The Lost World of the Kalahari Read online

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Copyright

  About the Author

  Also by Laurens Van Der Post

  Dedication

  Contents

  Round the Bend

  Map of Southern Africa showing the main features mentioned in the story

  1. The Vanished People

  2. The Manner of their Going

  3. The Pact and the Random Years

  4. The Break Through

  5. The Shadow in Between

  6. Northern Approaches

  7. The Swamp of Despond

  8. The Spirits of the Slippery Hills

  9. The Hunter at the Well

  10. The Song of the Rain

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Epub ISBN 9781407073125

  Version 1.0

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  Published by Vintage 2004

  2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3

  Copyright © Laurens van der Post 1958

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  First published in Great Britain by

  The Hogarth Press 1958

  Vintage

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  A CIP catalogue record for this book

  is available from the British Library

  ISBN 9780099428756 (from Jan 2007)

  ISBN 009942875X

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  About the Author

  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

  In a Province

  Venture to the Interior

  The Face Beside the Fire

  Flamingo Feather

  The Dark Eye in Africa

  The Heart of the Hunter

  The Seed and the Sower

  Journey into Russia

  The Hunter and the Whale

  The Night of the New Moon

  A Story Like the Wind

  A Far-Off Place

  A Mantis Carol

  Jung and the Story of our Time

  First Catch Your Eland

  Yet Being Someone Other

  A Walk With a White Bushman

  About Blady: A Pattern Out of Time

  The Voice of the Thunder

  Feather Fall

  To the memory of Klara

  who had a Bushman mother and

  nursed me from birth;

  and to my wife Ingaret Giffard, for saying

  without hesitation when I mentioned

  the journey to her:

  ‘But you must go and do it

  at once’

  Contents

  Map of Southern Africa showing the main features mentioned in the story

  1 The Vanished People

  2 The Manner of their Going

  3 The Pact and the Random Years

  4 The Break Through

  5 The Shadow in Between

  6 Northern Approaches

  7 The Swamp of Despond

  8 The Spirits of the Slippery Hills

  9 The Hunter at the Well

  10 The Song of the Rain

  CHAPTER 1

  The Vanished People

  THIS 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.

  One night, by the fireside, I seem to remember my grandfather and the oldest of my aunts saying that in a lean time the Bushman behind would shrink until it was much like any normal behind except for the satiny creases where his smooth buttocks joined his supple legs. But in a good hunting season it would stick out so much that you could stand a bottle of brandy with a tumbler on it! We all laughed at this, not derisively but with affectionate pride and wonder that our native earth should have produced so unique a little human body. Somehow, my heart and imagination were deeply concerned with this matter of the Bushman’s shape. The Hottentots, who were very like him, much as I loved them could not excite my spirit as did the Bushman. They were too big. The Bushman was just right. There was magic in his build. Whenever my mother read us a fairytale with a little man performing wonders in it, he was immediately transformed in my imagination into a Bushman. Perhaps this life of ours, which begins as a quest of the child for the man, and ends as a journey by the man to rediscover the child, needs a clear image of some child-man, like the Bushman, wherein the two are firmly and lovingly joined in order that our confused hearts may stay at the centre of their brief round of departure and return.

  But the Bushman’s appetite, shape, and steatopygia were, though remarkable, by no means the only unique features of his body. His colour, I was told, was unlike that of any other of the many peoples of Africa, a lovely Provençal apricot yellow. The old Basutu I have quoted told me that one most remarkable thing about the Bushman was that although he wore no clothes his skin never burnt dark in the sun. He moved in the glare and glitter of Africa with a flame-like flicker of gold like a fresh young Mongol of the Central Mongolian plain. His cheeks, too, were high-boned like a Mongol’s and his wide eyes so slanted that some of my ancestors spoke of him as a ‘Chinese-person’. There is a great plain between blue hills in South Africa called to this day the ‘Chinese Vlakte’ after the Bushman hunters who once inhabited it. His eyes were of the deep brown I have mentioned, a brown not seen in any other eye except in those of the antelope. It was clear and shone like the brown of day on a rare dewy African morning, and was unbelievably penetrating and accurate. He could see things at a distance where other people could discern nothing, and his powers of vision have become part of the heroic legend in Africa. The shape of the face tended to be heart-like, his forehead broad, and chin sensitive and pointed. His ears were Pan-like, finely made and pointed. His hair was black and grew in thick round clusters which my countrymen called, with that aptitude for scornful metaphor they unfailingly exercised on his behalf, ‘pepper-corn hair’. His head was round, neatly and easily joined to a slender neck and throat on broad shoulders. His nose tended to be broad and flat, the lips full, and the teeth even and dazzlingly white. His hips were narrow and, as my aunt said, ‘Lord, verily it has been a beautiful thing to see him move!’

