A Far Off Place Read online

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Author

  By the same author

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Prelude

  1 The Owl and the Cave

  2 Another Kind of Music

  3 Footpath in the Night

  4 An Amen of Annihilation

  5 The Dawn of Heitse-Eibib

  6 The Way of the Wind

  7 An Order of Elephants

  8 Lamb-snatcher’s Hill

  9 Kwa’mamengalahlwa

  10 Pillar of Fire

  11 The Voice of the Lion

  12 Below the Horizon

  13 The Singing Tree

  14 The Great Thirstland

  15 Hunter’s Testament

  Copyright

  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 book 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.

  By the same author

  *

  IN A PROVINCE

  VENTURE TO THE INTERIOR

  THE FACE BESIDE THE FIRE

  A BAR OF SHADOW

  FLAMINGO FEATHER

  THE DARK EYE IN AFRICA

  THE LOST WORLD OF THE KALAHARI

  THE HEART OF THE HUNTER

  THE SEED AND THE SOWER

  JOURNEY INTO RUSSIA

  THE HUNTER AND THE WHALE

  A PORTRAIT OF JAPAN

  THE NIGHT OF THE NEW MOON

  A STORY LIKE THE WIND

  For

  Laurens Kuno and John Christian van der Post.

  My wife, Ingaret Giffard who edited the book

  with such concern for its meaning. And in

  memory of Vetkop (Fat-head) mentioned in

  A Story Like the Wind, and Arrie, a Hottentot

  who appeared in our lives without preamble of

  family names or personal history and vanished

  with Vetkop into the turmoil of the World

  War, leaving us only with the glow of the

  natural love they had for children and a

  dazzle of stories to mark their sojourn

  among us.

  A Far-Off Place

  Laurens van der Post

  “The story is like the wind,” a Bushman called Xhabbo said.

  “It comes from a far-off place and we feel it.”

  Prelude

  ‘A FAR-OFF PLACE’ is a continuation of A Story Like the Wind. Yet it is self-contained, so that it can be read on its own provided this much of its predecessor is remembered.

  A Story Like the Wind is an account of the life of a boy about to become a man. His name is François Joubert, and he is born in the remote interior of southern Africa. He is the son of Pierre-Paul Joubert, a distinguished educationalist who had been totally ostracised by the European community, because of his emancipated attitude to his black and coloured countrymen. As a result a career to which he is utterly dedicated comes abruptly to an end.

  He goes to one of the most inaccessible parts of the country, deep in the north-western bush. There he establishes a vast farming enterprise and tries to make it a model of a larger world to come without discrimination on grounds of race, creed or colour. He deliberately chooses this remote country on the banks of a great river, the Amanzim-tetse, because it is close to the lands of a branch of the great Matabele people, as yet comparatively uncontaminated by contact with European colonial society and still integrated in an authentic primitive pattern of Africa.

  The farm is called Hunter’s Driftfn1 because it is close to where one of the oldest roads in Africa, the Punda-Ma-Tenka, or Hunter’s Road, crosses the river. On this road, even at this late, twentieth-century hour, there is still a constant and colourful flow of human traffic between the settled, increasingly metropolitan Africa of the south and the vast and comparatively untouched interior to the north. The homestead itself is a contemporary version of the home built by the first Jouberts who fled from the Huguenot persecution in France after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. They had established themselves in 1688 in the then remote uplands of the Cape of Good Hope.

  Pierre-Paul persuades an off-shoot of a distinguished Matebele clan living nearby at Osebeni, the Sindabele word meaning a place by the river, to join him in his enterprise, and develop the farm not as paid servants but honoured partners. Hunter’s Drift prospers and expands rapidly, because from a railway siding close by it, it supplies a great mining city with most of its meat, fruit, milk and vegetables. His Matabele partners call him ‘the great white bird’ because his unexpected appearance among them was almost like that of the descent of a rare new bird out of the sky. But in his own household he is known as Ouwa—meaning an old wagon for, as one of the coloured people tells François, his father carries so many people with him through life.

  Pierre-Paul is married to a beautiful, highly educated, sensitive, intelligent woman of marked character who fully shares his aspirations. She is never called anything but Lammie, the little lamb, by everyone involved in the Hunter’s Drift experiment. The relationship between Lammie and Ouwa is unusually complete. It is almost impossible to imagine an enlargement of the love which it exemplifies. When, many years after their marriage, Françoise is conceived, however surprising it sounds, it is yet understandable why Lammie, in her announcement of the event, refers to it as the “coming of another little person” into their lives.

  The consequences of such an approach to their one and only child are as profound as they are subtle in the evolution of François’s character. Although Lammie’s love of her son is never in doubt, it is hard to know whether the dignity implicit in such a concept is not conferred on François too soon, and that he might not have welcomed a little less honour and somewhat more immediate and less conceptualised love. As a result, he turns for more spontaneous manifestations of human feelings to the coloured and black people around him.

