have read a goodly number of Afrikaans hunting books, many of which are of interest, but I must confess to finding a fundamental difference between this genre in English and the same in Afrikaans. Possibly it has to do with the attitude to the hunt and the animal. For the Brits it's a noble animal they're pitting their wits against, and a sport (of kings, mind you, not so long ago) which carries a certain aura of romance. For the Afrikaner, the animal is historically so much biltong, and the hunt is a way of bringing home the biltong. Possibly I should not decry the delicious snack (of which I caused quite a few hundredweight to be made in my time), nor should I slander a good roast, but their literary efforts don't make romantic reading matter.
To name but a few, J Bruwer's " Noord van die Zambesi", Lucas Potgieter's two books "Staanplekkies langs my geweerpad" and "Fonteintjies langs my geweerpad", P Duplessis' "Duinestories", S le Roux's " Baanbrekers en Jagters van Suid Afrika", Sangiro's couple of books, J von Moltke's interesting three works on the early Southwest Boer hunters, and P J Schoeman's hunting reminiscences, are all good workmanlike examples. One J Sproul excelled with the title "My Vier-en-tagtigste Leeu en ander Jagverhale" but I could not wax lyrical about it - in fact I have forgotten everything about the other 83 cats, it was that unmemorable. For my money, I still prefer Pieter Pieterse's humorous anecdotes as on offer in his book " Boude en Blaaie - en nog 'n Paar Bosveldstories" (Uniboek 1991) - though it's still biltong that's being "platgetrek", but at least there's some pepper on it!
I fully expect a howl of protest from my audience, that's you, firstly because of the subject matter of this contribution, secondly because I've left out all the "Big Guns". Not to fear, at some future date I shall have the temerity to review the great, the brave, the accurate and the merciless killers.
Yours, from the hunting trail,
Arne

TWO TALENTS IN ONE FAMILY

AFRICANA VOTES & VIEWS VOL 1 # 2

The name van Onselen is probably familiar to a number of South Africans, as two of them, Lennox and Charles are well-known writers. Their beginnings could not have been more different. Lennox was a policeman, but his first book dealt with the relatively little known subject of antique furniture. As he says himself in the foreword of “Cape Antique Furniture” ( Timmins 1959) when he tried to obtain information during his Cape Town days, from bookdealers – possibly along Long Street – there were none to be found, so the enterprising man decided to write a modest introduction himself.
He attempts to give a brief outline of the origin of individual items, the timbers used and illustrates their development with some black and white photos. Interestingly he already acknowledges the early Eastern influences of the Malay craftsmen on the early Dutch efforts; they probably brought designs such as the ball and claw, and the cabriolet leg, as well as marquetry, rattan and laquer work to the Cape. The second wave of influence came through the Huguenots, who were to have a profound effect on local designs. Then came the English occupation and further continental ideas were brought into the mix.
The author wrote chapters on furniture development in the city and country districts, and features items which would grace reception rooms, bedrooms, dining rooms and he concludes with a chapter on long case clocks and some tips for the aspirant collector.
This little book was published in a limited edition of a thousand copies, so copies are reasonably hard to find, especially in good condition. Still, a worthwhile addition to your library, if antiques are in your field of interest.
Not surprisingly, his second book entitled “A Rhapsody in Blue” (Timmins 1960) deals with the development of the police, starting with the office of Fiscal in the late 17th century, later ably assisted by men of the Watch. A further body of men, the Dienaars, followed, and the office of Fiscal was made purely administrative. By the mid-19th century the Cape Constabulary was organized according to London principles, while in the country districts the Landdrosts were assisted by their veldcornets in keeping the peace..
The same period saw a proliferation of various armed, semi-military bodies, such as the Cape Regiment, Cape Mounted Riflemen, Imperial Cape Mounted Riflemen Corps, Cape Police, Frontier Armed and Mounted Police etc. Many of these were deployed in the Frontier Wars that were being waged on the Eastern Cape and on the Orange River. In the Boer Republics too, there were the notorious ZARP’s and the OFS Republican Police, while Natal had its Natal Mounted Police. After the cessation of hostilities the Transvaal Town Police and the S A Constabulary paved the way to the formation of the SAP. The author’s narrative is full of anecdote, as well as solid historical fact, but occasionally the book is a little ‘bare-bones’ for the serious scholar, as all this information is crammed into the first thirty pages of the book. The remainder is an ode to the life of a policeman, mostly tough, sometimes rewarding, often heroic, with dashes of humour – an eminently readable work.
He concludes with some of his own experiences, including his time as a personal bodyguard to General Smuts. He also saw service in the Sixth Infantry (Police) Brigade during WWII in North Africa, where he was captured by the Italians at Tobruk. With a few friends he escaped in 1943 and made it to Switzerland, where he had to remain due to that country’s neutral status, until the end of the war. A short concluding chapter sketches an ideal police force in an ideal state – a far cry from what happened in the thirty years after the book’s publication.
His third book is probably the most sought-after. “Trekboer” was published by Timmins in 1961, and once more the author draws on his own meetings and interviews with these nomadic stockmen of the arid interior and in the Northwest. By the time the book was written, they were already an almost extinct breed. The advent of the water-drilling machine, and then the ubiquitous windmill, made it possible for stock farmers to lead a more settled life with their flocks on the plains of Bushmanland, and the government promoted land-ownership as well as fencing of properties. All was well during the years when the Twa grass stood knee-high after good rains, but drought inevitably followed and the farmers had once again to muster their starving flocks, pack their wagons and trek along the dusty roads in search of better pasture.
Both van Onselen in “Trekboer” and F A Venter in his book “Kambro-kind” sketch the heartache and privation of the desperate farmer and his dwindling capital on the seemingly endless plains, shimmering in the white-heat, hoping to find a flush of green from a fleeting shower of rain. Many of them ended up eking out an existence on the banks of the Gariep, often dependant on the goodwill and charity of their more fortunate kinfolk, while others trekked into the Kalahari, which though a desert, still could support livestock in years when Bushmanland lay bare under successive droughts.
