AFree State town has paid appropriate and touching tribute to its most famous son Stephen Gray The hamlet of Philippolis in the Transgariep, south-west Free State, has developed a striking new feature to commemorate one of its celebrated sons. This is no waggon-wheel and ironstone affair, or variation on a tombstone like their memorial to Emily Hobhouse.
A rather Japanese-looking peace garden, it is beautifully designed, appropriate and touching. Part of its function is to act as a walkway connecting the township across the stream to the old whites-only main drag.
The celebrity in question is the late Laurens van der Post, the journalist and top travel-writer, who turned latter-day sage. Although, once he climbed to fame as an advisor to British royals, he liked to refer to his birthplace rather vaguely as “the Interior of Africa, a thousand miles from anywhere”, he willed his ashes to be returned here. In a metal safe, simply inscribed with his dates (1906-96), they are the centrepiece, embedded in one wall, facing the drinking fountain.
The open-plan idea is still working well: over two days I saw this strange park was lounged over, played in and rendezvoused at, with no dirt or defacements. The inspired local dominee, Bertie Haasbroek, forgot his cellular phone under an ice-white rosebush there while he was explaining the symbolism (water for knowledge, sand for his beloved Kalahari, the curved spiritual wall with an end you can never see, the wondrous wild olives taking root). When we returned from our walkabout, it was gone. Already handed in at the pastorie.
Between the garden and his monumental Dutch Reformed church, Haasbroek has bought up a typical Karoo house which is being enlarged as a retreat for writers with projects and for artists without shelter. Already arrived is the furnishing of Van der Post’s Chelsea penthouse studio: desk, lamps and crates of his entire library. Like that of his parents before him, down the road, this collection will surely be much borrowed and bent over. Haasbroek explained the concept is that guests of the centre should be accommodated free.
Until recently, the two adjoining late Victorian houses that constitute the birthplace of Laurens Jan were a roomy B&B, run by Mark Ingle, a refugee from the Rand given over to the country life. But the majority of his guests came more for the syrupy muffins than the spiritual master, he recollects.
Evidently father Van der Post, a noted pioneer author in Afrikaans, flourished as the local law agent when Philippolis had thrown off its missionary origins, expelled the Griquas and was on the main route to the diamond fields. A ball, a debate and a West End play directed by his wife filled up the weekly bill, with blank evenings spent about the piano. The doctor next door collected Charles Dickens manuscripts.
As Ingle stresses, Laurens Jan’s was hardly a barefoot, sheep-counting
boyhood rather more bilingual and bourgeois. And this was the billiard room, there the settlement’s first tennis court.
Ingle also confided that some frenzied devotees of the daffy old guru do still pitch up. They perform their obscure obsequies under the pomegranate tree, where further now holy ashes of this African explorer, Jungian interpreter, renaissance man and white Bushman lie scattered. Funds are being raised to preserve the tree-stump guarding his dust in varnish.
But for uninitiated folk, the presence of Sir Laurens in his public garden is striking and thoughtful a true oasis following the wishes of its major sponsor, his daughter Lucia, and the rest of his descendants. As its fame spreads, it is likely to lure in tourists too, from the featureless N1.