Photo : Lauren Clifford- Holmes
The bushman sheep rustler Koos Sas was shot dead on a farm near Springbok in 1922. He had escaped jail for the murder of a white farmer, though his guilt is disputable given the courts in that time and the outlaw’s notoriety. One Dominee Steenkamp and his son photographed Sas’s corpse, held up with his arms splayed out as if he were a trophy bird of prey, ironically Christ-like. These pictures were mass printed as popular postcards and in a macabre twist sold to raise money for the ACVV, a Christian women’s organisation. The dominee later exhumed the body and took the skull to America. It eventually ended up on display in the Montague Museum, where David Kramer saw it, prompting him to write a song Ballade van Koos Sas which appeared on his LP Hanepootpad in 1983.
Kramer has now developed a full-scale folk ballad musical recounting the story of Koos Sas as told from the perspectives of various characters and with some imaginative elaboration.
Loukmaan Adams gives a powerful and artfully understated performance as the picaresque Koos Sas. Adams is flawlessly supported by Jody Abrahams who plays Hendrik Skilpad, Sas’s slightly simple but honest friend. Abrahams achieves just the right balance between clown and idiot savant. Natalie Cervati makes for a diginifed Lenie, Sas’s love interest which allows for the development of a romance in an otherwise ghoulish tale. Robert Koen works well in ensemble, but feels somewhat wrong-footed in the unsympathetic role of Constable Steenkamp. Perhaps Kramer was hoping to avoid too stereotypical a reading of this part, but we miss some of the robustness in this character which is clearly indicated by the narrative.
It is always a treat to see veteran Nicholas Ellenbogen on stage. He plays Scotty Lennox based on a real buccaneer George St. Leger Gordon Lennox a.k.a. Scotty Smith, of whom Lawrence Green describes in To The River’s End as an “unrepentant and murderous old freebooter”.
With great narrative skill, Kramer uses the story of Sas for his own exhumation – the unearthing of Namaqualand’s dark past. Sas is a victim of the times, a good man caught in a clash of historic forces. The white man’s law has imposed land ownership and property rights on the nomadic bushmen. Transgression of these alien laws that dispossess the bushman of what they took to be inalienable – the mountains, rivers and wildlife – is punished with chains and slave labour. Much of the pathos arises from the consequences of a heartless foreign system of inequitable retributive rather than restorative justice. With Lennox enter the dark themes of this haunting musical. Social Darwinists and amateur scientists are at work dehumanising the indigenous people. They rob bushmen graves wherever they can find them to sell off as human specimens, boiling the flesh from the bones in tubs. ₤5 for a skull and ₤15 for a skeleton made even the living ‘fair game’.
Given these thematic concerns, Kramer has made the astute and correct artistic choice in keeping the music slightly muted. By denying the usual grand reprise and the big number, he keeps the narrative paramount, the mood eerie and tragic. Ballade van Koos Sas is an inventive, layered, moving and beautifully executed work.