The author also had his brush with the glittering wealth of Namaqualand and he relates some of the history of the discovery of diamonds, their effect on the Namaqualanders, who saw so much wealth coming from their lands, without any benefits coming their way. One senses a certain amount of sympathy in this policeman’s stories of IDB’s, police-traps and men who became inexplicably well-off almost overnight.
Lastly, as a dessert, he dishes up an account of the searches of a Pretoria chiropractor for the Lost City of the Kalahari. This struck a real chord in my memory, as I shared a schoolbench with the good doctor’s two children. After each vacation, which they had spent flying up and down the desert and camping within earshot of the lions’ roars, Lynn and Scott Haldeman would give their classmates another thrilling episode of their adventures – enough to make me green with envy. On the other hand, they never did find anything, nor were they likely to do so. It is now generally accepted that the much-vaunted Lost City described by the American traveler G A Farini ( actually his real name was William Hunt) was a geological phenomenon amplified by a fertile imagination and some good old-fashioned showmanship.
His fourth, and presumably last book, “Head of Steel” was published in 1962. This time he traces the development of the rail network from the Cape into the Transvaal. While quite an interesting read for the layman, I would suspect it is a little superficial for the railway enthusiast. Generally all of Lennox van Onselen’s books are worth reading and they are good, unpretentious ‘poor man’s Africana’.
Charles van Onselen, on the other hand, is an academic, a sociologist and historian, who has written a number of books on the economic development of the Southern African region, labour exploitation and crime. His first book, “Chibaro” (Pluto Press, 1976) is certainly an eye-opener. Most people know about the Belgian king, Leopold having the chutzpah to not only assume ‘ownership’ of a huge chunk of Africa, but then he set his minions to enslaving the population, and strip-mining everything in sight, from ivory to rainforest timbers and minerals, while committing some of the ghastliest atrocities you can imagine. His descendants still own a few dozen palaces spread around Europe – makes you think, doesn’t it?
The Rhodesian populace underwent similar exploitation; van Onselen examines the labour practices of the mining companies in Rhodesia, after the BSA Co had successfully quashed the last remnants of rebellion. Taxes were imposed, to pay which meant that men had perforce to work in the mines. When mining proved to be unprofitable due to the patchy presence of pay-dirt, the first to suffer were the African mineworkers, who laboured under horrendous conditions, ill-fed, and ill-housed, for progressively lower pay, powerless to alter their working conditions. Life in closed compounds became the standard option imposed by the capitalists of the whole subcontinent, and vice, alcohol, drugs, and credit were all used to keep workers in lengthy labour contracts which resulted in increasing social upheaval, poverty, disease and often death.
Lastly, the author considers the response of the black worker to this labour coercive economy: drunkenness, theft, desertion, property destruction, forgery and absenteeism – the only responses that the workers, brutalized and cowed by the system, could use against their masters. Not a pretty picture, and a far cry from the benevolent face which mining companies would like to portray to the world. In short, an uncomfortable read; typically a reworked doctoral thesis, which requires some specialized interest to persevere with.
The author then wrote a duo of books on the social and economic history of the Witwatersrand up to WWI. Entitled “New Babylon” and “New Niniveh”, van Onselen approaches the phenomenon of unlimited wealth generation, not from the perspective of the beneficiaries, the Randlords, but from the points of view of the underclasses. In the former book, he examines the role alcohol played in ridding the ZAR of agricultural surplus, while providing an anodyne to the masses as well as an incentive for labour recruitment. Sex was the other attraction, and prostitutes streamed to the Rand, first from the Cape, then in increasing numbers from the slums of America, Britain and Europe, closely followed by their symbiotic pimps and gangster elements.
President Kruger, the arch-reactionary statesman, actually connived in the launching of Republican rotgut, and condoned prostitution as a necessary evil, only to be forced into passing the ‘Ontugt Wet’, in effect the first legislation which prohibited relations between black miners and European women – when the ‘swart gevaar’ raised its ugly head in the minds of the local gentry. The Boer War altered all that, but only briefly, and soon Milner was forced into putting the first Immorality Act into force.
Lastly, transport, and in particular the cabbies, come under the magnifying glass. As the New Babylon grew from a scant few square miles some forty-fold in size within a few years, the transport needs of the masses had to be addressed. Once again President Kruger proved to be the reactionary influence, as he wanted his constituency, the agriculturalists, to have an outlet for their products, ie forage. He steadfastly refused to grant concessions for anything but horse-drawn vehicles and trams, when electricity was already a viable alternative. The author follows the power struggle between cabbies from different racial groups, their organizations, changes from the basic Cape cart, to the modish Victorias and Landaus, and on to the motorised taxi. He describes the stratification of cabbies by laws and regulations into classes, which in turn determine the fares and race of the passengers. Lastly, in 1906, the electrified tram, or trolley, made its appearance – and to my wonder, I actually still made use of those historic conveyances in the late fifties and early sixties!
The second book in this series “New Niniveh”, concerns itself, among others, with the role and composition of the servant-class. Firstly sturdy Irish and Scottish lasses were the preferred imports (after all in a society of 88% unmarried men, they could prove to be useful as breeding stock) but these inevitably succumbed to the white colonialist class-consciousness, which decreed that manual labour was unfitted for those of paler hue. Enter the Zulu ‘houseboy’ who would handle the menial work under supervision of the cook-general. Inevitably the economic fluctuations in the fortunes of the mining industry, made this structure too expensive, and black women joined the rank of servants, and then ‘picaninnies’ became the logical lowest rung of this labouring class.
Another interesting sub-class was that of the dhobi’s, or amawasha – who laundered the dirty apparel of Rand society. These consisted again mainly of Zulus, who formed a guild of micro-entrepreneurs wielding no little power and influence in the burgeoning city. The author sketches their rise and inevitable decline as mechanized steam laundries, shortage of water and capitalist intrusion crept into their kingdom.
A section of the book deals with the role of the Afrikaner poor, especially after the Boer War. From the ruins of their agricultural origins they streamed into the city and competed for work with foreign workers and the black labour force. The author traces the proletarianisation of this group, unemployment and the rise of a class-consciousness which was to play a growing political role as the century progressed.
