Place of birth, somewhere on an undeveloped farm between Heidelberg and Benoni. My father migrated to South Africa from the Netherlands to occupy and farm this land which came to him as an inheritance left to him by an uncle, Willem Bossinga. His migration to South Africa was not in accordance with the wishes of his parents. They wished him to follow the family tradition of accomplished pedagogues and teachers. However, he was different and refused to comply, and eventually after many disturbances in the grand parental home it was agreed that he be allowed to migrate to Africa. He was given an allowance to cover his costs to attend the Potchefstroom Agricultural College. His mission, after all, was to take up a land inheritance left to him by his uncle.
Being a toddler, and second born after my first brother Odiel, who was a year and a half older than myself, I do not recall much, nothing in fact, of life on a farm with only a few calves. These were donated by a compatriot of my father with whom he attended the Agricultural College in Potchefstroom. Much of what I know about the place came by word of mouth from Odiel. I did gather from many arguments between my parents that this farming venture of my father was a contentious issue. My mother, who also migrated from the Netherlands in 1938 and shortly thereafter a marriage, was arranged through my father’s social network (Catholics). She was most upset at having to be housed in a lousy tin shanty on the open veldt of the Transvaal, now known as Gauteng. But my father insisted that the shanty was makeshift pending his being able to accumulate resources to capitalize the farm and build a decent house for her and the children. The calves were of pure bred, Friesland stock, they would grow up and Heidelberg could look forward to a dairy farm as good as any in that part of the world. My father was Dutch after all, and although he did not have much farming experience in Holland, he was a qualified agriculturist of South African vintage. All that I do know is that this dairy farming experience of my father extended no further than a job he got during the Great Depression in an ice cream factory. This was of short duration. After selling vegetables from a stall outside Johannesburg station the farm was a work waiting to happen.
This farming venture from the tin shanty is a fleeing memory. I really cannot remember too much about it. But by the looks of it lasted at least a few years, three if not more. For my memory of the shack were poked by my brother, Jerry, whose real name was Jurriaan named after my father, first attempts at writing a biography. He mentioned that he too was part of what he described as growing up in a squatter camp. He was four years younger than I which places the period a bit in context. But I cannot testify for these facts. Jurriaan, later self-renamed Jerry, had a rather vivid, romantic imagination. Be this all as it may, this rudimentary farming experience was cut short due to my having a severe case of gastro enteritis. This malady, according to my mother, was due to the fact that there was no clean water available in or around the miserable dwelling. She made an issue of this and took her complaint to her Roman Catholic priest in Benoni. He agreed with her: my father leaving a beautiful wife (my mother never stopped reminding her sons of how beautiful she was, how sophisticated from a world class city) and toddlers in the open veldt. This was simply not on. He, the priest took the matter up with my father’s army commanders and they saw to it that the farming operation was dismantled and we, mother and toddlers, housed in a neat bungalow in Northmead, a suburb of Benoni. I got different interpretations for this mishap. According to my mother my father had decided to keep her and the toddlers (she was pregnant with the 4th child, child, brother Jerry, in the tin shack while he went off to fight Germans in Egypt and Italy. She of course rebelled. She called in the assistance of her priest (Catholic, my father was a convert, she born and bred as such) to put a stop to this plan. The priest was going to report my father to the health authorities if he dared leave her on the farm in the condition things were in. But my father had a different lament. In his absence the farming venture was dismantled, and gone was his family inheritance, traded in for a neat cottage in a cosy suburb of Benoni. The issue became cause for raucous behaviour and rows in the home leaving the boys, Odiel and myself especially, rather confused and seeking our playground in the streets, free rides on the buses and regular visits to the Air Force Airbase built in Rynfield.
My father did his initial army training at Sonderwater Army Base and often came home. He must have looked somewhat alien, smarter than the country bumpkin my mother propagated about him with her sons. Probably because of his strangeness in an army uniform I can recall nothing of his regular visits home before being shipped off as a Sapper in the Saharan desert, later in Italy. In later years, after World War 2 was over and done with, there were endless ruminations of my father as he bespoke to his sons the adventures of war which he seemed to thoroughly enjoy. Above all, he was no country bum “up North” and even managed to leave us a half Italian sister up there. Italy was blood, muck and mud, but for my father a grand adventure. The Germans were “Gerries”, and the word “Nazi” seldom came to the surface, let alone the atrocities, the holocaust and the general politics other than what a fine military commanders Montgomery and JC Smuts were. He was in charge of his brigade’s foraging among the Italian populace for provisions. He learnt to know the Italians and speak their language and much more besides. Years later a family secret slipped the closet, including the already mentioned sister in Italy whom t with whom he was prevented from having any connection by the Italian authorities. My father was an avid story teller and there was not much of the Italian Campaign of the British allies that was news to us. He and his troop of Sappers were bewildered in the sight of the “Ally” bombing of the medieval monastery, Montecasino. It also depended on his mood what sort of story, or from which theatre of his life he needed to dispose of his outpourings. Sometimes it was war stories, other times it was stories of gory happenings in the mines, at yet other times it was the most soul destructive accounts he had to give living through the Great Depression.
Once again, I cannot vouch for any of these facts but there are bits and pieces which fill open spaces in the jigsaw puzzle of my recollections of the early days and years. And quite often I had to credit Jerry on being right in his protestations about how early family life developed. His wanting to be part of the tin shanty deal seemed like an bothersome, unwelcome baby wanting to crawl into bed with his siblings and was never taken seriously. Odiel and I used to stake out battles with mother in order to get this “cry baby” off our backs. But later he proved me wrong in some of my own memorial shortcomings. He came up with a photograph showing him playing with one of the calves around the makeshift farm, around the tin shanty. Such occasions were not rare.
