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Sir Laurens van der Post, the writer, lecturer, traveller and environmentalist, was a confidante of Margaret Thatcher, friend to Carl Gustav Jung, guru to Prince Charles and war hero. He died in 1996, aged 90 surrounded by friends and family; he was much loved. In his lectures throughout the world and through his writing he stimulated interest in the Kalahari Bushmen of South Africa, in political causes - he was a vigorous opponent of apartheid but no fan of Nelson Mandela - in Jungian philosophy and much else besides. His books, fact and fiction, had huge sales throughout the world and led to successful television series and cinema films. He was a famous, even revered figure, and wealthy.
When I read the book that caught the imagination of the public, Venture to the Interior, I was intrigued and also puzzled. Van der Post presented a portrait of himself as an intrepid adventurer, on a British government mission to report on remote, mountainous areas of what was then Nyasaland (now Malawi). He wrote about the officials and characters he met on his journeys (thinly disguised with fictional names), painted vivid, romanticized pictures of the African bush and described the tragic drowning of a young companion. He probed deeply into his own feelings about this and other events during the expedition. He included a flash-back to his time as prisoner-of-war in Japanese occupied Java when he and the other prisoners were forced to watch the brutal execution of a Eurasian and an Ambonese man. The book, which was instantly successful, included van der Post's own gleanings from Jung among many of the other ingredients that were to make his career so successful from then on. It also reflected van der Post's own paternalist attitude to Africans. Popular sentiment about Africa in the nineteen fifties allowed him to be described as seeing with the ‘eyes of a prophet into the heart of the contemporary world’. There was a ready market for a book which included a Tristanesque passage s