The Lost World of the Kalahari

by Laurens Van Der Post

  Long as it takes to define and explain all this, it was clear to me and decided in one vivid moment. How it was to be done hardly took any longer. I had led so many other expeditions to the Kalahari that the physical means came instantly to my mind. I knew at once the kind of vehicles I would use. I saw precisely where and how I would have to arrange refuelling and water points in and around the desert. I knew the kind of people I would need if the search I had in mind was to be successful, as well as the individuals I would ask first to accompany me. I had a rough idea of how long it all would take. I knew exactly the amount of money I myself could spend on such an expedition. It was obviously not going to be enough and no sooner did I realize that than I saw what I had to do to get the rest. In fact there and then all the aspects of the plan that were within reach of my own hand were worked out and determined. What took longer, of course, was the part which depended on the decisions of others and on circumstances beyond my own control. Yet even there I was amazed at the speed with which it was accomplished. I say amazed but it would be more accurate to say I was profoundly moved, for the lesson that seemed to emerge for a person with my history of forgetfulnesses, doubts, and hesitation was, as Hamlet put it so heartrendingly to himself: ‘The readiness is all.’ If one is truly ready within oneself and prepared to commit one’s readiness without question to the deed that follows naturally on it, one finds life and circumstance surprisingly armed and ready at one’s side. In fact I would say now that the tragedy of Hamlet was precisely that he always found a reason for not obeying the readiness of his own spirit. I say this not because I raised my own small problem to Shakesperian proportions, but merely for the order that the parallel helped to bring to the perplexities of my mind, and for something else that it revealed beyond: how what we sentimentalize as ‘forgiveness’ is an iron exactment of life. Indeed, life does not merely exact forgiveness but sets the example. Vengeance, revenge, and bitterness are all reactions of the retarded Corsican in ourselves: they play no role in the abiding assertion of life. It is too urgent for that and in order not to stand still in mere action and reaction, it moves on only with the effect that has freely forgiven its cause. The fact, I believe, will one day be capable of mathematical as well as emotional expression. Meanwhile here was one more proof of it for me. If anyone had deserved a rebuff from life after so many fumbled years I had. Yet I found myself pardoned and my plan welcomed as an old friend.

  There was, for instance, the response to the many letters I wrote that morning. I wrote first to Wyndham Vyan in East Africa, because there is no man in Africa whose friendship and judgement I value more. Our friendship went back to my first major Kalahari expedition after the war and since then we had served on several other missions in the same area. He was older than I and yet if I had never been conscious of the difference in years between us I think that was due to the way he had lived. He had never sidestepped his problems but always lived them out in the circumstances wherein he encountered them, so there was no drag of the past holding him back from my own day. I never felt him to be anything but a truly contemporary person. This was all the more remarkable because he belonged to the generation which lost its finest flower in the First World War. He himself came out of it so old with killing and so sick at heart that he had only one clear instinct and that was to get away from the scene as quickly as possible. He went out to East Africa to one of its remote frontier areas and started a ranch of his own. He spent a great deal of money in stocking it with some of the finest sheep and cattle from Britain. Then, for years, with increasing dismay he watched Africa defeat his privileged and well-born stock. As fast as they withered and were stricken down he replaced them. He fought back with all the resources of European science and spent the rest of his money. But the campaign steadily went against him. A world slump joined in the formidable physical forces ranged against him. Then one day, when his fortunes were at their lowest, he was out among his shrinking herds in the heat of the day and noticed that while his own herd, their eyes red, sore, blinking at the sun, lay with heaving flanks in the shade of thorn trees, some native cattle of his Somali herdsmen grazed eagerly in the open close by, untroubled by heat or sunlight, their eyes clear and serene and their fur-less coats sleek and shining. He stood still with amazement that he had not seen the meaning of it before. He realized at once that all these years he had been trying to impose Europe on Africa without regard to its own conditions of being. He there and then turned round not only on his heel but in his mind. He got rid of all his over-refined European stock and replaced it with what he could buy, or barter, from Somalis. He then devoted the same methods, care, and sense of purposeful selection which is one of the European’s great gifts to my native continent, to the cattle forged in the fire of Africa. The response of Africa, he says, was truly staggering and today he has one of the largest and most successful ranches in the country. More, in winning his own battle, he won also a battle for Africa because he has given it a vigorous cattle that can rival any other in the world. To hear him talk about cattle is to hear an artist in flesh and blood discussing his works. This interest has absorbed all his peace-time life. He has been to Europe only once between wars and that visit endeared Africa all the more to him. He has stayed unmarried and I have teased him saying he has not a pinup girl but a pin-up heifer beside his bed. He loves his cattle so much that he hates selling them. He knows them individually, despite their thousands, and one of the most resolved moments I have ever spent in Africa was sitting with him in the grass while he smoked a pipe of Magaliesberg and watched his great white, hump-back cows with their purple eyes and gentle ways grazing around us. Once when I stood with him by the walls of a ruined city of another vanished race in Southern Rhodesia, he took his pipe out of his mouth and said slowly: ‘I bet whoever built these walls built them to keep their cattle safe at night.’ He was with me deep in the Kalahari when Mau-Mau struck, and knew at once how serious it was. His own ranch was in the heart of Mau-Mau country and he had close on two hundred Kikuyu working for him. From the start he saw the tragedy and its causes in all their complex wholeness. His imagination made straight for the centre of the storm and stood fast there. He was another confirmation, for me, of how one is free of the tyranny of the many in life only by committing oneself totally to the service of the one. Because Vyan had mastered his own job in such a living way he had been rewarded with a capacity for understanding much besides. From the start of the Mau-Mau trouble his main concern was that his countrymen of all races and colours, and not least the people who had produced Mau-Mau, should not compromise such honour as was left to them, and should emerge from the disaster with hope of a greater future.