What I can recollect of my father in my own infant years is very sketchy, in fact almost non existent. I cannot picture him at the makeshift farm at all. Maybe the constant rows and recriminations between the metropolitan beauty and country bumpkin were too much for me and washed away these early memories. I cannot recall more of my mother and siblings, but nothing of the precious calves upon which a fortune was to be built. But there is one in the picture of personages, and that was my dear Alsatian dog which was with the family for many, many years. Once we were resettled in Northmead, mother, brothers and sister blended in a rather happy family life, with memories abounding. Jerry was always up to no good. During time to take a bath he would crawl out of the tub, into the hand basin and fall out with howls trying to adjust the bump on his head. Trusy, the sister, was also up to nothing. She took to bathing baby cats and even “adopted a baby pig which she took to bed with her. These adventures took place on the farm of my father’s compatriot in Carletonville. Odiel, my older brother and I, were street walkers and adventurers which in those days safe, peaceful and quiet. There used to be a black vendor with horse and cart delivering coal to all the homes. More often than not he would pick us up, have us seated on the bench on the front end of the cart and sing out gustily, “You are my Sunshine, my only Sunshine”. He knew exactly where we lived and my mother would not even be surprised that her two street urchins were being return delivered in such a manner. Jerry was very much a toddler and did not worry us as he later would, “please let me come with you”. There was always something to panic or laugh about while the four toddlers were placed in the king sized bath together. Mostly Trusy would upset the whole nest of siblings bathing together, as one of us would surface a large, hard piece of shit which we automatically assumed was relieved by Trusy.
There are no real life memories relating back to my infancy or before then by my father. What we got from him though, were real life stories abounding two cardinal experiences of his life: the Great Depression and World War 2. His stories about his Great Depression misadventures need some elaboration as they made a lasting impression on me. After completing his studies at the Potchefstroom Agricultural College, he formed a partnership with a fellow sudent, an established farmer in the Northern Transvaal, now known as Limpopo Province. This farmer, Sparius, appears top have been a very adventurous fellow. He experimented with cash crops not tried before. This partnership was prosperous for a few years. A series of cash crops from babala seeds were profitable beyond expectations and it seems that with his share my father was ready to get on with his own deal on his land inheritance. Hardly able to fix fences, stock up with a dairy herd and build the shack spoken of above, the Great Economic Reaper of the 1930s took hold of the world and shook entire populations world wide to their bootstraps. My father’s farming venture came to nothing and he abandoned his land to find some type of employment in Johannesburg. He met up with a fellow victim of the Depression and together the two became inseparable bums roaming the length and breadth of South Africa. Some ventures, like selling vegetables at Johannesburg station, went belly up and the two of them were vagrants for a number of years until eventually they landed up in Durban. My father’s fellow traveler, also an unfortunate victim and migrant from the Netherlands, contacted his people and was provided with a passage to rejoin his people there.
My father was too hard headed to throw in the towel on his inheritance and so decided to stick it out. Via a soup kitchen run by Catholic sisters he was converted to Catholicism which seemed to at least provide him with a social base. He managed to get back to his fallow farm and through contacts in his new religious circle of friends was offered work on the gold mines as an underground surveyor. This was good fortune not so much for him, but a larger fortune of the price of gold turned for the better so jobs on the mines flourished. His inheritance at that stage seemed secure. But his marriage to my mother soon after, maybe too soon after her coming to South Africa in 1938 spelled the end of it. What he strove to keep during times fat and lean, finally gave way to contingency of marital obligations and, of course, the fact that he felt compelled to join the South African forces to fight Hitler and his Nazism. And this at the cost of shaving off his beard as a Boer sympathiser and job as an official at Modderfontein Gold Mine. His sympathy among the Boer miners plummeted as he vehemently enjoined that he was not against Hitler and Nazism as such, but the fact that the German dictator had invaded his precious homeland, the Netherlands aroused warlike feelings in him. Or so he defended himself against vitriolic attacks from his colleague miners, all Boers. But the uncanny of the story is that he dropped out from managerial ranks and soon became a miner like the other Boers and a trade unionist on their behalf. He could speak English and besides, was an educated man and was sought after much as maybe Verwoerd was sought after by the Boers with an infant language.
Later on in life, when I was able to land a scholarship to study in the Netherlands, I got to know my paternal side of forebears with some surprises. This uncle Willem did not turn out to be the grand benevolent Dutchman after all. But certainly he was no country bumpkin. The inheritance left to my father was for real, but then the circumstances under which that happened were in the balance of fortunes of war of the British against the Boers. This uncle was one of a bevy of Dutchmen who came out to assist the Paul Kruger government in setting up an administration for the Zuid Afrikaansche Republiek (ZAR). He became a key functionary for the Zuid Afrikaansche Spoorwegen Maatschappij. It was partly due to the influence that these Dutch officials had in the Netherlands that Queen Wilhelmina was prepared to send a Dutch warship, De Gelderland, to rescue Paul Kruger and his entourage from defeat by the British imperialists. Willem was charged with organizing the transfer of the state treasury of the ZAR in Pretoria via rail to Delagoa Bay, and from there via the Gelderland to Europe. This also involved cash worth millions in gold coins. This gold disappeared along the way. A family joke among the Schuitema’s in the Netherlands was that this grand uncle of mine had his doors all filled with gold. This story has never been proven but where there is smoke there is fire. And the smoke was that the gold that was taken from Pretoria went lost for ever, never accounted for.
So there is a romantic fringe attached to the story about the tin shanty of Rynfield where I was born. There is more to the family myth. Willem Bossinga, after leaving Kruger’s party, soon made another fortune for himself exploiting the people of Indonesia. After that he rode into the sunset and lived happily to the end of his days in Argentina. There is an avenue in Buenos Aires which bears his name.
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