Lastly the book deals with the shadowy criminal army that inhabited the caves, derelict mines and prisons on the Reef – the Umkosi Wezintaba – a Mafiosi-type brotherhood, rooted in social injustice, but which changed to robbery, extortion, burglary and murder. The mine compound system, the prisons as well as the free-roaming members of this army, were well-organised and informed and became a serious threat to law and order for several decades. Both of the above books are recommended reading for serious historians and students of the South African industrial revolution, but for a casual reader they may be too academic in flavour.
Another tour de force by this author was “The Seed is Mine” (Hill & Wang 1996); an award-winning biography of a black share-cropper, Kas Maine, whose life spanned most of the 20th century. From the edge of the Kalahari, where he spent the first half century of his life, he was a subject of the forced removals that became such a feature of the apartheid regime. As farming became increasingly mechanized, his services became less and less valuable to the white farmers on whose land he lived. Finally he ended up in the puppet state of Bophutatswana, with a plot of land which was too small to be farmed economically, and from where he had to send his children off to the cities to make a living.
Politics hardly entered into this man’s life, rather it was the economic and social changes that affected him most, leaving him powerless to alter the environment in which he lived. His working relationships with the white landowners and the representatives of the white government, both only concerned with their own interests, were surprisingly good, though he was never their equal socially. He is often portrayed as being critical of individual whites, but never rails against them as a group. The book is a real tribute to a hard-working black farmer, who showed remarkable forbearance and patience with his lot.
The latest book written by this author, “The Fox and the Flies” is visibly the result of his previous researches into the underbelly of the Witwatersrand demi monde. It chronicles the life and times of Joseph Liis, aka Joe Silver, thief, burglar, racketeer, gangster, whoremaster and psychopath. His nefarious career started in southern Poland, from where he emigrated to London with one of the early waves of migrants in the 1880’s. He wasted no time in establishing himself as a petty criminal and pimp on the streets of the East End at the time of the horrendous Whitechapel murders – of which more later. At the ripe old age of 21, already syphilitic, he decided to bless New York with his presence.
His American chapter saw him continuing in a similar vein, but even though he made full use of the corrupt lawmen of his adopted country, he spent his first two spells in Sing Sing and Riverside prisons in Pittsburgh, after which he left the States as a naturalized US citizen and returned to London, where he was soon incarcerated in Pentonville for a stretch. His next target was Johannesburg, and here van Onselen gives a fascinating insight into the low-life of this city in the making, where almost ninety percent of men were single, perpetually thirsty and looking for diversions. He describes Silver’s racketeering, his interaction with South African notables, such as Smuts, Manie Maritz and Mostyn Cleaver, which was to result in lengthy court cases as well as the first stirrings of an immorality act being passed by the old president, Kruger. The beginning of the Boer War found Silver in jail once more. First the Fort in Johannesburg, then the Potchefstroom prison. When the Brits threatened the town, Silver was shown the open gate and he departed thankfully to Kimberley, which was celebrating the lifting of the siege. Here again he did not last long doing what he did best, and once more he landed briefly in jail before being deported to Cape Town.
The Mother City, and particularly District Six, proved to be congenial surroundings until the war ended, when our man departed to – wait for it – Bloemfontein, of all places. Yes, even that placid Boer capital was to feel the impact of the brothelkeeper and white slaver from hell. But once again his intrigues resulted in imprisonment and finally he was deported back to the Cape. He managed to spend a year there more or less out of trouble – except for leaving a ‘wife’ maddened with syphilis in Valkenberg, for whom he had to pay maintenance, so when the Germans were forced to ship out large numbers of troops to quell the Hereros in South West Africa in 1904, he judged that he might as well make the sleepy little town of Swakopmund, and later Windhoek, his new business locale. Finally, in 1906, his luck ran out and several of his prostitutes ganged up on him and the German authorities incarcerated him once more before deporting him again. In vain he tried to leave ship at Cape Town, as well as at Durban, but the subcontinent had become too well informed about his activities, so he had to return to Europe.
His further adventures include Germany, France, Belgium, Argentina, Chile, New York and London again, before he finally departs almost inexplicably towards Poland, where he belatedly meets his just deserts – apparently for a completely different reason. I’m not going to spoil that one for you though.
The book is a tour de force of meticulous research and dogged pursuit of information. The subject is not a pleasant one; in fact, the author makes a case for Silver to have been ‘Jack the Ripper’, but to all devotees of things criminal, this book is a must. For those with an interest in the social history of the late 19th and early 20th century, it is also a valuable work and a thumping good read. Happy reading!

THE WILD NORTHWEST IN PRINT

AFRICANA VOTES & VIEWS VOL 1 # 1

From the earliest times of European contact with the subcontinent, the West Coast of South Africa and its forbidding interior was shrouded in mystery. The illustrious Bartolomeu Dias sailed down the Namaqualand coast in the first few days of 1488 and he reputedly sighted the mountains near Clanwilliam and named them Serra dos Reis. Near Lambert's Bay he seems to have encountered the famous southeaster, which blew him offshore, and that was the last he was to see of the subcontinent until he made landfall after having rounded the Cape. Some nine years later Vasco da Gama clapped his eyes on the forbidding coast in the region of Hondeklip Bay and he landed in St Helena Bay. He and his men made contact with Khoi tribesmen, and though relations were cordial at first, a misunderstanding occurred soon enough and a fight ensued in which several people were wounded. Both accounts only made it into print second- or even third-hand, much later.
The death of Francisco d'Almeida with some 57 of his compatriots in Table Bay in 1510, during a pitched battle with the local Khoi, did not endear the Cape to the Portuguese, and they tended to steer clear of it subsequently. In the course of the next one and a half centuries, the British, Dutch and French made sporadic landings on the West Coast, but the scarcity of water, exposed anchorages with the exception of Saldanha Bay, and generally uninviting appearance of the barren shores, meant that by the time van Riebeeck started the settlement at the Cape, very little was known beyond St Helena Bay. Before the days of the Dutch occupation, the numerous landings at, or near the Cape, were chronicled in the book "Before van Riebeeck" by R. Raven-Hart.