  In writing to Vyan now I was certain that he more than any other would appreciate fully what I had in mind. I hoped also that my letter might coincide with his need for a respite. I got an immediate airmail letter in reply saying among other things: ‘How odd that you should write just now. Things are somewhat better in the country but I need a break and was about to write to you to suggest it was time we did another safari together. Thank you, I’ll be delighted to come. Let me know what I can do and bring to help.’

  At the same time I wrote to Ben Hatherall. Although he had a name with an Elizabethan ring to it and was obviously of English descent, he and his family had become so identified with my own countrymen that they regarded themselves as Afrikaans. His father was one of a small group of hardy and restless frontiersmen whom Cecil Rhodes persuaded to settle at Ghanzis, a small oasis in the Western Kalahari, to act as buffer against the German expansion which he feared from South-Western Africa. They had hardly settled there, when the Jameson Raid and then the Boer War came to shatter Rhodes’ political power and influence in my country for good. The little community, hundreds of waterless miles between them and the nearest railway and a thousand from their capital, was forgotten. The climate was against them, but with the help of friendly groups of Bushmen they managed to survive and to establish themselves austerely in th
e desert. Ben was born there and as a little boy had to bear a man’s burden of deprivation and tribulation. His nurses and playmates were Bushman. He learnt their language and their ways and acquired much of their unique knowledge of the life of the desert. As a boy of nine, barefoot in the full heat of summer, he had to help his stern father drive the cattle that was their livelihood from one precarious waterhole to another for hundreds of miles across the burning desert to a disdainful market in Mafeking. At night he took a man’s turn to defend the uneasy cattle from lion. I do not know whether it was then that he learnt to shoot with a man’s rifle but it was early in life. As a young man his exploits as a shot, hunter, tamer of horses, and pioneer in the desert were legendary. His parents, with the Boers’ immense respect of learning, skimped themselves and saved every penny to send him, for a few years, to school in Kimberley. When he returned to the Kalahari he became school-master to the children of the desperate little community because the greatest Empire on earth, in its moment of supreme prosperity, had turned down a petition for a school on the grounds that it could not afford it. For twelve years, too, he represented his people on the advisory council of a well-meaning but impoverished administration far away in Mafeking and fought a a hard, and largely vain, battle for their rights. He, too, had accompanied me on my first post-war expedition and from the start we were friends. He was for me an Afrikaner version of Allan Quatermain and embodied much of what was best in our national character before power over the defenceless and the arrogant political intellectualism of the Cape had corroded it. He was self-reliant, resourceful, unafraid of man, beast, or opinion; generous, with boundless capacity for endurance and the manners of an aristocrat.

  From him too I heard by return airmail, saying among other things: ‘It is strange I was about to write and ask how you were. We had not heard for so long and felt you should come to us soon again. Of course, I am with you all the way, but I have just started a new farm, so would you please remember I should get back, God willing, when the rains break to do my ploughing. And, Colonel, if we are going back to the Kalahari in the summer don’t you think you should bring a hat with you for once?’

  I took such swift and characteristic responses from Vyan and Hatherall to be what the ancient Chinese would call ‘confirmatory signs’ and, as they had it, that it ‘would further to continue’. Vyan and Hatherall, too, had formed a friendship firmly based on a wide, shared experience and a deep love of natural Africa. They enjoyed each other’s company so much that I had often seen a camp, sulky with fatigue at the end of a hard day, recover grace just by watching the two of them, smoking and talking imperturbably together. I felt with their acceptance the foundations of the expedition were laid on rock – though it was as well, perhaps, that I did not know then how severely that structure was to be tested.

