The `great white Bushman’ was a storyteller whose gift was to create romantic tales, particularly about himself, writes Dea Birkett
It’s a crisp autumnal afternoon in October 1996, and the view from the Chelsea penthouse flat is fine. On the shelves behind me, prominently displayed, are a year-old Christmas card from Prince Charles, snapshots of the two young princes, and a personal message of thanks from Solzhenitsyn. In front sits an old man, crumpled by osteoporosis, his large, rocking head looming towards me.
“I was raised by a Bushman nurse,” he says, ponderously. “Zulu was my first language … I wrote the first book in South Africa against racial prejudice … I was ambushed with bayonets in Java during the war … I lived with the Bushmen in the Kalahari. The natural person everywhere is under attack.”
Laurens van der Post holds his heavily veined hands up to the sky, in the posture of a priest, the effort making them quiver. “We’re fighting for survival, whether people know it or not.”
Ten weeks later, on December 16, just three days after his 90th birthday, Sir Laurens van der Post died. The obituaries were large and laudatory, paying their respects to the “wise old man of Africa”. At his memorial service, Larry Hughes, Van der Post’s American publisher, said Sir Laurens had ” the spiritual presence of a saint”; he was ” Montgomery of Alamein and Francis of Assisi rolled into one”. Sir Laurens hadn’t only been knighted; now he was being canonised.
Laurens van der Post – soldier, explorer, author, filmmaker, philosopher, conservationist, mystic – was a major figure of the 20th century. For millions, Sir Laurens was like a religion, a modern- day Diogenes – his every thought to be absorbed. When he pleaded to protect the Bushmen – “the original people”, “the first Africans”, “natural man”, “the last remaining living example of the caveman” – to preserve what was untainted in our own souls, our hearts roared.
One lone voice stood out against the eulogies. In a brief letter to the Guardian following Sir Laurens’s death, Alex Callinicos, professor of politics at York University, wrote, “Sir Laurens van der Post described his In a Province (1934) as `the first book by an indigenous South African against racial prejudice’. Various counter-examples spring to mind, most notably Sol Plaatje’s Native Life in South Africa (1916). But Plaatje was only a black, so presumably didn’t count. Van der Post’s arrogant myopia is typical of a man who claimed to be an opponent of apartheid yet denounced Nelson Mandela’s speech on leaving prison as `communist’ … Anti- racist? Humbug, more like.”
Not long afterwards, a radio producer told an interesting anecdote about Sir Laurens. In 1993, she had produced an interview in which he discussed his 1949 journey to Nyasaland (now Malawi) and ascent of Mount Mlanje – the basis of Venture to the Interior, the book that made him famous. The dramatic climax in this interview was the death of his young companion, a forestry officer, who was swept away in a freak torrent. Van der Post recalled having to break the news bluntly – “Dick’s been lost. He’s dead” – to the forestry officer’s young wife.
“You can’t improve on the truth, rough as it is,” Van der Post told the interviewer. “I did all I could in my lifetime for the widow and the little girl. I’m sorry to say that they both died very young.”
The producer said: “The next day, the phone rang. It was the `little girl’, quite angry. She said, `He never did anything for me or my mother. And she only died 11 years ago, and I’m still very much alive!'”
These were the first clues that the seeming saint was not as we imagined. The man we knew as Sir Laurens van der Post was a legend that the great white Bushman himself had written. An enormously gifted writer and raconteur, the fted storyteller’s most fantastical tales were those he wove about his own life.
Laurens Jan van der Post was born in the Orange Free State in 1906 to a large Afrikaner farming family of 14, or 15, or 16 children – the details are vague – and, as second-youngest, he was billeted out to older brothers and sisters, spending summers here, winters there. His first job, as a teenager, was as a reporter on the Natal Advertiser, before he took a tramper to Japan with his friend, author William Plomer, in 1926. Two years later, in England, he married Marjorie Wendt, and they had two children, John and Lucia. He worked as a journalist and small farmer in Gloucestershire, before sending his family back to South Africa in 1938 – he said he foresaw the outbreak of war and sent them to safety. But his daughter, Lucia Crichton-Miller, believes: “The marriage was going. He never really meant to come back.”
Van der Post recalled the late 1930s as “perhaps the most unhappy years of my life”. His marriage was breaking up, he had a severe drinking problem, his attempts at a second book had foundered.
“By the time the war came, his life was in a bit of a mess,” says Professor Peter Alexander, who has written extensively on South African authors. “His writing had failed. He was having affairs while he was still married, one with the cousin of the Queen Mother, the poet Lilian Bowes-Lyon. Then the war broke out, and he found a role for himself.”
