The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

der Post family. 17 Even Bertolt Brecht, “socialist icon” and “one of the giants of modern
theatre” has been the subject of a “devastating demystification” in a controversial and
disputed “first full biography” written by academic and public intellectual, John Fuegi
in the mid‐1990s. 18 These controversial biographical studies were also the subject of
acrimonious debates, as reviewers, supporters, critics and family members engaged each
other through the printed word. Much of this biographic contestation concerned issues
of truth and fact, with moral and political questions also raised about the motives of
biographic assessment and criticism.
J.D.F. Jones, former foreign editor and arts and literary editor of the Financial Times had
started his research as an admirer of Laurens van der Post. With almost full access to his
papers, Jones had been given the official task of “unravelling the life” of the man who
had become “the embodiment of goodness”, criticism of whom would have been
“tantamount to sacrilege”. 19 But instead of adding to “the aura of wisdom and
spirituality” that he had accumulated, Jones’ biography revealed that Van der Post was a
man who had lied about almost every facet of his life, including his birth, origins,
education, military rank, his journeys and expeditions, whom he met and where he
went. Van der Post’s stories about himself were “inaccurate, embellished, exaggerated,
distorted”. He was, according to Jones, “a compulsive fantasist and master fabricator”. 20
The motive, it seems, behind all these lies was ambition and an urge to place himself at
16 J.D.F. Jones, Storyteller: the Many Lives of Laurens van der Post, (London: John Murray, 2001).
17 Some months after Van der Post’s death in 1996, a “gathering of the clan, friends, family and
followers” decided that the Van der Post archive would “not be open to the public, only to
selected researchers”. Even then, the collection would be “heavily censored”, as Van der Post had
left “strict instructions that personal correspondence was not to be available”. No doubt these
precautions had been prompted in part by the revelation a week after his death of an extra‐marital
seduction of a 14 ‐year old in 1953, which had resulted in the birth of a daughter, paternity of
whom Van der Post had never acknowledged. See Dea Birkett, ‘The great pretender’, The Guardian
Weekend, 13 December 1997.
18 John Fuegi, The Life and Lies of Bertolt Brecht (London, Flamingo, 1995); this book was also
published under the title Brecht and Company: Sex, Politics and the Making of the Modern Drama
(Grove/Atlantic, Incorporated, January 1994).
19 Dea Birkett, ‘The great pretender’, p 14; Lucia van der Post, ‘My father, the storyteller’, Sunday
Times Lifestyle, 18 November 2001, p 8. According to Lucia van der Post, only “highly personal”
letters, mostly to his wife, Ingaret, to Prince Charles and to Mangosuthu Buthelezi, had been
removed.
20 J.D.F. Jones, Storyteller. See Sunday Times, 9 September 2001, in which the revelations in Jones’
biography were reproduced in the newspaper’s sensationalised reportage on celebrity scandals.
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