  I wrote on the same day to the Rover Company. On a previous Government mission I had tried out a Land-Rover and had been impressed with its performance. There were disadvantages, of course, compared to the heavy three and six-ton vehicles that had been provided for me by the Government. The Land-Rovers’ carrying capacity was smaller, but they consumed less and, in comparison, skimmed lightly over the deep sand. In the past one of my great problems had been that my trucks devoured almost as much they carried. To cool their over-heated engines they used more rare and precious water than fuel. But the Land-Rover, on my previous expedition, had not boiled once and its fuel consumption had been only one-third that of the other vehicles. It was far more manoeuvrable and its daily range, as a result of all these factors, far greater. The saving in time and weight on water, containers, and fuel I believed would more than offset their lesser carrying capacity. My only fear was that, because of import control in South Africa and the long waiting list for Land-Rovers in the country, I would be unable to get the vehicles I needed in time. But I had an immediate and courteous reply and, within a few days, a meeting, first with John Baldwin, and then with Geoffrey Lloyd Dixon, of the headquarters staff of the Company. I explained what I had in mind and, although I know the English so well even I was surprised by the imaginative consideration they gave to my problem. They instantly promised me priority on any vehicles I needed, and offered to build extra petrol and water tanks into the vehicles I chose before they were despatched to Africa.

  The next step was concerned with matters of which I had no experience. Part of my plan was to make a documentary sound film of the life of the Bushman. It seemed to me there could be no quicker, surer, and more complete way of recording his life for the future. Moreover I had a hunch that such a film could also be made into an original television series and some of its rights sold in advance to help me pay my way. Unhappily I knew nothing of the technique of films, and could hardly operate a Box Brownie. Before I could go any further therefore I had to do three things: (1) Find out whether any television authority would be interested in such a plan. (2) If so, get hold of suitable technicians to accompany me. (3) Work out with my own technicians what we would need in equipment and transport.

  So I went first to the B.B.C. because I believe it to be the best medium of its kind in the world. In the war I remembered how its quality got through even to the illiterate South-East Asians in a Japanese prison camp. If they wanted to stress to me that a rumour was really true they always added: ‘This, Tuan, is B.B.C.’ In my own contacts over many years I had always found it searching, accessible, and imaginative. I was not disappointed. The people I saw, Mary Adams in particular, were truly interested and added only that it would help decisively if I could organize my own film unit.

  I had already thought a great deal about a film unit and had two major possibilities in mind. Friends of mine had for long been urging me to take on one of my expeditions a young Scandinavian film producer, of whom they expected great things. Then there was another, a continental freelance film producer called Eugene Spode. I knew him personally because a South African friend of mine had introduced us some five years before, asking me to write some lines for a short and impressive war film he had made. Since then I had met Spode quite often in London. He seemed to be an unusual and gifted person: not only painter, musician, and scenario writer but also composer, producer, and camera-man. He hardly spoke a word of English and conversation with him was either in French, of which he had some knowledge, or through my friend as interpreter. My friend, who knew him extremely well, was certain he needed only a fair chance to prove himself a film maker of note. But, more important to me, I liked Spode and my imagination was touched by all I was told of him. It is true that he struck me as a profoundly unhappy person and perhaps I should have been warned by that. I don’t believe that a truly creative person can be permanently as unhappy as Spode appeared to be. But my friend had told me of his suffering under Nazis, Communists, Fascists, and other lesser tyrannies of the modern world and society which adequately explained this. I was told also of the intensely heroic role he had played in the resistance movement of his country. More, I was told he loved Africa, had been there several times, and had even made a documentary film of it. His record in the war and his reputed knowledge of Africa decided me. I chose Eugene Spode. I wrote to my friend in Africa for his address and again got an immediate response, ending with the sentence: ‘I have always known you and Eugene would do great things together in Africa.’

  My sense of the ‘togetherness of things’, already flattered, now became proud of yet another positive response to my planning. I sent Spode a telegram and he came at once to meet me in London. I had never seen him so charming, happy, and confident. He was like a person renewed. I told him all I could about the conditions under which I expected he would have to work. I told him also about Vyan and Hatherall and the qualities that made them so important to me and the expedition, and about the black people I hoped to take with us. I stressed how decisive personal relationships would be on the journey. I told him, with irony deferred, of the lesson commended to me when I was very young by a great hunter and gentleman: ‘Little old cousi
n, if you want to go into the blue in Africa, always pick your companions only from among men you have known for at least five years. And the chances are, even then, that you will pick the wrong one.’ I found myself talking to him as I do to all people who are drawn to my native land. I described Africa as a great, exacting, and often shattering personality. I told him of the extremes of heat, the glare and the glitter that attacked one’s senses, the parasites, spiders, ants, snakes, and scorpions, and the incessant sapping of one’s physical endurance and drag on one’s watchfulness. Later, I remember becoming lyrical and saying something to the effect that Africa was a great and unfulfilled barbaric woman still seeking a worthy lover and testing all newcomers by every caprice, extreme, and stratagem of her unfathomable nature; but that those who were not discouraged from loving her would in the stillness of an unbelievable night find themselves suddenly rewarded with a tenderness, delicacy, and absence of reserve that passed European comprehensions.

  Spode smiled sweetly at this and reminded me gently that, after all, he had been to Africa and knew all this. He was certain that, as always, he would love Africa, and was prepared to take over from me the entire responsibility of organizing the film side of the expedition. At this I said I would have to insist on only one thing: I must be responsible for the story and the words of the film, though how it was translated into its film idiom, of course, would be his entire concern.