He enlisted straight away, trained in a commando unit, and was posted behind enemy lines in Abyssinia, Syria and the Western Desert, before being captured by the Japanese in western Java and held prisoner- of-war for more than three years. Unlike most of his contemporaries, he emerged not only physically unscathed, but mentally bolstered.
With an outstanding war record, the valuable skill of speaking Dutch and some rudimentary Japanese, Van der Post was asked to stay behind in Java to oversee the withdrawal of Japanese troops. He had entered the army as a private soldier; he left, in 1949, as Colonel van der Post CBE, war hero: the first chapter in what was to become a 20th-century legend.
“He was forged in the crucible of the war, the defining experience of his life,” says Lucia. “I remember meeting him for what was, effectively, the first time. He came to Cape Town as a war hero. The papers were full of him, very handsome, in his uniform. We had an incredible time; for two weeks, it was fabulous. He bought me books, he took me to fancy restaurants. Then he went back to England. He’d fallen in love with Ingaret [Giffard], whom he later married. And he always felt that he needed a wider arena than South Africa could offer.”
The man who would soon be declaring himself a “natural African” set up home in London,. summered in Half Crown Cottage in Aldeburgh, and wintered in Gstaadt, a fashionable Swiss ski resort. In the same year as receiving his CBE, he left for his first major expedition to Africa, sent by the British government to investigate the commercial potential of the forests around Mount Mlanje. The book that followed, Venture to the Interior, set a pattern – a mix of his own inward, psychological journeys with treks through tough terrain.
Jimmy Skinner, whose guesthouse at the foot of Mount Mlanje featured in the book, remembers reading Venture when it first came out. “I thought his description of the mountain was wonderful, very exciting. He dramatised it – it conjured up Humphrey Bogart dragging his boat along the steamy waters of the jungle, which is how people imagine Africa. In fact, it’s not at all like that. It was perfectly easy to get to, even when he did it.”
Van der Post had found his forte. He was the lone white, the natural man, pitted against – yet utterly in tune with – the African continent around him. His first journey was quickly followed by four more, this time to the Kalahari, the area most associated with his name. Those who travelled in Africa with Van der Post often remember their experiences differently.
“He sometimes got in trouble because people thought he was telling fibs,” says film- maker and friend of 20 years standing, Jonathan Stedall. “The thing had become a story in his mind, and the story took over.”
Whether in immaculately pressed khakis in The Lost World of the Kalahari or in a smart suit with a kerchief neatly protruding out of the top pocket in The Story of Gustav Jung, it was as if he were trying out different identities. He took to wearing a monocle and adopted impeccable English manners. He seldom laughed. His voice, whether on film, radio, or in conversation, was sonorous and hypnotic.
In the 1950s and 1960s, in hundreds of media appearances, he grew into a guru of international repute. His appeal to his audiences – that they recognise the bankruptcy of Western thought, reject their “light, rational, masculine, European” side for their “dark, imaginative, feminine, African” inner being – found enormous favour in an age of increasing materialism. His rendering of Bushmen’s tales were as simple, profound and compelling as fairytales, with core truths, triumphant good and evident evil.
For a few of his disciples, the prophet of their young adulthood would become a friend. The writer Christopher Booker, now 60, first encountered the great man as a teenager. “I watched his film about the Kalahari, and what he said about the Bushmen had immense resonance for me. He was a great hero of mine throughout the 1960s.”
Conservationist Dr Ian Player was also introduced to him as a fan. “I was a young game ranger at Ndumu, on the Mozambique border. In July 1954, Venture to the Interior arrived in our local store. I went back to my tent and started to read it. I remember it clearly. The hippos returned to the lake, the fish eagle screamed – the whole night had gone by and I was still reading. It had an enormous impact on me. It made me realise that Africa had a soul, and my soul was part of Africa.”
Van der Post boasted of being a leading voice against racial discrimination, particularly with his first book, In a Province. “He began to make the claim that it was the first book to tackle the racial divide,” says Alexander. “He was very wrong about that. William Plomer’s Turbott Wolfe and Ula Masondo dealt with the racial divide. Van der Post knew very well that he drew on these books.”
In 1956, at Lake Malawi, the Capricorn Society was founded with the aim of introducing whites to blacks and countering growing violent demands for nationalism. Van der Post was a leading member.
