Herman Charles Bosman’s short stories have held South Africans spellbound for generations. He wrote in English, creating deliciously ironic tales based on the lives of the Afrikaner folk whom he met when teaching in the Groot Marico in the period before he shot his stepbrother in an argument and went to jail in 1926. Bosman was a great protagonist of Afrikaans, even finding the time in his short free life between his writing and his time in prison, to translate the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam into Afrikaans (for which I am sure generations of Afrikaners to come will always be immeasurably grateful).