The good van Riebeeck had his hands full for the first few years of his occupation, but soon mention was made in his Daghregister that his thoughts were turning to the exploration of the northern interior. The visiting Commissioner Ryklof van Goens in 1657 spurred him on to discover the whereabouts of the River Spirito Santo and the fabled city of Monomotapa. The semi-myths of these places, the fabled empire of Prester John, names like Vigiti Magna, Davagul and the like - all these were the drawcards that led the commander to send out men like Gabbema, van Harwarden, Danckart, van Meerhoff, Everaert, de la Guerre, Cruythoff and others in search of the untold riches that were to be found to the north and northwest. Some of the reports that these men brought back with them, can be considered to be the first 'Northwest Literature', although the reports were not published as such at the time. Nowadays they can be found in compilations, such as the first two volumes, subtitled 'Tochten naar het Noorden' contained in E C Godee-Molsbergen's work "Reizen in Zuid Afrika", E. E. Mossop's "Old Cape Highways", and lastly the three volumes of Jan van Riebeeck's Daghregister or Journal, which is available in English, Dutch and with Afrikaans footnotes and summaries.
Needless to say, the commander's brave explorers met with little success in their quest for walled cities, cloaked people, precious metals and jewels. Instead they met unforgiving deserts, mountains and extremes of climate. They did meet up with the Nama people; the rumours of the existence of at least copper in the north, was confirmed, and yes, there was a 'big river'. Van Riebeeck's term at the Cape ended, and his successor Commander Zacharias Wagenaar, made one half-hearted attempt towards the fabled region, but an early upset caused him to abandon the attempt, and from then on his expressed opinion was that the fabled cities of the North were travellers' tales, not worthy of being followed up.
The next traveller was Olof Bergh, who was despatched on two expeditions in 1681 and 1682, following contact with copper-bearing Namaquas who visited Governor van der Stel at the Cape. His expeditions penetrated as far as present-day Garies, and his journals are available in print in the VRS first series, No 12, translated by E E Mossop. Bergh's superior was to follow in style, mounting a huge expedition in 1685, which was successful in reaching present-day Springbok, and the famed 'Koperberg', where a trial adit was sunk, samples were taken and smelted and a full report was written, which appeared in print for the first time in Valentyn's five volume work, the English title of which is 'Description of the Cape of Good Hope'. This is then the first printed work on the region to appear, by Johannes van Braam, Amsterdam, Gerard onder de Linden 1724-6. Although my copy lacks the title page, it is one of my really treasured items. Also contained in the same volume is the travel diary of the Landdrost Johannes Starrenburg, who led a trading expedition north of the Olifants River in 1705.
The next publication took more than fifty years to eventually appear. Although several trading journeys had been made towards the North, as evidenced by the inscriptions left on the walls of the famous Heerenlogement Cave, north of Graafwater, the travellers Slotsbo and Hem did not leave any published record of their trips. However, the next traveller, I T Rhenius, left a journal of his 1721 trading trip, which again has been published by the VRS in 1947 (#28). The names of Messrs Blass, Breedt, Giebeler, and Lourens then appear, as they passed the cave between 1721 and 1739. In 1760 a short record appeared in the records of the Council of Policy, of one Jacobus Coetze Jantz, a farmer from the Aurora region near Piketberg, who went on a hunting expedition, and became the first European to cross the Orange, Eyn or Gariep River, and to penetrate into what is now Namibia. This short report appears in both a VRS volume (#15) as well as in Godee-Molsbergen's books, Vol 2.
A most informative record of life along the Great River, was left by one Henrik Jacob Wikar, who deserted from the Company's service in 1775. He lived an adventurous life with the Khoi tribesmen along the Orange, and returned to the Cape in 1779 to be reinstated by the Company. A copy of his manuscript was preserved, among others in the Swellengrebel Archive - it appeared in print for the first time in 1926, and in book-form in1935 by the VRS (#15). However - back to the second book to be published about Namaqualand - it was Carel Frederik Brink's ' Nieuwste en Beknopte Beschryving van de Kaap der Goede Hoop, nevens een Dag-Verhael van eenen Landtogt naar het Binneste van Afrika door het Land der Kleine en Groote Namaquas' published in 1778, that is, some fifteen years after the journey was actually made.. The first part of the book was compiled by R S Allemand and J C Klockner, while part two describes the journey made by H. Hop, whom Brink accompanied as surveyor and scribe. During the return trip, one Scheffer (hopefully no relation - but one can't be sure) murdered one of the Khoi servants while in a demented state. Scheffer was later tried for the crime and banished to Robben Island. To return to the journey; it did break some new ground, crossing the Orange River near Raman's Drift and penetrating deep into Namibia, it is thought, just short of Windhoek, which makes it also the first published work of Namibiana
The rest of the 18th century saw much exploration. Col. R J Gordon explored the lower reaches of the Orange River, which he named, as well as penetrating to Warmbad in Namibia, and inland way past where Upington is now located. In part he was accompanied by William Paterson, who was to have his journal published in 1789 - while the more illustrious traveller Gordon's manuscript was lost for almost two centuries, and only saw the light recently in the Brenthurst Library's fine work.
The inimitable Francois le Vaillant was there too. Fresh from his successful "Voyage de M le Vaillant…" covering the first five years of meandering through the southern and eastern Cape, he now tackled the northwestern route. Admittedly, his three volume work on his latest expedition "New Travels into the Interior of Africa " translated into English in 1796, could have been considerably condensed, but it was written for a public eager to share in the intrepid voyageur's privations. A modern publication on le Vaillant's travels, and especially paintings of the Library of Parliament's 1973 "Francois Le Vaillant - Traveller in South Africa, with contributions by a number of historians and specialists, is also a very worthwhile investment.
The last great, enduring book of travels in the North West during the 18th century, must surely be John Barrow's "An Account of Travels into the Interior of South Africa" during 1797-8, though published after 1800.

