Laurens van der Post - The Lost World of the Kalahari

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Epub ISBN 9781407073125

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Published by Vintage 2004

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Copyright Laurens van der Post 1958

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First published in Great Britain by

The Hogarth Press 1958

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is available from the British Library

ISBN 9780099428756 (from Jan 2007)

ISBN 009942875X

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Laurens van der Post was born in South Africa in 1906, the thirteenth of fifteen children in a family of Dutch and French Huguenot origins. Most of his adult life was spent with one foot in Africa and one in England. His professions of writer and farmer were interrupted by ten years of soldiering in the British Army, serving with distinction in the Western Desert, Abyssinia, Burma and the Far East. Taken prisoner by the Japanese, he was held in captivity for three years before returning to active service as a member of Lord Mountbattens staff in Indonesia and, later, as Military Attach to the British Minister in Java.

After 1949 he undertook several official missions exploring little-known parts of Africa, and his journey in search of the Bushmen in 1957 formed the basis of his famous documentary film and The Lost World of the Kalahari. Other television films include All Africa Within Us and The Story of Carl Gustav Jung, whom he met after the war and grew to know as a personal friend. In 1934 he wrote In a Province, the first book by a South African to expose the horrors of racism. Other books include Venture to the Interior (1952), The Heart of the Hunter (1961), and A Walk with a White Bushman (1986). The Seed and the Sower was made into a film under the title Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence, and, more recently, A Story Like the Wind and A Far-Off Place were combined and made into the film A Far-Off Place.

Sir Laurens van der Post was awarded the CBE in 1947 and received his knighthood in 1981. He died in 1996.

ALSO BY LAURENS VAN DER POST

Contents

Table of Contents

CHAPTER 1

T HIS is the story of a journey in a great wasteland and a search for some pure remnant of the unique and almost vanished First People of my native land, the Bushmen of Africa. The journey in fact was accomplished barely a year ago, but in a deeper sense it began long before that. Indeed so far back in time does all this go that I am unable to determine precisely when it did begin. I know for certain only that no sooner did I become aware of myself as a child than my imagination slipped, like a hand into a glove, into a profound pre-occupation with the little Bushman and his terrible fate.

I was born near the Great River, in the heart of what for thousands of years had been great Bushman country. The Bushman himself as a coherent entity had already gone, but I was surrounded from birth by so many moving fragments of his race and culture that he felt extraordinarily near. I was always meeting him afresh on the lips of living men. Beside the open hearth on cold winters nights on my mothers farm of Wolwekop, the Mountain of the Wolves (as my countrymen call the big striped hyaenas), or round the camp fire with the jackals mournful bark raising an apprehensive bleat from a newly-lambed ewe in the flock kraaled nearby and with the night-plover wailing over the black plain like a bosuns pipe, there the vanished Bushman would be vividly at the centre of some hardy pioneering reminiscence; a Bushman gay, gallant, mischievous, unpredictable, and to the end unrepentant and defiant. Though gone from the land, he still stalked life and reality in the mixed blood of the coloured peoples as subtly as he ever stalked the multitudinous game of Africa. He was present in the eyes of one of the first women to nurse me, her shining gaze drawn from the first light of some unbelievably antique African day. Here a strain of Bushman blood would give an otherwise good Bantu face an odd Mongolian slant; there would turn a good central African black to an apricot yellow or just break out, like a spark of electricity, in the clicks of onomatopoeic invention which the Bushman had forced on an invaders sonorous tongue.

The older I grew the more I resented that I had come too late on the scene to know him in the flesh. For many years I could not accept that the door was closed for ever on the Bushman. I went on seeking for news and information of him as if preparing for the moment when the door would open and he would reappear in our midst. Indeed I believe the first objective question I ever asked of life was: Who, really, was the Bushman? I asked it of people of all races and colours who might have had contact with him, to the point where many a patient heart must have found it hard to bear with the uncomprehended importunity of a child. They told me much. But what they told me only made me hunger for more.