Jimmy Skinner was also actively involved, but left after a year. “It was just not the right approach,” he says. “It was far from being any kind of support on an equal level. It was very paternalistic: `We’ll help these chaps along and, perhaps in 100 years, they’ll be able to rule themselves, who knows?’ There was no future in it. It was just a bit of therapy for whites. Most whites involved then committed themselves to African nationalism.”
But Van der Post never left the ideals of the Capricorn Society behind. Until his death, he was bemoaning its demise. “He got stuck in that,” says Skinner. “He could never make out what African nationalism was all about.”
Colin Legum, former correspondent for the Observer, recalls: “He was basically against early anti-apartheid people like me; we regarded him as a rather unhelpful element. We called him Laurens van der Posture. He was a poseur.”
Van der Post found his ideal Africans, not in nationalists and freedom fighters, but in the far less threatening Bushmen. He was eager to tell interviewers that he had always, from childhood, intended to visit these people of the Kalahari.
In fact, he displayed little interest in them until the mid-Fifties, after returning from his Kalahari journeys. Klara, his nurse, “a great influence on me”, was only remembered by Van der Post as a Bushwoman at this time. Before that, she had appeared in many other guises in his writing, and been both black and, in Heart of the Hunter, “my old coloured nurse Klara”.
Real or not, she enabled Van der Post to claim that he, at heart, was an “original African”. “I grew up with black people,” he said. “Travelling with Africans in Africa, I was instantly back in my youth.”
Edwin Wilmsen, an anthropologist who has worked in southern Africa for 25 years, questions Van der Post’s knowledge of the people of the Kalahari. According to Wilmsen, Van der Post spent a total of 18 weeks in the desert on four trips between 1950 and 1955. “The Bushmen tales, which he was so fond of recounting, come straight out of George Stow’s 1905 The Native Races of Southern Africa,” says Wilmsen.
Van der Post claimed to be entering virgin territory. But in the 1950s alone at least seven expeditions were mounted to study the Bushmen. What distinguished Van der Post was that he endowed a real-life people with mystical meaning, thereby giving the Western imagination something it desperately needed in the post-war era.
The only problem was, the people that Van der Post described – our other, hidden, better half – barely existed. “That they were living in an untouched way, hunting and gathering in a living relic of the way our ancestors lived, is all fabricated, totally false,” says Wilmsen. “They lived by doing some hunting and gathering when they had to, taking jobs when they were available, and selling ostrich eggshell beads. In the 1960s, these were very fashionable among the flower children, and could sell for $100 a metre. They were living as a rural poor, getting on by whatever strategy was available.
“Van der Post was not a racist, but he did hold an underlying belief in fundamental differences,” says Wilmsen. Absolutely everything was unique about the Bushman, from the way he thought down to his smell, which was “astringent, with the essences of untamed earth and wild animal-being”, and which, alarmingly, dogs enjoyed.
“This sets these people apart as being not the same kind of humans as the rest of us, and that is very damaging,” says Wilmsen. “Van der Post didn’t directly harm the Bushmen, but indirectly the images do a lot of harm.”
In 1961, following the renewed interest in these “untouched first Africans”, the Central Kalahari Game Reserve was established to preserve the Bushman way of life. “What it actually did was make it possible to simply ignore the real needs of these people,’ says Wilmsen. “It provided an atmosphere where officials could say: `We don’t need to supply schools, health care, job opportunities, they’ve got their traditions! We want to keep them this way!’ You only have to spend 30 minutes with them to see their abject poverty. If that’s how humans lived 10 000 years ago, you wouldn’t want to be one of them.”
Van der Post continued to flourish. After his African stories were so successful, he began excavating his earlier life for more tales of adventure. His The Seed and the Sower (1963), about his time in the prisoner-of-war camp, was made into a film, Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence, with actor Tom Conti.
“The events in his books that happened in Java – yes, they were all true. But some things were embroidered – no, not embroidered – as though one had put a lens on them and enlarged them,” says Major John Denman, who was in the camp with Laurens. “Every poet has artistic licence.”
Van der Post was remarkably discreet about his friends. “No one can claim that they knew Laurens van der Post because there were so many different sides of him. He lived his life in boxes, and he would only let you into one of them,” says Player, whom he spoke to on the phone every Sunday evening.
These applied even to Frances Baruch, Sir Laurens’s long-term companion after the death of his wife, Ingaret. Considerably younger than her lover, she was a sculptor whose model was often Sir Laurens himself. “They went abroad together two or three times a year,” says the friend. “She was devoted to him – he was the man in her life.” Van der Post described her as, “a source of great strength and joy” and, always generous, left her 75 000 in his will, one-third of his estate.
