Trompie en die Boksombende

6/10/1980

Trompie, Blikkies and Dawie all have brand new bicycles. Rooie, whose dad is too poor to buy him a bike, feels very left out and decides to leave the Boksombende. His three friends decide to come up with a plan to help him.

5/6/1980

Sefanja, a friend of the Toeriens’ gardener Jafta, has a dog called Boesman. Trompie and his friends try their best to convince Sefanja to give the dog to them – from bribing him with tobacco to scaring him with the Tokkelosh. Eventually Sefanja decides to let Boesman decide for himself.

5/20/1980

The circus comes to Kwaggaberg. Even though they’re flat broke, the Boksombende are determined to go – after all, it’s not every day that strongman Dirk Staal visits their town. When their plans to make enough money for the entrance ticket fail, they manage to slip into the circus tent, where they very nearly ruin Dirk Staal’s act.

5/13/1980

Trompie brags that he could get any role he wanted in the school concert. When his friends won’t believe him, he decides to prove it. He bribes Gerrit Moerdyk to lend him his tiger costume for the opening night. The plan is to make a quick appearance on stage as the tiger, but then to hand the costume back to Gerrit for the tiger’s dialogue scenes. Of course everything doesn’t go as plan and Trompie has to do some quick thinking on stage.

6/3/1980

Trompie gets caught getting his friends to do his homework for him. The teacher explains that as the other boys in the school look up to Trompie, he should be a good role model and perform good deeds. But no matter how Trompie tries, his good deeds never work out well.

5/27/1980

Trompie’s parents are away, and the Boksombende decide to hold their own circus in the Toeriens’ lounge. They invite the town kids to come watch Karel de Beer’s dog jump through a hoop and other fantastic acts. Blikkies plans to swing from the chandelier – but when the whole thing comes crashing down, chaos ensues.

6/17/1980

There’s big excitement with the opening of a boxing club in Kwaggaberg. Trompie reckons that he’ll show everybody a thing or two about boxing, even though he doesn’t bother with technique. When members from a club in Johannesburg get invited to Kwaggaberg, Trompie comes up against the Transvaal junior champion, Eric Watson. Trompie is so excited that he sleeps with his boxing gloves for days before the fight. But when the fight begins, it becomes very clear that Watson is far to good for our hero.

6/24/1980

The Boksombende’s rules are clear: No girls. So when Trompie gets smitten by the new girl in the school, the haughty Lucille Vermaak from Johannesburg, the gang is in danger of splitting up.

7/1/1980

A spate of bicycle thefts hit Kwaggaberg. Trompie decides that the Boksombende should catch the thieves so that they can claim the reward from the police. He’s convinced that the thieves are hiding the bikes in the kloof, so they set off to do some detective work. When they find nothing, Dawie and Blikkies leave Trompie and Rooie to continue the hunt on their own. They find the thieves and their stolen bikes in a cave, and Rooie runs to get help. But when he returns with the police, there is no trace of the thieves, the bicycles or Trompie.

7/8/1980

Trompie is chosen as a junior prefect and it soon becomes clear that the senior prefects don’t like him. When things start disappearing from the prefects’ room, they suspect Trompie. He even hits one who accuses him of theft. Things get so bad that the principal decides to expel Trompie from school.