Description
Willemsdorp by Herman Charles Bosman is a darkly satirical novel set in a fictional small town in the Northern Transvaal shortly before the pivotal 1948 election. Far removed from the romanticised image of the South African platteland, Willemsdorp is a closed and restless community where boredom, repression, secret desires, infidelity and political tension simmer beneath the surface. The town becomes a microcosm of the wider South African society of the period, allowing Bosman to examine the social and ideological pressures shaping people’s lives.
The central character, journalist Charlie Hendricks, arrives in Willemsdorp to become editor of the Northern Transvaal News and soon finds himself caught up in the town’s political and personal intrigues. The novel’s satire takes aim at narrow Calvinism, rising Afrikaner nationalism, racial attitudes and the restrictive social conventions of the Union period.
Originally published posthumously in a censored form in 1977, the complete, uncut text was published by Human & Rousseau in 1998, allowing the novel’s darker social and political commentary to be fully appreciated.
