Laurens van der Post

Sir Laurens Jan van der Post (aka Laurens van der Post) December 13, 1906 – December 16, 1996. Famous 20th century Afrikaner author of many books, farmer, war hero, political adviser to British heads of state, educator, journalist, humanitarian, philosopher, explorer, and conservationist.

Rise to fame

With the war over and his business with the army concluded, Laurens returned to South Africa in late 1947 to work at the Natal Daily News, but with the election victory of the National Party bringing in apartheid he came back to London. In May 1949 he was commissioned by the Colonial Development Corporation (CDC) to "assess the livestock capacities of the uninhabited Nyika and Mlanje plateaux of Nyasaland".

Related Topics:
National Party - Colonial Development Corporation - Nyika - Mlanje - Nyasaland

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Around this time he divorced Marjorie, and on October 13, 1949 married Ingaret Giffard. Before he married Ingaret, he had become engaged to Fleur Kohler-Baker, the daughter of a prominent farmer and businessman, who was seventeen years old; they had met on a ship with an intense but brief affair of love letters, and so she was shocked when he broke off the relationship. He went on a honeymoon with Ingaret to Switzerland where his new wife introduced him to Carl Jung, and he worked on a travel book about his Nyasaland adventures called Venture to the Interior, which borrowed on the structure of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.

Related Topics:
Carl Jung - Joseph Conrad - Heart of Darkness

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In 1950 Lord Reith (head of the CDC) asked Laurens to head an expedition to Bechuanaland, to see the potential of the remote Kalahari Desert for cattle ranching. There Laurens for the first time met the Kalahari natives, a hunter-gatherer bush people known as San. He repeated the journey to the Kalahari in 1952, the same year Venture to the Interior was published, and it became an immediate best-seller in the US and Europe. In 1954 he published his third book Flamingo Feather, an anti-communist novel about a Soviet plot to take over South Africa, which sold very well. Alfred Hitchcock planned to film the book, but lost support from South African authorities and gave up the idea. Penguin Books kept Flamingo Feather in print until the collapse of the U.S.S.R.. In 1955 the BBC commissioned Laurens to return to the Kalahari in search of the bushmen, a trip that turned into a very popular six-part television documentary series in 1956. In 1958 his most famous book was released under the same title as the BBC series: The Lost World of the Kalahari, followed in 1961 by The Heart of the Hunter, derived from 19th-century Bushmen stories by Wilhelm Bleek.

Related Topics:
Bechuanaland - Kalahari - Ranching - San - Alfred Hitchcock - Penguin Books - U.S.S.R. - BBC - Wilhelm Bleek

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Laurens described the bushmen as the original natives of southern Africa, outcast and persecuted by all other races and nationalities. He said they represented the "lost soul" of all mankind, a type of noble savage myth. This mythos of the Bushmen inspired the colonial government to create the Central Kalahari Game Reserve in 1961 to guarantee their survival, and the reserve became a part of settled law when Botswana was created in 1966.

Related Topics:
Noble savage - Central Kalahari Game Reserve - Botswana

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