His relationship with Baruch was utterly discreet, as boxed in as any other. In Sir Laurens’s long life, everyone had their allotted place. Wednesday afternoons were for his nephew, Tom Bedford, who would go to his Chelsea flat and talk in Afrikaans. Tom, former captain of the South African rugby team, became a sort of substitute son after his own son John died of cancer.
Together, they sought to influence the situation emerging in South Africa. “It was all things done on the QT,” says Tom Bedford. “If you could do things through the back door, quietly, trying to put people in touch with each other, that was how we tried to do it.”
There was no area of Africa in which Van der Post did not lay claim to have played a major role. The Lancaster House agreement in 1979, which paved the way to Zimbabwean independence, was one. “There would have been no resolution without Laurens,” says Tom Bedford. Those directly involved in the talks remember otherwise.
In 1989, Tom Bedford arranged a meeting between leaders of the African National Congress in exile in London and Sir Laurens. “It didn’t go well,” he remembers. “He told them all about his experiences in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp. They thought he was a silly old man. What did he know about being young and passionate and saving your country? They thought he was irrelevant to the struggle.”
His hostility to the ANC, “wretched Bishop Tutu”, and later Mandela, bordered on obsession. “He often said that Mandela was a violent terrorist before he was imprisoned,” says Jane Bedford. He attacked Mandela’s speech on his release as “moth- eaten clichs … Mandela is a miserable figure who speaks with a double tongue … he’s a very great disappointment to me.”
It was Buthelezi (who addressed him as Oubaas) who was Van der Post’s ideal African leader. “We were both behind the traditional Zulu nation led by Buthelezi,” says John Aspinall, a friend and supporter. “Rural, untainted, pre-industrial people, as opposed to urban masses.”
Did Van der Post ever reveal himself or was the legend all anyone got to see? Jonathan Stedall, who made two films with him, says, “He was essentially a private person. Very open and friendly and warm – but I wouldn’t feel that I knew him intimately.”
John Denman is one of the few people alive whom Laurens knew as a young man. Did he ever moan to Denman, as friends do? “No, never,” said Denman. “He would just be alone, like a wild animal and, in his own way, get over it.” Van der Post must, from early on, have been in a crowd of admirers and yet so lonely.
As he grew older and more frail – his eyesight failing, hard of hearing, and his gnarled hands making writing impossible – his circle protected him. “He was listened to reverentially. Most people were very much acolytes; they would come and expect wisdom. It’s a terrible role to thrust on him,” says Lucia.
Many people I met declared their love for Sir Laurens, unprompted. Van der Post invited such allegiance. “He terribly needed to be loved and hated to be criticised,” says Lucia. “It crippled him. He was strangely insecure, at some level asking, `I’m all right, aren’t I?’ The roots lay in his childhood. He always said his father didn’t like him.”
In Yet Being Someone Other, Van der Post wrote, “Death has always seemed to me one of the greatest moments of truth, when all that is false and imprecise in life is erased.” For Van der Post, that moment arrived just six days after his death, when the Mail on Sunday published the confession of Cari Mostert, a 42-year-old farmer’s wife whose mother, Bonnie, had been just 14 when she fell pregnant. In 1953, the young Bonnie had been seduced at sea by a 47- year-old married man who had been appointed her ward for the long voyage from Cape Town to Britain. The man with whom the young girl had been entrusted was Laurens van der Post.
The family adamantly denies the claim. “The dates don’t fit,” says Lucia. “It couldn’t have happened then, because he was madly, passionately in love with Ingaret at that time. He just wouldn’t have done it.”
Two weeks ago, there was a gathering of the clan, friends, family and followers to decide what to do with the Van der Post archive. It will not be open to the public, only to selected researchers, and even then, heavily censored. “My father left very, very strict instructions that personal correspondence was not to be available,” says Lucia.
Professor Alexander, who hopes to become Sir Laurens’s official biographer, was granted limited access to some of his correspondence before his death. “His personal files contain surprisingly little of interest. Someone had gone through them and weeded them …. I think he was determined that the view of him that was left was his view,” he says. “It’s on a par with his beautiful dress and polished appearance; the immense effort with which he controls the image makes one think something is hidden.’
What is left to be revealed about the white Bushman? Often in a moment of parting a new seed of doubt would be sown. Booker was escorting me to the door: “I loved him – the old fraud,” he said in the hallway.
“What do you mean, old fraud,” I snapped back.
“Weel, you know … er … nothing in particular,” and he showed me out.
The life of the great storyteller is still unravelling. The tale has not ended.