  First of all there is his old nurse, Koba. Koba is a survivor of the cruelly persecuted and almost vanished first people of Africa, the Bushmen. Koba not only brings him up with a passionate, instinctive love but also opens wide his imagination to perhaps the oldest pattern of life to be found in the world today. Indeed he becomes so committed to it that he acquires the difficult clicking Bushman tongue as if it were his own.

  Another great source of primitive love in his life is their cook and housekeeper, a large, formidable African lady known to François
and his parents as Ousie-—little old mother—Johanna, but to the Matabele she is “The Princess of the Pots”. She is a superb cook, warm-hearted, beloved by all, and makes her kitchen, pantry, larder and quarters in the household a kingdom of her own.

  Then there is the hereditary head of the clan who have joined Ouwa at Hunter’s Drift. He is a natural Matabele aristocrat called ’Bamuthi, and becomes in the male sense to François what his old nurse Koba was to him in the female. His influence on François is wide and deep and the love between them as great as it is immediate. There is no corner of the spirit of the emerging man in François where ’Bamuthi’s presence, voice and being is not present, and no shadow in his spirit which is not illuminated by ’Bamuthi’s tender concern for what is unafraid and self-reliant in men.

  It is ’Bamuthi who names François “Little Feather,” and Little Feather he is to everyone at Hunter’s Drift, except his parents, to whom in moments of intimacy he becomes Coiske (pronounced Swaske) and in more authoritarian intervals, just François.

  Since both François’s parents are fully qualified teachers, he is never sent to school but educated entirely in the European sense of the word by his father and mother. In other and equally important underlying levels, however, he is educated in the primitive sense first by Bushman induction of old Koba, then by the example and exhortation of ’Bamuthi and the African children with whom he plays.

  This has the result that he moves through the story as a character standing in relation to Africa and its bewildering context of peoples and cultures rather as Kipling’s Kim stood to the India of Kipling’s day.

  As dear and of as great a consequence to François is his relationship with the closest friend of his parents, an almost legendary white hunter turned conservationist, officially styled Colonel H. H. Théron but known far and wide by his African name, Mopani.

  The son of a hunter himself, he has had little formal schooling. Almost the only books in his life have been, first the Bible and then books inspired by the Bible, like Pilgrim’s Progress. His university has really been the bush and veld of Africa. A world war in which he fought as a famous scout has sickened him of killing. He is a frequent visitor to François’s home. It is difficult to say who matters most to him, the Ouwa with whom he fought in the war, or Lammie, for whom one suspects he has feelings deeper than he cares to acknowledge, despite some intangible reservations about her concept of François as “another little person.”

  About his relationship with François, however, there is no doubt. He loves his “little cousin” as he calls François, as if the boy were his heir and successor. From an early age he takes François on long and dangerous patrols against the armed poachers who are always raiding his immense game reserve. He becomes accordingly in European pioneering terms to François what the noble ’Bamuthi is to him in a primitive sense.

  He is, moreover, as Ouwa often stresses to Lammie, a poet both in heart and deed, as well as a natural philosopher. As a result, therefore, he has the imagination to transform a highly dangerous confrontation with a rogue elephant of legendary proportions, Uprooter of Great Trees, into a natural ritual of initiation to manhood for François.

  Mopani has a habit of arriving at Hunter’s Drift on a horse called Noble, always accompanied by two ridgebacks of illustrious pedigree, a great hunting dog called Dingiswayo, or ’Swayo for short, and a bitch called Nandi. This tawny couple are the parents of a puppy which Ouwa brings to François on a cold winter’s day, so small that it is hidden for warmth in the pocket of his greatcoat. François calls him Hintza, after a great Amaxosa chief, but for good Bushman reasons he is compelled to call him Hin to his face.

  The arrival of Hintza in François’s life is a turning point in more ways than one. It marks the moment when he becomes conscious of himself as a person in his own right, and it coincides with the general realisation that Ouwa, his father, is far from well.

  Through François’s loving, detailed absorption in the education of Hintza he has more and more a life of his own. Yet he cannot ignore a profound dismay as Ouwa’s condition grows rapidly worse. It increases when all the doctors and specialists who are consulted can find nothing physically wrong with Ouwa.

  Ousie-Johanna, their African cook, is convinced that Ouwa has been bewitched by his European countrymen. So is ’Bamuthi. They both urge François to consult a great African seer and healer who lives some two days’ march away through the bush. The seer’s name is uLangalibalela, the Right Hon. Sun-is-Hot. François only does so when Lammie, in desperation, takes Ouwa away to the Cape of Good Hope to consult another round of specialists.

  On this hazardous journey to uLangalibalela, François and ’Bamuthi come across the first direct evidence that great and terrible changes in the life of the bush might be imminent. They narrowly escape confrontation with a group of men who are travelling by a little known and obscure route, under command of a Chinese officer, apparently to join African insurgents in the hinterland of Angola. From then on François feels guilty for not telling Mopani about these men. He keeps it secret because he feels that his visit to uLangalibalela might not meet with Mopani’s approval.

  uLangalibalela immediately diagnoses Ouwa’s illness as a curse inflicted on him by “the turning of the backs” of his European countrymen. This “turning of the backs” as the smallest Matabele boy knows, is pronouncement of an infallible sentence of death unless speedily suspended by exercise of great magic. uLangalibalela promises to do all he can to cure Ouwa, in spite of grave misgivings that he has been consulted too late. However, despite all uLangalibalela’s efforts, soon after François’s return to Hunter’s Drift, Mopani arrives with the news that Ouwa has died at the Cape, from no ascertainable cause.

