Clicko: The Wild Dancing Bushman
272
Clicko: The Wild Dancing Bushman
272Hardcover
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
Through Taibosh’s tale, Parsons brings to life the bizarre golden age of entertainment as well as the role that the dubious new science of race played in it. Beginning with Taibosh’s early life, Clicko untangles the real story of his ancestry from the web of myths spun around him on his rise to international stardom. Parsons then chronicles the unhappy middle period of Taibosh’s career, when he suffered under the heel of a vicious manager. Left to freeze and nearly starve in an unheated apartment, Taibosh was rescued by Frank Cook, Barnum & Bailey’s lawyer. The Cooks adopted Taibosh as a member of their family of circus managers and performers, and his happy—if far from average—years with them make up the final chapter of this remarkable story.
Equal parts entertaining and disturbing, Clicko vividly evokes a forgotten era when vaudeville drew massive crowds and circus freaks were featured in Billboard and Variety. Parsons introduces us to colorful characters such as George Auger the giant and the original Zip the Pinhead, but above all, he gives us an unforgettable portrait of Franz Taibosh, rescued at last from the racists and the romantics and revealed here as an ordinary man with an extraordinary life.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226647418 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 12/01/2010 |
| Pages: | 272 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.20(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.80(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CLICKO
The Wild Dancing BushmanBy NEIL PARSONS
UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
Copyright © 2009 Neil ParsonsAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-64741-8
Chapter One
Growing Up in the Snow Mountains
Franz Taibosh was in Fact Korana, not Bushman (San), by paternal ancestry. The clicking language spoken by him has been identified as Korana by, for instance, the word koo-rang. It was applied by Franz to a pretty young woman in Paris in 1913, and means a girl ('diminutive-feminine singular').
Franz's Korana ancestral identity is confirmed by the notes on the back of a 1931 museum photograph of him: 'He ... is said to be a direct descendant of a tribal king.' This establishes that Franz Taibosh (Taaibosch) was a descendant of Matsatedi Taaibosch, who succeeded his brother as leader of the Korana group of Khoekhoe around the Orange and Vaal rivers in the middle of the eighteenth century. (Taaibosch or taibos is Dutch-Afrikaans for a 'tough bush' found near rivers.) Matsatedi Taaibosch and his brother were themselves the direct descendants of the Korana clan's founder, a man named !Kora or Gora who had resided in the area of later Cape Town in the early part of the seventeenth century.
Prominent members of the Taaibosch family, like a son and a grandson giving evidence to colonial commissions in 1837 and 1869, prided themselves that 'they could with tolerable correctness trace the line of [their] ancestors to that remote period when they held possession of the country about Cape Town'. !Kora or Gora, recorded in English written documents as 'Corey', was kidnapped from Table Bay in 1613 by an English sea captain named Gabriel Towerson, who took him to England to train as a comprador or trading agent for the English East India Company. Living in the London house of Sir Thomas Smythe, governor of both the East India Company and of one of the Virginia companies, 'Corey' pined for home.
On his return to the Cape in June 1614, Corey 'threw away all his Clothes, his Linnen, with all his Covering, and got his sheeps skins upon his back [again]'. A year later, English sailors in Table Bay found him settled with his followers in a village of a hundred houses on the Liesbeek River, trading in livestock with visiting ships. But Corey now knew the true value of European goods, and drove increasingly hard bargains. In the words of a Welsh visitor of 1627, on the people of Table Bay: 'They hate the dutchmen since they hanged one of the blackes called Cary who was in England & upon refusall of fresh victuals they put him to death.'
By 1658, settlers of the Dutch East India Company-'unjust and often cruel to them, thus provoking reprisals'-had taken over the pastures of the Liesbeek valley from the original Korana (recorded in documents as Gorachoqua). The Korana retreated to the hills across the plains-after they had been expelled by the Dutch.
