Veldstories

Well, recuperation, as they don't say, has it's silver lining. In my case it's a chance to engage with outstanding work and online opportunities. My friend's dad, Pete Berman, has been an incredible role model to me during my school years. While my own father had been, rest in peace, too darn Asperger's to do anything more than watch television, with a few exceptions, Pete used to take Mark and I camping and hiking. Piketberg, Cedarberg, Gifberg, Kogelberg, Riviersonderend and many of the caves and some of the climbs became familiar to me thanks to Pete in my youth. By torchlight or firelight, a Herman Charles Bosman story would emerge. And it was to the sound of Pete's voice doing an impression of Schalk Lourens, that I would all too frequently fall asleep.

Life was simpler then, times were slower. There's a part of me that's always wanted my own children to take hiking and show the world to and read Bosman. But I also feel like I have too little time in the world to do the things I have to do. On top of that, I really struggle with the idea of making Shereen pregnant, again. And having to choose between another painful and resentful abortion, and having a child during our time exploring the continents. Thus it is with a somewhat heavy heart that I made the choice to have a vasectomy.

There's one other aspect that I struggle with. I feel like it's taken me 47 years to find someone as kind, understanding and tolerant as Shereen. All qualities that are necessary if you are to be my partner. I've certainly come close a few times if I look back over my hallowed dating career. But there's one other rare quality: being okay with not having children. Would Shereen like children? Yes. But not with me. She says I'm too selfish.

So, instead, I provide readings of Bosman to you, not as my children, but as friends, and family. To listen to in your own time. I feel that Bosman was an environmentalist and a fighter for equality during apartheid. In his own way, he prodded the system and pointed out that the indigenous people of Africa have their own innate mental and cultural intelligence, different from that of the white man. And the white man, has his own mental and cultural stupidity and density. This kind of cultural self-deprecation was perhaps necessary to offset the predominant paradigm at the time and shortly after the rise and fall of Naziism: that the white man is the de-facto superior race. We are, where we are, culturally and technologically thanks to the predominance of this western "intelligence".

Perhaps there was wisdom, even in the 1950's, of Bosman setting his stories fifty years earlier, a time before cars roamed the roads and radio waves, whether digital or analogue, unified the world to the same technological clock.

Listen to Bosman's stories on https://open.spotify.com/show/3QQfcQz4To3ERMvT9…Read more