Lapis Magazine

Wilderness by Laurens van der Post

True wilderness remains the last great sacred temple and, in the face of modern neurosis and meaninglessness, restores the human spirit to its instinctive and natural roots.

Sir Laurens van der Post is the author of numerous works of fiction, travel, exploration, and psychology, including The Lost World of the Kalahari, Flamingo Feather, and Jung and the Story of our Time. This article is edited from a talk Sir Laurens gave entitled “Wilderness” at the Royal Geographical Society in London in 1995 on the occasion of the inauguration of the Wilderness Trust in Great Britain.

The launching of The Wilderness Trust in Great Britain has a lot to do with one of the greatest battles, perhaps the greatest battle, that mankind has ever faced, which is the battle for our planet. The trouble is that we all have been exhorting people about this battle. We’ve heard statistics from people about this battle. They know all there is to know about the danger of it. And yet we have not managed to get through to the place where the battle must be won, and that is in the minds and spirits of human beings. We think that when we have saved a rare species, a rare plant, a strip of wilderness somewhere, that we have done the task which we face. But we have not, because we do not realize what a profound revolution in the mind and spirit and heart of man is demanded. The Wilderness Trust, has I think, a great deal to do with that revolution.

I want to talk about The Wilderness Trust and exhort you to do something. I think everything has a story, and by following our own individual stories and the stories which face the central issues of one’s life and one’s time, if one follows that, one changes things, without a word having to be said. The story will do it. I am going to tell you the story about The Wilderness Trust. It’s an experience I want to convey to you. I do not want to hurl a piece of my mind at you. That is the trouble, everybody is giving everything in the world a piece of their minds. Whereas what we want is not a piece of somebody’s mind, even the best mind, so much as an open heart and an open spirit.

So here is the story of The Wilderness Trust.

The inspiration for The Wilderness Trust came from the Wilderness Leadership School in South Africa. This School has grown over many years. It is a story of a man whose name is Ian Player.

Ian Player was amongst the youngest of South Africans who went almost straight from school into the last war. He trained in the Western Desert, then fought in Italy as a trooper in the 6th South African Armoured Division. When he returned home, he had no experience except that of the war. He felt completely lost and bewildered and somehow empty of meaning. What war does to people is, it makes everything suddenly important in life again. Perhaps that is one of the attractions of it. Everything becomes a matter of life and death. In war perceptions are heightened and they have an acute meaning. After the war Ian was faced with this great battle which people have to fight in peace. He could not find what his role was or what he was going to do.

And I think it is almost as if a kind of dream pattern took over. A kind of irrational pattern took over in his life, and he decided that he was going to go to the source of one of the great rivers, called the Umgeni. He went up to the source of this river and he came down it in a very perilous way in a canoe. And he wrote a book about it which is an inner and outer exploration.

When he reached the sea what was he going to do? He sat by the sea fishing endlessly. Then one day life produced a relevant coincidence, synchronicity as it is called nowadays. He saw in a newspaper an advertisement for the post of a ranger in a remote part of Zululand. He applied for it, and he got it. It is interesting that he went to the source of the river, a river is such a “symbol of life”, and then to the sea, which is the symbol of all being, all beginning, and all ending. And there, fishing, looking inside himself for the answer. And that advertisement took him to what was to be the answer of his life.

In Zululand, as a ranger, he met a very remarkable Zulu, Magqubu Ntombela, who was older than he, already in his forties whereas Ian was only in his twenties. Ian and Magqubu became great friends. Magqubu was a remarkable Zulu, because he had taken to the ranger’s uniform as a person who comes from a long clan of distinguished soldiers and statesmen. He had been an oral historian of the Zulu people. He spoke the most beautiful Zulu, what Ian and I between us called Shakespearean Zulu.