The Korana trekked hundreds of kilometres north with their sheep and cattle in two major groupings. The Links (or Left-hand) Korana migrated north-west up the Atlantic coast as far as the Orange River. The Great (or Right-hand) Korana under Corey's grandson Eiyakomo migrated northeast to the Camdeboo plains, south of the Sneeubergen (Snow Mountains). Camdeboo was a local Khoekhoe (Inqua) word for a 'green pool in a river' with fat hippos ready for the taking. Eiyakomo was subsequently killed hunting elephants, and was succeeded as chief of the Great Korana by his son !Kunansoop. Dutch hunters followed the Great Korana, and !Kunansoop abandoned the Camdeboo to them sometime before 1760. He led his people again northwards to rejoin the Links Korana on the Orange River.
On the Orange River !Kunansoop faced the aggressive competition of King Tau (the Lion) of the Rolong clan of the Tswana, who murdered !Kunansoop after tricking him into unarmed negotiations. The Korana chose Eiyakomo's younger son Matsatedi Taaibosch to be their chief, and used their poisoned arrows against the spears and battle-axes of the Rolong. Tau was killed, and lost his capital, known as Taung, to Matsatedi Taaibosch.
The Korana under Matsatedi Taaibosch dominated the Orange River valley for the last half of the eighteenth century. The nation was organized in numerous clans: Bag People, Black Chins, Cats, Mud People, Narrow-Cheeks, Reds, Seacows, Scorpions, Side People, Sorcerers, Springboks. There was extensive intermarriage with local San women, and with Tswana men and women. Trade with the Boers of the Cape in ivory, cattle and furs brought in firearms and gunpowder, horses, wagons, clothing and coffee-and also attracted 'rogues, rebels and runaways'. Oorlam people of mixed Khoekhoe and Dutch ancestry began to raid San Bushmen and Korana for cattle and child slaves to supply to the farms of their Boer relatives in the south. There was also a renegade Prussian sailor, Jan Blüm (Bloem), who fled from the Cape and married into the Springbok clan of the Korana. He died in 1798, but his sons continued to lead Springbok-Korana bandits who raided as far south as the spring named Bloemfontein after them.
* * *
By 1785 there were so many Boers in the Camdeboo that a Dutch landdrost (magistrate) was posted at a spot thereafter known as Graaff-Reinet. However, the local San Bushmen of the Sneeubergen, the Sun'ei (known to the Dutch as 'Chinese' Bushmen on account of their narrow eyes), fiercely resisted Boer encroachment during the 1770s-1790s. Boer men and their Khoekhoe servants were organized into mounted troops known as commandos, which radically depleted Sun'ei numbers by genocidal raiding. Adult men were systematically killed as vermin, while captured women and children were given to the Boer settlers and to their Khoekhoe (Inqua and Korana) servants.
For the first half of the nineteenth century, the South African interior can be described as a whirling cockpit of bandits and settlers, mounted on horses and wielding firearms. Springbok-Korana horsemen under the Bloem brothers on the highveld 'rounded up the cattle when they were at pasture, killing the herdsmen and keeping any pursuers at bay with their guns ... [or] they were bolder still, and entered a village just before sunrise, opened the kraals, and drove the animals away under the very eyes of their astonished and terrified owners. But these attacks were not conducted without risk to themselves, for their numbers were few and their discipline poor.'
Korana brigandage was effectively subdued by a combination of conquest by King Moshoeshoe of Lesotho, Boer trekkers and British Wesleyan Methodist missionaries. Some Taaibosch-Korana from Taung were persuaded by the Wesleyans to settle on the Lesotho frontier. Gert Taaibosch, a famous horseman and warrior, made common cause with incoming Boer settlers in 1840-1, and was eventually killed in battle with Moshoeshoe in 1853. By the early 1850s, Boer settlers in the interior came together in republics-the Transvaal (South African Republic) and Orange Free State (around Bloemfontein)-which were embroiled in endemic warfare with their African neighbours.
The main body of Taaibosch-Korana moved from Taung to settle at nearby Mamusa on the Harts River on the Transvaal border. Matsatedi Taaibosch's grandson David Massouw Taaibosch became their chief, until he was killed and his people were dispersed by Transvaal Boers in December 1884. Mamusa was in future marked on maps under the name of Schweizer-Reneke. Henceforward the Korana were a forgotten people who had apparently disappeared from history. But his remarks about an ancestor, recorded in 1931, show that Franz Taibosh knew his heritage. It is equally likely, though, that Franz was descended from those Korana left behind in the Camdeboo or the Sneeubergen during the eighteenth century, in Boer service, rather than from those Korana who ranged north over the highveld.