Shortly after the turn of the century, the first missionaries appeared on the scene. From humble beginnings in a hostile land, men of the calibre of Christian Albrecht and Johannes Seidenfaden endeavoured to start a mission among the Namaqua, first near present-day Kakamas, as the Cape Government was against any form of missionary endeavour within its boundaries, then at Warmbath in Namibia. The Cape authorities relented a few years later and the missionaries were able to establish themselves with Cornelis Kok's people in the Kamiesberg region. However the Great Namaqua chief Jager Afrikaner came into dispute with mission's people and razed the fledgling stations to the ground. Then Messrs Sass, Helm, Ebner and Schmelen of the LMS took to the field. The latter was to play a huge role in furthering the aims of the missions in the region, besides establishing numerous stations in Namaqualand and across the river in Namibia. But it was Ebner who was to get into print; all that is left of Schmelen's efforts are the reports, that were included in the annual publications of the London Missionary Society. Ebner's "Reise nach Süd Afrika…etc' was published in 1829 in Germany - and it is one of the books still missing from my collection.
1813 saw the advent of Rev John Campbell on a prolonged tour of inspection. His charming book "Travels in South Africa", published in 1815, is a delight to read, and is therefore the first work on missionary endeavours to get into print. The Wesleyans established their first mission in 1816 at Leliefontein, and the Rev Barnabas Shaw was to spend several years there, of which he wrote in his " Memorials of South Africa", published in 1840. A young missionary, by name of Threlfall, made the mistake of wanting to explore terra incognita in bad company in 1825. One of his companions, named Naugaap, murdered him, which led to reams of martyrdom being published about the lad for more than a century subsequently. The said Naugaap was later apprehended and tried by Cornelis Kok, whose followers executed the miscreant at Silverfontein. There was Robert Moffat, who also had his introduction to missionary labours in Namaqualand before departing for Afrikaner's kraal in Namibia, as described in his 'Missionary Labours and Scenes in South Africa' published in 1844. The same year too, saw the publication of James Backhouse's "Narrative of a Visit…", during which he did the Grand Tour of the missionary establishments of the Cape as well as in the Northwest. James Kitchingman's short term at Leliefontein was described in 'The Kitchingman Papers" published relatively recently by the Brenthurst Press. So there is no real shortage of hearing about the experiences of the men of the cloth.
More recently, during the second half of the 20th century, it became the fashion to publish a swathe of books, usually entitled something to the tune of " Eeufeesgedenkboek van die Gemeente…", referring to each and every community of the NG Church in the region. I have assiduously collected as many of these I could find, since not only do they document the ecclesiastical matters of the region, there are usually short, regional, general histories, names of early farms and their inhabitants, construction of churches, irrigation projects, roads and a host of other detail.
The era of grand exploration may have been past, but there were still some intrepid souls who wished to experience the hardships and dangers of the road untrodden. A good example was George Thompson, a man of commerce from the Eastern Cape, who professes some curiosity about the lesser known regions. While earlier traveller recorded the natural history, tribes and geography, all Thompson desired was to be on the move and to experience new scenes. The second volume of his work "Travels in Southern Africa" sees the author coming down the Orange river into a desperately drought-ridden Namaqualand. His adventures are well-described, so much so that it is thought he received more than passing assistance from Thomas Pringle in writing up his journal. No matter, as long as it is entertaining.
The next explorer was James Edward Alexander. After a stint of soldiering in the Eastern Cape, he was intent on exploring the West Coast of Africa - starting at Cape Town. Under the aegis of the Royal Geographical Society and with the blessing of the Governor of the Cape, the intrepid soldier set off, getting as far as Walfish Bay. His 1837 account is most entertaining, and has been reprinted in USA, as well as relatively recently by Struik. After the first half of the 19th century had passed, there is almost an abrupt halt to all information published about the region in books. True, short articles appear in periodicals and reports, but it seems that copper-fever has overtaken the region - so this is the subject of a book that I am at present assembling - that 'lost' half century 1850-1899.
A few other books deserve mention in the annals of exploration and missionary work in the Northwest. They are A A Anderson's "Twenty-five Years in a Waggon" published in 1888 - but infuriatingly he gives very little data of where he was travelling and when - instead these are discontinuous episodes strung together into a book. The there is Benjamin Ridsdale's "Scenes and Adventures in Great Namaqualand" which mainly describes missionary work at Nisbeth Bath in Namibia, but has some absolutely charming and humorous experiences during his travels through Namaqualand as well. The book was published in 1883. Lastly there is the stern and scientific work by Leonard Schultze, entitled "Aus Namaland und Kalahari". No light reading this, but rather an enumeration of geological and topographical features, tribes of peoples; their appearance, habits, economies etc, lists of plants, and animals - but nowhere is a trace of the author and his travels up the Orange river to be found. Only for real enthusiasts!
Maps are an integral part of many books on exploration. So it is natural that sooner or later maps find their way onto the shelves as well. There are several dozen maps in my collection. The oldest are French maps of portions of the West Coast by de Maurepas and Bonne, from the early and late 18th century. One could amass literally hundreds like this, but to do them justice, a lot of wall-space is needed, which I do not have. So maps are not of great importance as items of my collection, though I am striving to get a complete set of British Intelligence Maps from the Boer War period. Another desirable set of detailed maps was made before and during WWI by the Union Government, since they anticipated trouble in the region as well as hostilities with the Germans across the Orange River. My most-used map is a three and a half metre long by one a half metre wide abomination, which I have taped together from a number of 1:250 000 sheets of maps from the Topocadastral Survey. It has travelled with us all over the region and led us onto some memorable places.