Magqubu had had a remarkable experience as a ranger. He was bitten by a boomslang tree snake. This is the most poisonous snake in the world. At that time there was no antidote for it. There was an antidote for other snake bites but not for the boomslang, and he very nearly died. He had a near death experience. When afterwards he told me about the death experience it was extraordinarily like the death experience that the great psychologist and Swiss philosopher and scientist, Jung, had had. This experience added to the natural spirituality of Magqubu, and he took Ian in hand, and taught him all that there was to be taught about the natural life and the natural history of the natural man.

And Ian suddenly had a great flush of meaning in his life. He was completely changed. He went on working faithfully as a ranger. He felt that if nature and the combination of natural man could change him like that, and rescue him from the meaninglessness of the state in which the end of the war had left him, he felt it could do the same to other people. He tried to do this within the structure of the Natal Parks Board.

Now at that time, when I was a boy in Natal, there were only twenty white rhino left in the whole world. They had been exterminated everywhere. In this corner of Zululand where Ian was they had undertaken the task of preserving and multiplying the white rhino, and Ian had already consolidated this to such an extent that, when I last had the statistics, they were exporting 200 rhino a year to other parts of Africa and the world, re-populating Africa with white rhino. It is one of the great success stories of conservation.

But Ian felt that what was important was that nature by itself, unaided and alone, if only one could experience it, could change people. While with the Natal Parks Board he founded the Wilderness Leadership School, because it was able to do what the Natal Parks Board could not do. In 1957 at his level in the bureaucracy it was a remarkable move. Then after twenty-two years with the Natal Parks Board he resigned to work full-time on wilderness matters. He created a movement where he and this remarkable Zulu, Magqubu Ntombela-he had become a sort of white Zulu and Ntombela had become a blackwhite man-raised money and started taking people, whom they thought would one day play a role of influence-a decisive role in the shaping of human societies in the world-to the wilderness and let the wilderness itself speak to them. And it was an immense success.

Ian couldn’t get the money fast enough, and there were so many people to take and there almost wasn’t enough wilderness to take the people to. And not only adults went, because he found that people who had problems, very often adolescents, who went to the wilderness suddenly found that there was a wilderness in themselves that responded. And this is what makes the Wilderness Leadership School and The Wilderness Trust different from all other forms of conservation. Of course, everything we do we hope aids the task of rehabilitating our sorely wounded Mother Earth. Everything that we do implies that as well. But our Wilderness organizations are much more concerned with the way in which wilderness brings the human spirit back to the instinctive and natural roots with which it has lost contact. And Ian found increasingly that he was doing that.

From this the Wilderness Leadership School grew to such an extent that when apartheid was at its worst, when South Africa was a kind of international leper, Ian organized a World Wilderness Congress in South Africa, to focus people on the wilderness. People came from all over the world. It was a resounding success. We followed it up later with a World Wilderness Congress in Australia. There is a remarkable wilderness movement in Australia. On that occasion Malcolm Fraser, who understood the idiom of the wilderness, declared one of the wonders of the world the Great Barrier Reef, a human universal heritage forever. It can never be exploited for commercial or other ends. That alone made it worth it. I could tell you similar examples.

We had a World Wilderness Congress in Inverness, Scotland, out of which all sorts of remarkable books and documents came. But one of the most remarkable documents came from a great psychologist who opened the Congress and who for thirty-seven years had been a collaborator of Carl Gustav Jung, whom I think is one of the greatest philosophers and spiritual influences of our time. Dr. C A Meier opened the Congress and spoke of wilderness without and wilderness within. He found a parallel in what we were doing and what he as a psychologist was doing with human beings who came to him with a sense of meaninglessness: The great problem of our time, neurosis. The great problem of practically everything that is happening, is this loss of meaning that has been inflicted on the human spirit. And there suddenly, through his patients’ dreams, this great psychologist found wilderness was alive. It was a tremendous confirmation of what had led Ian Player instinctively to start the Wilderness Leadership School, just with that object in view.

The movement expanded in America. It had an immense response in America.