  Meanwhile, François has acquired another, even greater secret. Hintza, nearly full-grown, wakes François early one morning and compels him to follow him out in the bush along a narrow track, where every night huge steel lion traps are laid, baited with meat, for the many carnivorous animals who persist in raiding the livestock at Hunter’s Drift. They arrive at the lion trap at first light to find caught in it not a lion but a young Bushman, who might have walked out of the dream of the ideal Bushman implanted in François’s imagination by his old nurse.

  François rescues the Bushman from the trap and has no difficulty, since Koba has taught him the language, in reassuring the badly injured and naturally apprehensive Bushman. He discovers that his name is Xhabbo (the Bushman word for dream). He learns that Xhabbo has just come on a long and dangerous journey from his people in the heart of the great desert, stretching for some fifteen hundred miles to the west of Hunter’s Drift right up to the edge of the Atlantic. He has done so in order to visit a vast cave deep in a hill overlooking the Amanzim-tetse river. The cave, which neither the Matabele nor even François had discovered for themselves, was once both a home to the Bushmen and a kind of temple to their god, the Praying Mantis, before the Matabele invasion of the country compelled them to seek refuge in the desert. Despite generations of exile in the desert, Xhabbo informs François that one or more representatives of his people are compelled to visit the cave from time to time to inform it of important changes in the fortunes of the Bushmen. He himself was on his way to announce to Mantis and all that the cave represents, that his own father had just died and that he, Xhabbo, had now taken over the leadership of his people.

  François manages to get Xhabbo into the cave unseen. In the days that follow he succeeds in smuggling sedatives, sleeping draughts, antibiotics and food and drink into the cave and to nurse Xhabbo tenderly until his terrible wound is healed. Since François rescued Xhabbo at first light, when the morning star was high and bright, Xhabbo gives François, who already feels he is somewhat overburdened with names, a Bushman one which is his own special salute for the planet, “Foot of the Day”. He adds a great deal to the knowledge François acquired from Koba, above all a phenomenon the Bushmen refer to as “tapping within themselves”. This “tapping” appears t
o be a physical manifestation of a profound gift for intuitive apprehension of the future.

  When at last the time comes for Xhabbo to leave he has become such a close and unique friend that François is heart-broken. Xhabbo is equally distressed. As a result, they form a pact that as soon as possible Xhabbo will return to visit François and that he will announce his coming by an unusual combination of the call of the night-plover and the bark of a jackal. He cannot return openly, of course, because his people still live in peril of all other men.

  After Xhabbo has gone, François, out of a devastating sense of bereavement, has an instinct to continue equipping the cave with provisions, food and water, medicines, guns and ammunitions, so that it is always in a state of readiness for Xhabbo’s return. He does all this, of course, in great secrecy and this secret, like that regarding the “insurgents,” keeps his Huguenot conscience in a state of unease. Yet he sees no way of sharing either of these secrets, even with Mopani.

  At the same time both François and ’Bamuthi are increasingly perturbed by strange new traffic along the Punda-Ma-Tenka road, across the ford at Hunter’s Drift and on into the even more remote interior to the north and north-west. There are several ominous encounters with aggressive African truck drivers, and one occasion on which François catches a glimpse of what he believed to be the face of a Chinese “officer”. They are also perturbed by visits of strange European priests whom Ousie-Johanna calls “the crows of God” and who purport to be representatives of the World Council of Christian Churches, on their way to help the struggle of repressed African peoples against their European oppressors.

  Mopani adds to their general disquiet by pointing out to François how even the birds in the bush have “changed their tune” and how this only happened when great destructive elements appeared to threaten the natural life of the bush.

  At this strange, uneasy moment another and more welcome change occurs. A new neighbour arrives, a distinguished colonial governor, Sir James Archibald Sinclair Monckton, K.C.M.G., D.S.C., B.A. (Cantab.). As a young district commissioner, he had fallen in love with the country of the Amanzim-tetse river and bought a concession of land next to Hunter’s Drift. Now retired, he has decided to develop his concession and to build there a new home for himself and his young daughter. He is a widower. His wife, a young Portuguese woman, the daughter of a colonial governor, was killed a few years before in northern Angola where an “army of liberation” poured out of the bush one morning and massacred some thirty-four thousand people, of whom only a few thousand were Portuguese. François, who encounters the Moncktons in the bush on his way from Mopani’s reserve to Hunter’s Drift, finds the daughter Luciana the most attractive and lovely person he has ever seen, but tends to be incapable of understanding or knowing precisely how to respond to her, because she is the first European girl he has ever met.