God loser, bad loser

Recently I did something quite unusual: I participated in a “Bosman weekend” in Groot Marico.

I was mistakenly under the impression that everyone knows Herman Charles Bosman, but I discovered that many people are not aware of this talented writer who captured the soul of the Afrikaner people of the bushveld so well in his stories—written in English.

Although he was only briefly stationed in Groot Marico, as a school teacher in the 1920s, he wrote with gentle, dig-in-the-ribs type humour and compassion, as if he had lived there for years and intimately knew the people and their ways.

Listening to dramatisations of some of the stories was certainly a joy. A shared experience of the culture, food, jerepigo and mampoer added to the enjoyment. Other blessings of that weekend were making new like-minded friends, plus discovering the source, the “eye” of a river, the Groot Marico river.

Although I had known a little of him, during the course of the weekend I became intrigued by Bosman—a man who was in reality not the gentle, compassionate person who comes across in the stories. He was, in fact, quite an unsavoury character, and somewhat of a con-man. Reprieved from a death sentence for shooting his step-brother, he served a prison sentence and had other clashes with the law. His life as a whole was no spectacular success.

That was the aspect that intrigued me. How do we project ourselves to others, what image do we show to others and why? It’s one of the issues couples in a marriage preparation programme are asked to look into. Do we show our real selves to others, in particular to our future spouse, or do we hide elements they may not like?

You’d think that in families we do show our true colours, and to a certain extent we can’t help but reveal ourselves. At the same time, we also learn to put on a mask, hide elements of ourselves to deal with hazards, or behaviour that gets us what we want.

Sucking up to a parent, a step-parent or grandparent is a clear example. Becoming a pleaser, or a mother-hen, or deliberately being obstreperous happens too.

Becoming a joker, or the life-and-soul of a party might hide insecurity. There are also people who seem to have a split personality, or people who appear to have no conscience and, while seeming to be most pleasant, are intrinsically dishonest and classified as anti-social.

People are complex and can be very strange and difficult to understand, even to their parents who have seen them develop over a life-time.

Parents on the whole do try their best to form their children into law-abiding, socially adept and well-functioning adults. Learning such things as being good losers or bad losers is a normal part of one’s upbringing. How we deal with life, in particular the losses we experience, is partly determined by our make-up, our upbringing, and the environment around us.

Happy the person and the family that can deal with loss in an acceptable way. It is normal to experience anger, grief and a period of mourning for any loss before coming to acceptance of the reality. There is help available for those who find loss intolerable and get bogged down in the grieving phase.
November’s family theme—“Good losers, bad losers”—is an opportunity to explore who we are and how we play the game of life.

It is sad to think that HC Bosman—the creator of such characters as Oom Schalk Lourens, the archetype of bushveld Afrikaner, and Dominee Welthagen who through going into a trance in the pulpit caused his congregation to sing all 176 verses of psalm 119 from the morning service until dark—was technically a loser in life.

And yet he lives on for most of us as a guru, a delightfully insightful man who continues after his early death to bring joy to many readers.
Is he then a good or a bad loser, I wonder.