This sparsely populated region was inhabited by some of the most hated, feared, despised - and romanticised people in the subcontinent - the San or Bushmen. There are a number of more or less recent books on the cave-art sites, as well as rock engravings that are to be found in the region. An early book on the prehistory is E J Dunn's "The Bushmen" published in 1931. It relates the author's encounters with some of the remnants during his career as a geologist, and also gives an overview of the Middle Stone Age in the region. There is G W Stow's Book "Native Races of South Africa" which deals extensively with Khoi and San. Although the author only met a few tribespeople, and he based most of his work on other sources, his findings are still consulted today, though first published in 1904. Other seminal works were J A Engelbrecht's work "Koranna", Isaac Schapera's "Khoisan Peoples of South Africa", Winifred Hoernle's and Peter Carsten's several works on the Nama people of Steinkopf and the Richtersveld, among others. Most of these books are for the specialist student, though there are a number of lesser, general publications
1899 saw the start of the Ango-Boer war, which heralded the establishment of the Border Scouts, who were made up of local coloured people, a move which caused much animosity between segments of the Northwest population. The first invasion led by Gen. Herzog early in 1901, took the towns of Calvinia and Vanrhynsdorp among others, and the Boers penetrated as far as Lambert's Bay, but this was not to last. The last part of the war was bitterly contested in Bushmanland as well as Gordonia and the copper-mining district around O'okiep. There are about two dozen works dealing with the conflict in the region, mostly in Afrikaans - generally in the genre of " My part in the war.." - touching on the conflict in Namaqualand and Bushmanland. Many of these are poorly written, and equally poorly published. Probably the most readable account of the war was by Deneys Reitz - "Commando", and two in-depth books on the siege of O'okiep by P Burke and B L Kieran for ardent students of military matters (by the way, such is the nature of the rough terrain around the mining town, that one can still discover previously unknown small fortifications or 'sangers', complete with cartridge cases and empty bully-beef tins, among the rocks surrounding the town ), and lastly, Bill Nasson's book" Abraham Esau's War".
Mining and geology has been of great importance to the region. Although its mineral wealth has been largely stripped; the copper mines have ground to a halt, the yield of diamonds has dropped, but is continuing, while there are still reserves of metals like zinc and titanium to keep the industry going. There may still be some undiscovered lodes or deposits. One of the classics of the search for riches is, of course F C Cornell's " Glamour of Prospecting", first published in 1920. Cornell spent months, literally sleeping metres away from untold riches, which he never found; though I know that when he died in a tragic street accident in London, he was carrying two small, uncut diamonds for which he had a permit (which I have seen). Hans Merensky too, was involved in the search for diamonds, and he and his partner Reuning, persevered and reaped the benefits. Reuning wrote a lengthy article on the finds. Merensky had a biographer who chronicled his life, Olga Lehmann, who wrote the book " Look Beyond the Wind". There are dozens of theses, articles, contributions to learned journals on earth sciences - all dealing with the Northwest, only one has become an enduring standard work on the subject: Henno Martin's "The Precambrian Geology of South West Africa and Namaqualand". UCT has published a whole series of geological work done in the area, most of which I have been fortunate to acquire - though I don't profess to read and understand the contents. Though geology might not seem much of a spectator sport for most laymen - I would recommend the glacier track, south of Niewoudtville to the most blasé observer. It is almost inconceivable how a layer of ice, carrying boulders and pebbles, will melt the rock surface it is sliding over through the friction exerted upon it. Truly awesome.
Talking of nature, there are few books on the fauna of the region. Barry Lovegrove's fine work, "The Living Deserts of Southern Africa", published by Fernwood in 1993, is probably the closest you can get to an all-encompassing book on the arid ecosystems of the region. To my mind, it is a wonderful work and succeeds admirably in explaining the secrets of survival of life in a mainly hostile environment. There are a number of bird-lists, and a few booklets on the fauna of reserves of the region. A more general, but very worthwhile work, is Joan Schrauwen's "West Coast - a Circle of Seasons in South Africa", published by Winchester 1991. There are also more scientific works - the reports of museum expeditions, led by men such as H H W Pearson who led the Percy Sladen Memorial Expedition of 1908-9 as far as the Kunene, describing the fauna and flora as they wended their way up the coast through Namaqualand; in 1930 there was the Vernay-Lang Kalahari expedition which researched the inland fauna and flora.
In addition, there are large numbers of publications dealing with the palaeontology of the region, especially so since the vast fossil beds of Langebaanweg are still giving up their secrets and increasing our knowledge of the period between 1 and 25 million years ago. Up on the Gariep River, at Arrisdrift, there are river terraces containing similar fossils, while in the Cederberg, once over the Pakhuis pass, there are hundreds of square kilometres of rounded hills containing fossils by the million - dating back up to 400 million years ago - and of which there are also learned monographs to consider.
Since the epic explosion of spring flowers is a yearly phenomenon, which some say, is visible from space; it is fitting that some truly beautiful books have appeared to celebrate this event. Even Sima Eliovson's 1972 book " Namaqualand in Flower" still never fails to enchant me, though the photo reproduction may not be as good as in modern books. Enid du Plessis' and Hilda Mason's book, "Western Cape Sandveld Flowers", published in the same year, is an evergreen of the artistic sort, to be ranked with Barbara Jeppe's work in "Spring and Winter Flowering Bulbs of the Cape", OUP 1989, which contains much of the regions' flora. There is Cowling, Pierce & Paterson-Jones' "Namaqualand - a Succulent Desert", and Williamson's " Richtersveld - the Enchanted Wilderness" among a large number of mainly photographic works. The guidebooks published by the Botanical Society, covering the various floristic regions contained within the area under consideration, are not to be despised either, and no visitor to the spring flower display should be without the full complement of four volumes.
A scarce genre is that of hunting books. With the exception of the millions of springbuck that gathered periodically for their migrations, which were described by Cronwright-Schreiner in "The Migratory Springbucks of South Africa", as well as by Scully and Conradie, game was scarce, and even the noblest of desert antelope, the gemsbuck or oryx, hardly rated expeditions by the Nimrods of the period. There is only one regional work which richly deserves a place in a collection of books on the chase - Scully's " Lodges in the Wilderness". Unlike most hunters of the day, he creaks off into the waterless desert in an ox-wagon, to a strange Bantomberg, out on the endless plains, where he and his companions ambush passing game.