* * *
In 1937 Frances Cook Sullivan, whose family had taken in Franz Taibosh, told a US district court that his earliest memories were of working for 'English planters in South Africa', the last of whom was named Roberts, who also employed his three brothers. Evelyn Cook and her daughter Barbara Cook later added that Roberts was Christian Roberts (or Roberts Christian) and that his farm was on the road to Kimberley or Johannesburg. The Taibosh family worked for him herding sheep, while Franz himself worked as a household servant and as a post-rider.
It is now clear that Christiaan Willem Roberts, an Afrikaner of British ancestry, was sole tenant from 1899 through 1907 on one of the farms around Heydon Hill in the Middelburg district of the Cape Colony, on the south side of the road from Richmond to Middelburg. Heydon Hill lay on the most northerly wagon pass through the Sneeubergen, through which the headwaters of the Little Seacow River flowed. The pass carried an old wagon road that ran from Graaff-Reinet in the Camdeboo towards Kimberley, or to Johannesburg via Bloemfontein.
The small hill-farm devoted to sheep-raising leased by Christiaan Willem Roberts at Heydon from 1899 was almost certainly Boschman's Hoek (Bushman's Glen or Bend), which was actually owned by an Englishman called John Herbert Staples. Staples was a land magnate who owned many other farms in the vicinity. Franz Taibosh and his family probably came to Willem Roberts with the farm tenancy. Alternatively, they came as personal retainers with Roberts from the Bethesda district, a few days' walk to the south, where Roberts was born.
Heydon Kop (Heydon Hill) had first appeared on a map in 1805, as the northernmost point of the Cape Colony surveyed by British army engineers. No doubt an engineer-surveyor was nostalgic for one of the villages in England named Heydon. Heydon Kop stood next to the pass of the Little Seacow River known as Cephanje's Poort-one of four possible wagon routes through the Sneeubergen.
The first white farm at Cephanje's Poort was a colonial 'loan place'-a farm area around a watering point ceded free of charge by the Dutch East India Company to a Boer trekker in 1772. But it could not be occupied until the end of the wars between Boers and Bushmen around 1800, when a small farmhouse made of rocks and clay was built for summer occupation. 'Wild' Bushmen were persuaded to stop raiding farms by gifts of meat and beads, and were induced to join other Khoekhoe and San employees herding Boer sheep and cattle.
* * *
Franz Taibosh was born most probably around the later 1860s or early 1870s. A full-body photograph taken in 1912 suggests a man in his thirties or forties. At the time of his death in 1940 he looked to be in his seventies.
The later 1860s saw bitter winter chills in the Sneeubergen. In mid-1869, snowstorms buried flocks of sheep: shepherds walked through the mountains looking for telltale wisps of steamy breath rising from the snowdrifts. Young Franz must have remembered the great drought of 1877-8, when the hippo pools were parched dry, after less than one inch of rain. Larks, twittering high above the land, fell dead from the sky.
In 1959 Evelyn Cook recalled that Franz had 'told us his father had also been a shepherd, but he didn't recall his mother'. Franz's death certificate listed his father's name as Hans Taibosh, while his mother's name was unknown. We know that he had at least three brothers, and that one of his older brothers was also named Hans. We may speculate that Franz's mother died not long after giving birth to him, and that she was of San ancestry-which would account for Franz's short and slight stature.
As a small child, Franz joined his father and three brothers herding sheep. But he was subsequently chosen to be a household servant and gardener ('He worked as a houseboy ... he knew how to dust, wash dishes, prepare vegetables, and work in a garden'). In later years he showed particular delight and skill in growing roses. As the diminutive 'runt' of his family, no doubt Franz was petted one moment and bullied the next-which may help to account for his fatalistic acceptance of life's vagaries, and his self-defence of becoming a jester and entertainer. Franz's cavorting and good humour help to explain the 'mascot' status he developed in later years with white patrons.
