The Lost World of the Kalahari

Table of Contents

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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

Vintage

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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 Mountbatten's staff in Indonesia and, later, as Military Attaché 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

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 mother's 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 bosun's 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 invader's 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.

They said he was a little man, not a dwarf or pigmy, but just a little man about five feet in height. He was well, sturdily, and truly made. His shoulders were broad but his hands and feet were extraordinarily small and finely modelled. The oldest of our ‘Suto servants told me that one had only to see his small precise footprints in the sand never to forget them. His ankles were slim like a race-horse, his legs supple, his muscles loose, and he ran like the wind, fast and long. In fact when on the move he hardly ever walked but, like the springbuck or wild-dog, travelled at an easy trot. There had never been anyone who could run like him over the veld and boulders, and the bones of many a lone Basuto and Koranna were bleaching in the sun to prove how vainly they had tried to out-distance him. His skin was loose and very soon became creased and incredibly wrinkled. When he laughed, which he did easily, his face broke into innumerable little folds and pleats of a most subtle and endearing criss-cross pattern. My pious old grandfather explained that this loose plastic skin was ‘a wise dispensation of Almighty Providence' to enable the Bushman to eat more food at one feasting than any man in the history of mankind had ever eaten before. His life as a hunter made it of vital importance that he should be able to store great reserves of food in his body. As a result his stomach, after he had eaten to capacity, made even a man look like a pregnant woman. In a good hunting season his figure was like that of a Rubens' Cupid, protruding in front and even more behind. Yes, that was another of the unique characteristics of this original little Bushman body. It had a behind which served it rather as the hump serves the camel! In this way nature enabled him to store a reserve of valuable fats and carbo-hydrates against dry and hungry moments. I believe the first scientific term I ever learnt was the name anatomists gave to this phenomenon of the Bushman body: steatopygia.