The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

While the limitations of Jones’ biography of Laurens van der Post might lie in its attempt
merely to uncover hidden evidence as the basis of its evaluation, an approach based on
‘imagination’ and an understanding of the ‘poetic’, the ‘magical’ and the ‘mythical’
dimensions of a life need not necessarily result in a sympathetic appreciation. The
beginnings of such an approach were expressed in a short biographic study published a
year after Van der Post’s death by Dea Birkett. 25 Taking her cue from the stories he
wrote, Birkett suggested that Van der Post could be understood as a legend that he
himself had written:
An enormously gifted writer and raconteur, he discovered the
most effective way to create a world of romance and real‐life
heroes was by telling stories. But the feted storyteller’s most
fantastical tales were those he wove about his own life. 26
As an author, Van der Post established a “trademark” of “inward, psychological
journeys with treks through tough terrain”, and in his stories, he invented himself as
“the lone white, the natural man, pitted against – yet utterly in tune with – the
African continent around him”. In this storybook world, Laurens van der Post was
always “very conscious” of his setting, and “always immaculately dressed in an
outfit he thought appropriate for the occasion”. And some of the African stories he
told, such as those about “his ideal Africans”, the “far less threatening Bushmen”,
seem to have their origins in the writings of others and not, as he had claimed, in
authentic Bushman tales heard in his childhood. 27 Van der Post’s legends may have
entailed the telling of lies. But for Birkett, these lies also belonged to the world of a
storyteller, whose life was lived inside the web of the stories he told.
25 Dea Birkett, ‘The great pretender’.
26 Dea Birkett, ‘The great pretender’, p 16.
27 Dea Birkett, ‘The great pretender’, pp 16‐19. In preparation for this article, Birkett spent some
time talking with anthropologist Edwin Wilmsen, whose research has shown that the tales
recounted by Van der Post had been lifted directly out of the witings of George Stow, Wilhelm
Bleek and Lucy Lloyd. See Edwin N Wilmsen, ‘Primitive Politics in Sanctified Landscapes: The
Ethnographic Fictions of Laurens van der Post’, Journal of Southern African Studies, Vol 21, No 2,
June 1995.
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