The 1870s and 1880s saw an industrial and farming revolution in the interior of South Africa. Diamond mines opened at Kimberley, followed by gold mines around Johannesburg. The wagon routes into the interior were progressively replaced by railway lines. African peoples lost their independence, to become a labour force under new racial controls. Mining was the magnet for people of many new ethnicities from Africa and beyond, but the dominant culture of the new capitalists was English. Capitalized English farmers came to settle among the Boer or Afrikaner farmers of the north-eastern parts of the Cape Colony, as farms rose in value with the opening by the railways of new urban-industrial markets for farm produce.
Around 1878-9, the Boschman's Hoek farm was acquired by an English land speculator called James Collett. Within a few years Collett in turn sold Boschman's Hoek as well as the neighbouring Cephanje's Poort to John Herbert Staples, and another Heydon farm, Klein Cephanje's Poort, to Maurice James Hall, a Cambridge graduate originally from Nottinghamshire, who renamed his farm The Willows. (Like his friend Herbert Rhodes, Cecil Rhodes's ne'er-do-well older brother, Hall had failed to strike it lucky in diamonds or gold.)
Hall turned The Willows into a conspicuous centre of progressive agriculture. He drained the hippo pool in the Little Seacow River on his farm, and controlled the clover (poisonous to sheep) around it by stocking the area with ostriches-it was boom time for ostrich feathers exported overseas to adorn fashionable ladies' hats. Hall planted hundreds of willow and poplar trees as windbreaks around the house and garden-a splash of green in the otherwise perennially brown landscape. He scorned the farming practices of his Boer neighbours, who only raised sheep and cultivated a few fruit trees, by bringing in four hundred European shorthorn cattle. By 1887 Hall had enough capital to invest in a cream separator for his cows' milk, a mechanical mower that could be hitched to oxen, steel wire fencing to protect land and livestock against flocks of grazing springbok and predatory jackals, and the first farm windmill (a wooden one, for pumping underground water) seen in the district. During the 1890s the Halls invested in a small sanatorium, which brought in tuberculosis sufferers from Britain who could afford the fares and the fees.
It was J.H. Staples who leased out the sheep runs of hilly Boschman's Hoek to Christiaan Willem Roberts between 1899 and 1907, while the Staples family remained in the valley on the main Cephanje's Poort farm. The Taibosh family would have had long experience of English farm owners, but their everyday contacts would have been with Boer farm managers and their wives. Afrikaans was the lingua franca of all farming. Franz seems never to have learnt any English as a child. The Staples and Hall families must have been the 'well respected and well to do' English planters recorded by Evelyn Cook in 1959 as being among Franz Taibosh's 'earliest memories'. On the other hand, his learning of 'Father Abraham' as he grew up, 'so they must have been religious people', could refer to a Boer family-an Old Testament kind of Christianity being implied. Franz Taibosh would have had such formative experiences long before C.W. Roberts arrived.
* * *
It is possible that Franz as a boy underwent the doro initiation ceremony of the (Khoekhoe-speaking) Korana. Male adolescents, with their faces painted, were taught step-dancing to the trilling music of reed-pipes. But it was the mark of (Bantu-speaking) Xhosa initiation into manhood, namely circumcision of the penis, that Franz was to bear for the rest of his life.
Xhosa people had come from the Eastern Cape in considerable numbers as farm workers to the Camdeboo and Sneeubergen, after the great 'Cattle- Killing' and famine of the late 1850s. Travelling specialists went from farm to farm to hold circumcision camps for young males. Boys were painted white, ate only watery vegetables, no meat, no salt, and waited for their wound to heal-looking from a distance 'like bright white statues among the small grey bushes'. After weeks in seclusion, the boys emerged as confident young men, returning home with new clothes and new blankets-everything old had been discarded.
It was by no means unusual for a Korana boy to undergo Xhosa circumcision. All farm workers' adolescent sons went to the same circumcision camp, regardless of ethnic origin. Khoekhoe and San and even white boys were initiated into Xhosa age-grades. Secret knowledge learnt by heart bound the young men together for life as age-mates. Circumcision would have given Franz Taibosh a respect among Xhosa men that would have served him well in adult years as a farm worker and later as a Kimberley resident.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from CLICKO by NEIL PARSONS Copyright © 2009 by Neil Parsons . Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.