Have you ever heard of a “jam boy”? Worse still, have you ever employed (as it were) the services of one? Or, like me, were you blissfully unaware of the term or the practice underlying it? I’m hoping you’ve never heard of “jam boys”, because I’m trying to correct a terrible, hurtful untruth about the history of our beloved country. Help me out on this one.

Let me start at the start…if that’s alright with you, of course? Haha. No, seriously. Get fucked if it’s not.

One morning, while we were passing around a bottle of rum in our little beachfront cabin in Mancora, Peru, one of the Irish lads I was travelling with introduced the term “jam boy” into conversation. None of us had heard it before, so we asked him to explain it. And this is what he said (oddly enough, almost verbatim):

The Jam Boy was first introduced as early as the 1800s when the British Empire occupied India. When the British gentry went to play golf, they would have two men, the caddy and a Jam Boy.

The Jam Boys sole purpose was to keep the mosquitoes away from the golfer. To do this, the Jam Boy would cover himself in Jam to attract the mosquitoes away from the players. When the game was over the Jam Boy got to keep the jam he was wearing to take home to his family.

Logically, being the only semi-British representative in the room (ie, I happen to have a British passport), and appreciating the Irish “love” of all things English, I took a bit of a bollocksing for being an exploitative, racist colonial c*nt (pronounced something like “coent”, with a soft diphthong and a gentle “t”, but for some reason I apparently just couldn’t get the subtlety). And as with most conversations with travelling foreigners involving the concepts of “racism” and “colonialism”, it wasn’t long before South Africa was dragged into the equation. That was it – the final straw. I defended our dignity and our pride with a flurry of biting rhetoric and blind ignorance the likes of which have never been heard before. It was a bloodbath. Seriously. I may have been drooling a bit too for effect. “I have never heard of jam boys and we have never used them. Period”. That’s the crux of what I concluded. More or less.

Imagine my shock and disappointment the following morning when I checked my position on the ever trustworthy Wikipedia.

The term and practice were apparently revived in South Africa in the 1980s during the apartheid regime of the Afrikaners.

This individual might wear an industrial boiler suit covered in a sugary syrup intended to attract flies. The purpose of this was that the jamboy or jammee would stand 20-30 metres away from the player and attract flies and other pestilence to his person while his patron would be undisturbed during his round of golf. A jam boy was predominately paid less than a caddy.

This practice was abolished with the overthrow of the National Party by the ANC. Nelson Mandela stated that there would be ‘no more jamboys in my country’. The term is still used in South Africa as a derogatory term for labourers.

I was gobsmacked. Wikipedia had just fucked me between the cheeks. How could this be? How did I not know this? I took the news back to the group, much to their enjoyment, and the term was hurled back at me consisently over the next two months. And in the absence of evidence to the contrary, I had no choice but to endure their incessant abuse.

Since returning to London, I’ve run the term past a number of educated, goodlooking South Africans, but to no avail. It seems that none of our own are familiar with “jam boys”. And when I quote Wikipedia regarding its alleged quotation of Nelson Mandela (as above), I’m customarily met with disbelief. Did Madiba really say that…or is someone manipulating the most powerful source of information in the galaxy for their own nefarious ends? It has happened before, mind you!

So here’s the thing, right? Whilst I’m in very little doubt that “jam boys” were employed in the past, I’m sceptical about their use in South Africa during the 80’s. Having said that, is it such a stretch for the imagination? One thing’s for sure: there definitely weren’t any “jam boys” lying around next to the practice green at Rondebosch Golf Club when I was a tyke. I don’t think.

So are “jam boys” fact or fiction? I’m stumped.