But back to people - as they are a necessary ingredient in 'fleshing out' a geographic region. There are a number of biographies, mainly autobiographies, some of which I have already mentioned above, as the lives described were those of missionaries, explorers and discoverers of mineral wealth. There are many more of the same - all giving the reader pictures of life at different times and milieus in the arid zone. From V C Malherbe's "Krotoa, Called Eva" which chronicles the largely forgotten life of the brave Khoi lass who accompanied van Riebeeck's early explorers into the Northwest as an interpreter ( and later married the surgeon van Meerhoff), to Ursula Trüper's " Die Hottentottin" - which describes the life of the shadowy Nama woman, Zara Schmelen, wife of the missionary at Komaggas, who helped him with the almost insuperable task of translating the bible into Nama. There are a number of biographies of Gordon, who played a large part in the exploration; Lady Anne Barnard travelled as far as Langebaan, where she spent some time with friends on a farm; Louis Leipold spent some of his early years in the Clanwilliam district; Frank Wightman, the intrepid sailor of Wylo fame, whiled away a few years as a hermit on his yacht moored at Kraal Bay, as recorded by Lawrence Green. The quirky magistrate, poet and writer, William Charles Scully, although rather sparing with his Namaqualand experiences in "Further Reminscences of a S African Pioneer", contributed much to our knowledge of the people of Namaqualand in the 1890's, with snippets in a number of other works. In Afrikaans there are a number of well-written biographical works by such as F A Venter, with "Die Middag voel na Warm As", "Werfjoernaal" and "Kambro-Kind", A A J van Niekerk's " Boetie van Namaqualand", W Conradie's "Ondervindingen van een Jong Predikant in Namaqualand" - as well as a number of fairly rustic memoirs by people from all walks of life, from fishermen to farmers and shopkeepers; yet all contribute a little something to the overall picture.
What is a region without its own literature? There is a lovely word in Afrikaans for it - kontreistories, which could be loosely translated as 'country-tales'. Namaqualand is rich in those, but mainly in Afrikaans - to which we will return a little later. What, then, is the first novel to be published on the region. Anthony Trollope visited there in the 1870's - but his Namaqualand experiences seem to have left no permanent impression as the region gets only a fleeting mention in his work 'South Africa' published in 1878. That able writer, W C Scully, wrote several novels with a Northwest background. His most well-known is "Between Sun and Sand", which features trekboer life and the lonely existence of a young Jewish smous, or shopkeeper. Another of his novels is "Vendetta of the Desert", but both of these appeared only in the 1890's. No, it was a French novel, by none less than the master of science fiction Jules Verne, that had a setting in Namaqualand. His "Aventures de trois Russes et de trois Anglais dans l ' Afrique Australe" was published in Paris by Collection Hetzel in about 1872. The English translations followed from 1873 onwards under various titles like my copy " Adventures of three Russians and Three Englishmen in South Africa". His characters embark on an unlikely voyage of exploration by steam boat up the Orange River ( totally ignoring the Augrabies Falls, and meeting with a further series of unlikely adventures on their quest to Central Africa). John Galsworthy too has a connection with the region. His father was the Copper Company's solicitor, and John trekked round the region and even rode the copper train to Port Nolloth. He is reputed to have written a crime story set in the desert, but so far I have not been able to identify it - any help would be welcome. Galsworthy started the O'okiep library with works selected by himself in London, so it would only be right if one of the volumes there was his tribute to the desert. Except for a few minor, historical novels, juvenile adventure books and the like - that seems to be the sum total of English literature.
In the Afrikaans language we are absolutely spoiled for choice. The pithy Namaqualand Afrikaans idiom, as spoken by white and brown, combined with Cederberg, Sandveld, West Coast, and Bushmanland idioms and variations, are a pure delight. I must mention authors such as van Niekerk, von Wielligh, Suttner, Rossouw, Murray, Leipoldt, E Kotze & T Kotze, Joubert, Deist, Deacon, de Roubaix and Branca, among many more. These writers have done much to record the trials and tribulations of the rural people, the shepherds and goatherds, the tillers of the soil, the craftsmen and the crafty, the rich and the poor, the transport riders and the prospectors, the law-breakers and the lawmen. Even though some of the language used is so 'foreign' to city-dwellers' ears that it is almost unintelligible - and I would challenge some of the Afrikaans speakers here to translate a few choice pages from a book such a T Kotze's
"Latjiesboud en Horingsmanooi" - larded as they are with antiquated stock-farming terms and Nama words, yet they are part of a unique regional linguistic heritage, well worth treasuring.
As mentioned before, there are a number of charming children's books, some in English, but most in Afrikaans. G Sauerman's "Roep van die Riviervoels", Willem Steenkamp's "Namakwalandse Oustories", and several books by A A J van Niekerk are good examples of what is on offer.
Lastly, there is poetry. Yes, again W C Scully comes to the fore with several poems featuring his beloved Bushmanland. Unfortunately there was never a collection of verses dealing with the region only. The honour of having a book published containing that, must go to padre Henry Wigget of "West Coast Poems" fame.

I hope that this not so short presentation on the literature of the "wild west" has explained and shared with you my fascination with the region and my desire to amass a collection of its written work. For those of a practical bent - the northwest is ideal since the subject is reasonable in size and scope (my collection contains about 800 items, ranging from pamphlets to tomes). Although some of the earlier works are scarce and expensive, these are in the minority; many of the Afrikaans novels can still be picked up for a song at charity sales.
In conclusion, I would just like to express my wish that somewhere in Namaqualand, Cederberg, Bushmanland or on the West Coast, there was a library which had the facilities to house my collection, when I no longer need it, where it would be available to scholars and enthusiasts in future.

The 5 lb Press or Vijfpondpers - Dutch Resistance Publishing

Following the occupation of the Netherlands by Germany in 1940, and the establishment of the German civil administration, the next five years were fraught with deprivation, hunger and life under a harsh regime. Organised resistance was difficult due to the cultivated character of the countryside and dense population. Nonetheless, an underground movement slowly came into being, which focused on aiding Jews, forging ration cards and money, sabotage, intelligence gathering and the publication of newspapers and other printed material. Many European Resistance groups issued manifestos, political pamphlets and news sheets, even regular newspapers, and nowhere more so than in the Netherlands, where some 1200 newspapers were published between 1940-1945. These had a wide circulation, and would have a wide effect on the people's morale.