Last year a World Wilderness Congress was held in Norway. It has had an enormous impact in Norway. And the Norwegians are doing now what we did first in Africa, in their polar and the Arctic regions. It is the same pattern, because it is not a South African pattern, it’s not Ian Player’s pattern, it isn’t my pattern, it is a universal pattern. It is a pattern in the spirit and imagination of every man. Now when Ian came to see me, many, many years ago now, what he said to me made instant sense, because I had a very similar experience to the experience which Ian had. I had a bit more of the war than he had. I had nine years of war. I had three fairly horrendous years of sort of straightforward war. I had a war within a war for three and a half years within a Japanese prisoner of war camp, and I went straight to more active service when I had almost another three years, in South East Asia, of a war that wasn’t a war. The worst kind of war that you could have. After three years I saw that what we were trying to do had come to an end, that we could not contribute any more, that in a sense what we had tried to do to bring the Dutch and the Indonesians together in Indonesia had failed, and that the Dutch were resorting to war on the Indonesians. I had hoped that a commonwealth pattern could have been created. I knew the date on which an attack was going to be launched, and I thought that I was not going to take part in this, I was going to leave it. So I took the plane to Singapore and saw my Commander-in-Chief, Neil Ritchie, and told him I was going. He said “But you can’t go like that,” and I said, “I’m going, there’s no more, I’m going,” and I went.

Ritchie had a very remarkable Chief-of-Staff called Dixie Redman who had been a very distinguished soldier in both wars, and he said, “You must let him go, he has done more than can be asked of people.” When I got to Cairo, on my way to report to the War Office in London, I saw a South African military plane, and I went over and spoke to the people, and I said how much I longed to go back to Africa. They said, “Well, jump in!” I was supposed to report to the War Office, but I flew off. I didn’t know at the time, but what I was doing was in a way what Ian had done. I was going back to my source, and nothing could stop me, and fortunately I wasn’t sacked as I might have been!

I arrived late one evening, after four days of traveling, on a cold winter’s evening in Johannesburg. I went to a hotel which I had always used in Johannesburg. The porter there nearly fell over backwards, because I had been reported missing, believed killed for so long, and they all thought I was dead. The staff thought they were seeing a ghost. But I pledged them to silence, and early the next morning

I went and got a truck. I took my gun and some ammunition, and two black people joined me, and without saying a word to anyone, we made straight for the bush. We went to a part in the Northern Transvaal where the Pafuri River and Kipling’s greasy Limpopo meet, on the borders of what was then Rhodesia, South Africa, and Mozambique. It is a wonderful part. A most wonderful heavenly part of the bush in Africa, very lonely. I remember the evening when I made my first camp with these two people from Africa. I went for a walk down towards the river, and out of the bush there stepped an enormous kudu bull. A lovely bull. It is one of the most lovely antelope, with great spiral horns. It looked at me and sniffed the air between itself and me, and I thought, “God, I’m home!” I stayed there for about three weeks, and only then could I go home. I never told my people of the experience, because I thought they would not understand. I just arrived out of the blue, and nobody asked any questions. It had such an impact on me that ultimately before going back to England I took my son to give him that experience.

So I came to the same conclusion that Ian Player had, that what is left of true wilderness, what is left of the world that is near to the original blueprint of creation, are the only true churches left in life. When you go into them, without a word being said, they bring alive this ancient pattern of oneness and partnership with nature and the universe. And I felt this very strongly, and I tried to express it in my writing.

When you live with the Bushmen you find that they are rich in a way in which we have become poor. They pass on something tremendous. They talk, and they say the human being has two hungers. There is the hunger for food, but there is also the great hunger, and that is to be part of the creation. I found that this is what wilderness did for me, and this is what wilderness has done in Africa, in Australia, in America, and all over the world.

