Kas Maine sharecropped on the marginal farmland of Willem Nieman, a staunch Afrikaner, chairman of the local National Party branch and hater of the English and the Jews. When Kas's first son was born in 1921, he and his family celebrated in Sotho fashion. Kas then picked his way across the stubbled fields to Nieman's house to enact his part in one of the seigneurial rituals of the Western Transvaal. Sixty years later, among the thousands of hours he spent recalling his life for Charles van Onselen - Kas was blessed with a memory from which nothing faded - he described how the ritual went:

LRB 12 December 1996 | PDF Download