  But perhaps the most remarkable thing about the Bushman was his originality. Even in the deepest and most intimate source of his physical being he was made differently from other men. The women were born with a natural little apron, the so-called tablier égyptien, over their genitals; the men were born, lived, and died with their sexual organs in a semi-erect position. The Bushman found dignity in this fact and made no attempt falsely to conceal it. Indeed he accepted it so completely as the most important difference between himself and other men that he gave his people the name of ‘Qhwai-xkhwe’ which openly proclaims this fact. The sound of natural relish that the word ‘Qhwai-xkhwe’ makes on his lips is a joy to hear, and the click of the complex consonants flashes on his tongue as he utters them like a sparkle of sun on a burst of flower from our sombre mountain gorse. He has even painted himself all over the rocks of Africa in naked silhouette plainly demonstrating this distinguishing feature of his race, not with the obscene intent which some European archaeologists have projected into him, but simply because his God, with care aforethought, in the great smithy of Africa had forged him naked and unashamed just like that.

  Only one thing seems really to have worried the Bushman regarding his stature and that was his size. Often I have been impressed by the extraordinary energy of revolt I have encountered in the spirit of many little men and have seen something of its exacting consequences in their own and other lives. Nor have I forgotten how disastrously this revolt can be orchestrated in the complexes and policies of whole races. When a prisoner of war of the Japanese, I have been punished at times, I am certain, for no other reason than that I was often taller than those who had me in their power. Yet I have a suspicion that the Bushman’s reaction to his smallness was of a different kind and brought about solely by his helplessness to repel the ruthless invasion of his country by men so much taller than he – men who seemed, in fact, so tall that he painted them on the rocks like giants! There was no doubt in the minds of those who had known him that his spirit was raw and vulnerable regading his size. According to my mother’s elder sister, our favourite aunt (who could count up to ten in Bushman and utter his formal greeting for our delight although i
nvariably she went dangerously purple in the process), it was fatal to remark on the Bushman’s smallness in his presence. More, it was often perilous to show in one’s bearing that one was aware of dealing with a person smaller than oneself.

  Our old ‘Suto hands strongly supported my aunt with their own colourful illustrations. They said they had always been warned never to show any surprise if they unexpectedly came upon a Bushman in the veld in case he took it to imply they could have seen him sooner had he not been so small. When, unexpectedly, one ran into a Bushman the only wise thing to do was promptly to blame oneself for the surprise and say: ‘Please do not look so offended. Do you really imagine a big person like you could hide without being seen? Why we saw you from a long way off and came straight here!’ Immediately the fire in those shining eyes would die down, the golden chest expand enormously and gracefully he would make one welcome. In fact, the oldest of the old Basutos once told me one could not do better than use the Bushman’s own greeting, raising one’s open right hand high above the head, and calling out in a loud voice: ‘Tshjamm: Good day! I saw you looming up afar and I am dying of hunger.’ Europeans so often use a diminutive for that which they want to endear. But with the Bushman this mechanism is reversed. The pitiless destructive forces sent against him by fate seemed to mock his proportions until he sought perhaps to appease his sense of insecurity with a wishful vision of a physical superlative he has never possessed. So, in his rock-paintings the Bushman depicts himself in battle as a giant against other giants to such a degree that, were it not for his ‘Qhwai-xkhwe’, he would be hardly distinguishable from his towering enemies.

  But, I was told, this little man before all else was a hunter. He kept no cattle, sheep, or goats except in rare instances where he had been in prolonged contact with foreigners. He did not cultivate the land and therefore grew no food. Although everywhere his women and children dug the earth with their deft grubbing sticks for edible bulbs and roots and, in season, harvested veld and bush for berries and fruit, their lives and happiness depended mainly on the meat which he provided. He hunted in the first place with bow and arrow and spear. The heads of his arrows were dipped in a poison compounded from the grubs, roots, and glands of the reptiles of the land and he himself had such a respect for the properties of his own poison that he never went anywhere without the appropriate antidote in a little skin wallet tied securely to his person. My grandfather and aunt said that he was so natural a botanist and so expert an organic chemist that he used different poisons on different animals, the strongest for the eland and the lion, and less powerful variants for the smaller game. His arrows were made of flint or bone until he came to barter for iron with those about to become his enemies.