It is less well known that clandestine production of books of a literary character also occurred in not inconsiderable numbers. Some of these were concerned with current events, but what typified the publications was the unauthorised use of paper. Part of the restrictions by the occupiers, was that a limit of 5 lbs weight of paper was imposed on any publication run - making it impossible to produce mass media. Some material was printed hastily and cheaply, other with extreme care on carefully hoarded stocks of good paper. Many of the items were anonymously published, omitting authorship as well as illustrators, and with false publication dates. The paper used came from private remainders of pre-war stocks, some was diverted from that officially supplied for authorised work, some was even stolen from the warehouses of conniving dealers who were co-conspirators, while as a last resort, some packaging material or recycled paper had to be used. After paper had been obtained, there was still the difficult job of printing ahead. Much of this was done by private presses, such as the 5Lb Press, specially established for this work. Often the work was done by hand, at times by amateurs.
This is where, among a number of other publishers and publications, the name, the ' Vijfpondpers ' or ' 5 Ponden Pers ' came from; the brain-child of the Amsterdam publisher, A. A. Balkema and his friend Jan van Krimpen, the typographer, together with some 53 other well-know figures in publishing and intellectual circles - who decided to eke out these tiny quantities of paper for definitive publications of typographical and literary merit, without the permission from the authorities. Thus the clandestine band of writers, illustrators, printers, typographers, binders and paper merchants collaborated in the production of some twenty booklets, usually limited to editions of 50 copies (from November 1942 until June 1943) and later 55 copies as the ranks of the association swelled to that number. All items were not in the Dutch language; some French, English, Latin and even German items were included. The most remarkable feature of these publications was the variety of pieces produced; poetry and prose by old and new writers, some typical Resistance work, fiction, critical, philosophical and journalistic work as well as some mainly visual representations. Some of the items printed in larger quantities, brought in much needed income for authors, illustrators and publishers. Those items that were sold to the general public were sold under the counter. Otherwise they were distributed to friends or list subscribers only, or like in the case of the 5Lb Press, to its members.
Although the print runs were very restricted, the amount of paper used still exceeded the amount permitted for these original works and reprints in various typographical styles. Some are of very fine quality indeed. Special care was taken to find the best possible typography and illustration. Among the artists used were Jeanne Bieruma Oosting, whose etchings adorn a selection of poems from Baudelaire's title Le vin; Titia Worm-Wiegman whose lithographs grace an anthology of poems translated from the French by Martinus Nijhoff, while the calligrapher Susanne Heynemann wrote out the poems of Emily Dickinson in the original English and their parallel German translation in facsimile. Every book in the series has its own individual style, and all are of different sizes.
The full list of titles under the 5Lb colophon is as follows:

1. Arthur Rimbaud - Le Bateau Ivre. November 1942
2. Stephane Mallarme - L'apres midi d'un Faune. December 1942
3. Edgar Degas - Huit Sonnets. April 1943
4. Quem Queritis. April 1943
5. (Keuls, H. W. J. M. ) - Doortocht. May 1943
6. Jac van Looy - De Pendule. June 1943
7. Charles Baudelaire - Le Vin. August 1943
8. Jacques Perk - Eene Helle- en Hemelvaart. August 1943
9. ( W. Gs. Hellinga ) - Dies Noctesque. September 1943
10. Dick Elffers - Kalender 1944. December 1943
11. ( A. Roland Holst ) Helena's Inkeer. April 1944
12. Livinus - Six signed gravures. May 1944
13. Emily Dickinson - Ten Poems. June 1944
14. Franz Kafka - Ein Landarzt. August 1944
15. (M. Nyhoff ) - Eenige Romantische Gedichten. October 1944
16. Jan van der Noot - Ode. December 1944
17. Valery Lebaud - Portrait d'Eliane a quatorze ans. December 1944
18. Thomas Nashe - In time of Plague. March 1945
19. Het Zaansche Schoffeltje
20. W. J. H. B. Sandberg - Experimenta Typografica 3. September 1945

The last typographer, Sandberg's, involvement during World War II in the resistance was to be a turning point in his career. Many people in the art world needed false papers to avoid arrest. With the help of a printer, Frans Duwaer (also a valued member of the 55 bibliophiles), Sandberg produced these to such a high standard that even experts could not identify the fakes. He later described this as ‘the greatest praise I have ever had for typographical work.’ They could only be checked through the Central Civil Registry Office in Amsterdam, which Sandberg and four others attempted to burn down in 1943. Sandberg was the only one to escape arrest and spent the rest of the war in hiding where he began work on Experimenta Typografica. The other four, including Duwaer, were shot by the Gestapo.
However, it must be stressed that the 5Lb Pers did not generally get involved in acts of sabotage, and their activities were more by way of civil disobedience
A number of other booklets were published at the same time under Balkema's own unmistakeable imprint that became such a familiar sight on his many post-war books published in South Africa from 1947 onwards. All of these were printed in very limited quantities as well - some simultaneously with the 5 Lb Press items, although most appeared after the war had ended in Europe, before Balkema left for South Africa.
The typographer Jan Kaleveld, was also one of the members of the 55. He later followed his friend 'Guus' Balkema to South Africa, where he became his business partner and co-worker. Some of the remaining items of the wartime publications of the 5Lb Pers as well as subsequent A A Balkema booklets from Kaleveld's private collection, have been offered for sale by Explorer Auction #60 on 28th August - which was a unique chance of acquiring some of this rare historic material.

Bibliography:
Balkema, A. A. Juni 1945. Catalogus van vijftig Boeken en Boekjes zonder toestemming uitgegeven in de Jaren 1942-1945 door A. A. Balkema te Amsterdam. Amsterdam: A A Balkema.
Friends of the National Library of South Africa. 1984. Liber Amicorum pro A. A. Balkema. Cape Town: Friends of the S. A. Library
Simoni, A. E. C. 1972. The Library, 5th Series No XXVII, No 1. Oxford: Transactions of the Bibliographical Society.