Mafeking Road ─ And Other Stories

?It will be a tragedy for the creative process if we parents, both black and white, deny our children the opportunity to read [Herman Charles] Bosman.”?Johnny Masilela

?Bosman knows what to tell us and when, and most importantly he knows what not to tell us. To this he adds a subtle and simple treatment of deep reflections, a rural ?sit-back-and-relax’ feel, and an ability for remarkably poignant description. The result is a classic set of stories, deserving of world attention to match the attention it already receives in Bosman’s home country.”?David Lahti

He seemed to have nothing but what the sun and the sand and the grass had given him, and yet that was more than what all the men in the world could give him. In the voice of the sly old Bushveld storyteller Oom Schalk Lourens, Herman Charles Bosman tells tales of love, jealousy, betrayal, and friendship in a rural South Africa at the turn of the century. It is a fusion of satire and raw emotion in a politically fraught era. Mafeking Road was chosen as one of the twenty-five classics for the South Africa Reads program.

Herman Charles Bosman (1905?1951) is widely considered the greatest short story writer of South Africa, known for infusing the cadence of Afrikaans speech into his English-language writing. Drawing upon his experiences living in the Transvaal farming town district of Groot Marico, Bosman wrote the first stories of Mafeking Road (his most celebrated collection) during a brief imprisonment for killing his stepbrother.