Here I have something that I want to speak for me. Once I have read it to you, I’m not going to say another word, and I hope it will give you something of what Africa can give. There is something unique that Africa can give, why Africa is important and does something that no other continent can do. It is because it talks to a very ancient level, to almost a forgotten level in the human imagination, a level to which only the heraldry of Europe refers. You know, one of the things that always puzzled me in Europe was the strange kind of nostalgia that I feel in every country in Europe I go to. I feel it in Greece, I feel it in the Mediterranean, I feel it in Britain. There is a great kind of loneliness. A great kind of aloneness. And I suddenly realized it one day. This aloneness, it is because the animals that once were in Europe have all been eliminated. Europe and Britain were stocked with animals. Look at your heraldry, it is still a relic of that ancient world.

Now, I have here with me, something written by a person some of you may know as a great travel writer. He wrote a great travel book. It’s a lovely book, it’s a great classic, it transformed travel writing in a way, and it’s by Robert Byron. And he said:

If I have a son, he shall salute the lords and ladies who unfurl green hoods to the March rains, and shall know them afterwards by their scarlet fruit. He shall know the celandine, and the frigid, sightless flowers of the woods, spurge and spurge laurel, dogs’ mercury, wood-sorrel and queer four-leaved herb-paris fit to trim a bonnet with its purple dot. He shall see the marshes gold with flags and kingcups and find shepherd’s purse on a slag-heap.

He shall know the tree-flowers, scented lime-tassels, blood-pink larch-tufts, white strands of the Spanish chestnut and tattered oak-plumes. He shall know orchids, mauve-winged bees and claret-coloured flies climbing up from mottled leaves. He shall see June red and white with ragged robin and cow parsley and the two campions. He shall tell a dandelion from sow thistle or goat’s beard. He shall know the field flowers, lady’s bedstraw and lady’s slipper, purple mallow, blue chicory and the cranesbills-dusky, bloody, and blue as heaven. In the cool summer wind he shall listen to the rattle of harebells against the whistle of a distant train, shall watch dover blush and scabious nod… and savour the virgin turf. He shall know grasses, timothy and wagwanton, and dust his fingertips in Yorkshire fog. By the river he shall know pink willow-herb and purple spikes of loosestrife, and the sweetshop smell of water-mint where the rat dives silently from its hole. He shall know the velvet leaves and yellow spike of the old dowager, mullein, recognise the whole company of thistles, and greet the relatives of the nettle, wound-wort and hore-hound, yellow rattle, betony, bugle and archangel. In autumn, he shall know the hedge lanterns, hips and haws and bryony. At Christmas he shall climb an old apple-tree for mistletoe, and know whom to kiss and how.

He shall know the butterflies that suck the brambles, common whites and marbled white, orange-tip, brimstone, and the carnivorous clouded yellows. He shall watch fritillaries, pearl-bordered and silver-washed, flit like fireballs across the sunlit rides. He shall see that family of capitalists, peacock, painted lady, red admiral and the tortoiseshells, uncurl their trunks to suck blood from bruised plums, while the purple emperor and white admiral glut themselves on the bowels of a rabbit. He shall know the jagged comma, printed with a white c, the manx-tailed iridescent hair-streaks, and the skippers, demure as charwomen on Monday morning. He shall run to the glint of silver on a chalk-hill blue-glint of a breeze on water beneath an open sky-and shall follow the brown explorers, meadow brown, brown argus, speckled wood and ringlet. He shall see death and revolution in the burnet moth, black and red, crawling from a house of yellow talc tied half-way up a tall grass. He shall know more rational moths, who like the night, the gaudy tigers, cream-spot and scarlet, and the red and yellow underwings. He shall hear the humming-bird hawk moth arrive like an air-raid on the garden at dusk, and know the other hawks, pink sleek-bodied elephant, poplar, lime, and death’s head. He shall count the pinions of the plum moths, and find the large emerald waiting in the rain-dewed grass.

All these I learnt when I was a child and each recalls a place or occasion that might otherwise be lost. They were my own discoveries. They taught me to look at the world with my own eyes and with attention. They gave me a first content with the universe. Town-dwellers lack this content, but my son shall have it.

Come, and join with us in The Wilderness Trust, so that we can make certain that your sons and their sons, everywhere in the world, here and in Africa, also have it.