Cold Stone Jug - The Anniversary Edition. Herman Charles Bosman
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penalty, has taken the anti-capital punishment campaign into Africa at large.
Few critics of Bosman in the context of prison literature, however, link him up to the tradition in which he placed himself, that is of European writing on the topic from St. Paul onwards. Nor are they often able to handle the fact that, unlike the politicals, always assumed to be unjustly punished, Bosman was indeed a common criminal owning up to his guilt.
Also overlooked is his scathing indictment of the system of capital punishment, made imaginatively in Cold Stone Jug when the story of his Stoffels (stof = dust in Afrikaans) gets underway and elsewhere. None make the obvious comparisons with E. E. Cummings’s The Enormous Room of 1922, or with George Orwell’s opinion about “the unspeakable wrongness of cutting a life short when it is in full tide” (in his essay of 1931, “A Hanging”); with Arthur Koestler’s 1955 campaign against what he called “the monthly sacrifice” in Britain, where once upon a time under the Bloody Code there were 220 offences for which suspension at Tyburn tree was the remedy and even unruly horses were hung for throwing their riders; or with Albert Camus’s 1957 diatribe against what he termed the law of retaliation in his “Reflections on the Guillotine.”
The imaginative responses of writers who have not been prisoners are also neglected. Just one example is Nomavenda Mathiane in her magnificent report (in the Frontline of April-May, 1988), bidding farewell to those on Death Row in Pretoria Central Prison. Nor until Zackie Achmat’s article exposing the prevalence of forced homosexual liaisons between older and younger prisoners (in Social Dynamics in 1993) would Bosman’s important theme – his terror of protection turning into tampering – be addressed with any academic seriousness.
In an article in the Natalia of 1997, Adrian Koopman and his students put Cold Stone Jug to yet another use as a touchstone when interpreting the graffiti found on the walls of the old Prince Alfred Street prison in Pietermaritzburg when it was decommissioned by the Department of Correctional Services in 1993. The scene of terrible floggings on the blood-spattered triangle – as Blackburn recorded in his indictment of the way crime was controlled in colonial Natal, the novel Leaven of 1908 – Pietermaritzburg gaol had hosted many a hanging as well. Against the authorities, Koopman maintains, the anonymous scratchings on the walls – particularly of guns, calendars, crooked cops and the inevitable sexual parts – represent a poignant expression of resistance against the anonymity forced on all prisoners of the old type: those who used boob-slang and left no other record behind.
A concluding note on prison argot.
In one of his columns for The South African Opinion (in June, 1946) Bosman recounted that that brilliant trawler of bawdry and illicit lingo, the New Zealand-born scholar Eric Partridge, had now cast his net over South Africa, inviting local experts to dish him their verbal dirt. Bosman responded with relish; the time had come to print South Africa’s unprintable. He offered these credentials:
I have been afforded exceptional facilities for studying South African prison slang at first hand, and rather extensively. And I believe that in this tarnished word-currency, which starkly illumines the mode of life of a little-known and rather terrible world, we have something that comes very near to the earthy side of real poetry. It is something that has genuine literary significance: the fact that a few rough and sullied words can lay bare the whole inner life of a criminal, and make a prison up in a moment, with its gates and walls and warders, in sunshine and in shadow.
His article, called “South African Slang”, stresses the contributions of Afrikaans and black languages to the basic convict vocabulary, otherwise derived mostly from the East End of London, District Six and Fordsburg. He reckoned that a unique strain in that “great clearing-house of crime, Pretoria Central”, had been colloquialisms from its Australian gangsters (bonzer for deserving admiration, bosker for good and swagman as in tramp), the original core of informants having been dropped into silence long since. Many of the items he cites are so confidential to prisoners that he seems eventually to have weeded them out of the final Cold Stone Jug six months later, the text making only elementary explanations as it proceeds.
Here is Bosman’s beginner’s list, as explained from the end of Chapter 2 onwards:
blue – high; bluecoats – habitual criminals; boob (rather than the common British jug or stone jug, originally referring to Newgate two centuries before, or the American cooler, slammer or pen for penitentiary) – prison; boom (also American green leaf or Navy cut, ashes, grass, the herb, Nellie, papegaai, queer stuff, the weed) – dagga; bottle, lumber – smuggle; bunk – observation cell; channel – distributor of contraband; china (plate) – mate (riming slang); crook – no good; daisies – shoes; do one’s dash – give up; a doppie of tobacco ration, a stoppie of dagga; drop – get convicted; edge that – cool it; go in smoke – into hiding; head – long-term prisoner, not yet a lifer; hook, also crook or onkus – difficult; the hug – ambushing a victim from behind; jack – backside; jerry – to tumble to; john – policeman; johnny (horner) – corner; lam – on the run; leaves – banknotes; longstall – keep cave; lumber, nab, pinch – arrest; moll – woman; nark on – report; peter – cell; pipe – to spot; poke – smuggled goods; pom-pom – discharge suit; ponce – pimp, procurer, brothelkeeper, whore-monger; pozzy – hideout; rammies – trousers; rep – prison record; rookers – dagga smokers; roomer – method of waylaying; sandbagging – cosh and mug; sassing – harassing; scandal, skinder – to gossip; screw – turnkey, warder; shelf – traitor; snout – a kick, also tobacco; soup – dynamite; span – team; stone balmy – absolutely insane; swinging the lead – pulling a trick; zol – hand-rolled smoke.
The above vocabulary constitutes the core of what a later inmate (in his article, “South African Gaol Argot”, in the UNISA journal, English Usage in Southern Africa of May, 1974) defines as ‘Central English’, evidently still petrified there. The unidentified linguist lists as current all the syntactical features which Bosman used in his recorded speech: the double negative (I haven’t got nothing); the misuse of parts of speech (Do it good); the dropped auxiliaries (I done it) and prepositions (Don’t swear me), with the historic present tense used to such vivid effect (So I says to the Bombardier… ). Those familiar with Alex la Guma’s prison stories of the early 1960s will readily recognise those features, together with much of that persistent “tarnished word-currency” (burg, john, juba, rooker, squashies), still largely uncaptured in Oxford’s 1996 Dictionary of South African English on Historical Principles.
Much of this carceral parlance Bosman already knew from his reading of turn-of-the-century O. Henry. He used terms like box-man and cracksman (safecracker), to be buncoed (taken for a ride), graft and spiel (scam). More than once he described the bull-pen, the admissions part of the stir (prison). To him lamb meant a predator’s under-age (female) sex partner (see Huysmans’s twelve-year-old in Chapter 4), while punk meant the ambiguous male equivalent (the pansy’s rabbit is Pym’s expression).
Entrance to Pretoria Central Prison, Klawer Street (photo: Craig MacKenzie)
A scene from the Solly Flatt Album, of the Pretoria Prison, late 1920s
A-2 Section entrance
A-2 Section
Quarry
Print-shop
Brush-shop