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Book Review, 01 November 2001 The myth within the myth of Africa’s white mystic
Storyteller: the many lives of Laurens Van der Post Some say the boundary is a fine line. Maybe it is better to make it two lines. Above one is unquestioned fact. Below the other are lies, untruth. The gap between the two lines is a confusing land of oversimplifications and half-truths where in aiming for goodness we sometimes do evil and find truth when we seemed to be in the land of lies. Sir Laurens Van der Post made his name with books like Journey into the Interior and The Lost World of the Kalahari, which combined travel-writing, story-telling, philosophy and psychology in a way that for many people answered the fundamental questions about life. He painted Africa as an Eden, retaining a spirituality that the industrialised world had lost. He popularised the psychological insights of Carl Jung: white racism, he said, was based on the denial of the dark side of our natures. Africa, he said, was free from the psychological constraints that fettered Western man and Westerners had much to learn from Africans. Van der Post helped form a mild anti-apartheid movement and his writings gave a spiritual underpinning to the white liberal cause in South Africa. To many he became the white mystic who understood the mysterious heart of Africa and who somehow knew the way to racial harmony on the continent. Had Van der Post called his famous travel book 'Venture into the Imagination' rather than Venture into the Interior he could have got away with the inventions and exaggerations exposed in this biography. It would still have been a great book. As the title of J.D.F. Jones’s biography says, Van der Post was a great storyteller. But Van der Post claimed his account of his experiences among the African Bushmen was factual. He went further, suggesting that the experiences (which he invented), the people (he had not interviewed) and the places (he did not visit) contained great eternal truths about the Meaning of Life. They were, he said, supercharged with deep truth. Jones, a former Financial Times journalist, was given exclusive access to Van der Post’s papers. He is reported to have been shocked at what he found. Members of the Van der Post family regretted that this book came to be written and it is hardly surprising that Van der Post himself blocked any attempt to write a biography during his lifetime. Van der Post had a dramatic life, he added other even more dramatic versions, and Jones, like an archaeologist scraping away the layers, dispassionately examines all the evidence until he suggests which version of Van der Post’s life, if any, might be true. Jones digs back to Van der Post’s birth to a poor Afrikaner family in 1906. 'There are fantasies, mysteries, evasions in Laurens’s life from the beginning', he writes. And they continued throughout his life. Jones never suggests what for others may seem obvious: Van der Post was an out-and-out fraud. The untruths of Laurens Van der Post extended beyond his writings into his personal life. In the Second World War he posed as a lieutenant-colonel when he was only a captain. In Java in 1942, he mysteriously surrendered to the Japanese, leaving sick and wounded men behind on a mountainside while he took all his company’s medicines. He invented a childhood in South Africa quite different from the reality, created a Bushman nanny and new lives and loyalties for his Afrikaner parents. From then on he became a compulsive fantasist, constructing a biography with people and events he had read about imported into his imagined life. Again, had he been a novelist who was honest about his bizarre private life, he might have been excused a little, or even a lot, of bad behaviour. Instead he continued to play the saint, the mystical wise man who had looked pure goodness in the face and it knew him. If anyone challenged him, he first deployed his considerable charm, then ignored them or turned nasty. The most damning episode from Van der Post’s private life is when, in his forties, he accompanied a 14-year-old girl, the daughter of friends, on a boat from South Africa to England. On the boat he seduced and impregnated her. He never gave any assistance to the girl or even acknowledged their child. This is the man who wormed his way into the affections of Prince Charles and, even more dangerously, Margaret Thatcher. He was a disastrous influence on her policy on Africa. He was the central figure in a group of 'old Africa hands' who believed that the 'real' African dressed in skins, hunted wild animals and lived close to mother earth. They spoke of Africans in terms of tribesmen and exulted in warriors and hunters. In South Africa Van der Post backed 'the Zulus' or at least those Zulus who followed Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi, the leader of Inkatha. He saw Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress as un-African, Communist-inspired. He ignored the fact that there was a huge urban Zulu population who supported the ANC and who despised the artificial 'tribal structures' of the rural Zulus which the apartheid regime had done so much to foster. The same apartheid government also secretly supplied weapons to Chief Buthelezi’s Inkatha movement and encouraged it to use them against civilian black South Africans throughout the 1980s and early 90s to spread terror and panic. Hundreds of ordinary people were murdered by Buthelezi’s thugs both in KwaZulu and in Johannesburg. Three years after Van der Post’s death, I managed to catch Lady Thatcher at F.W. de Klerk’s book launch. I asked about Buthelezi and Van der Post. Her eyes glazed over as she described Van der Post as a 'dream of a man', one of a few who had changed her life, 'so spiritual and yet so practical at the same time'. It was he, she confirmed, who had introduced her to Buthelezi, whom she also praised as a great leader and, yes indeed, he had always been welcome at Downing Street in the early 1990s – the very period when his followers were committing atrocities. Even when pressed, she refused to say anything good about Nelson Mandela. The tragedy is that Van der Post, revealed in this lucid and readable biography, had such a great and appalling influence.  |
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