Laurens van der Post

Sir Laurens Jan van der Post, CBE, was a South African Afrikaner writer, farmer, soldier, educator, journalist, humanitarian, philosopher, explorer, and conservationist. He was noted for his interest in Jungianism and the Kalahari Bushmen, his experiences during World War II, as well as his relationships with notable figures such as the future King Charles III and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. 

After his death, there was controversy over claims that he had exaggerated many aspects of his life, as well as his sexual abuse and impregnation of a 14-year-old girl. Van der Post was born in the small town of Philippolis in the Orange River Colony, the post-Boer War British name for what had previously been the Afrikaner Orange Free State in what is today South Africa. His father, Christiaan Willem Hendrik van der Post (1856–1914), a Hollander from Leiden, had emigrated to South Africa with his parents and married Johanna Lubbe in 1889. 

The van der Posts had a total of 13 children, with Laurens being the 13th. The fifth son, Christiaan, was a lawyer and politician who fought in the Second Boer War against the British. After the Second Boer War, he was exiled with his family to Stellenbosch, where Laurens was conceived. They returned to Philippolis in the Orange River Colony, where he was born in 1906.

He spent his early childhood years on the family farm and acquired a taste for reading from his father's extensive library, which included Homer and Shakespeare. His father died in August 1914. In 1918, van der Post went to school at Grey College in Bloemfontein. There, he wrote, it was a great shock to him that he was "being educated into something which destroyed the sense of common humanity I shared with the black people." 

In 1925, he took his first job as a reporter in training at The Natal Advertiser in Durban, where his reporting included his own accomplishments playing on the Durban and Natal field hockey teams. In 1926, he and two other rebellious writers, Roy Campbell, and William Plomer, published a satirical magazine called Voorslag (English: whip lash) which criticized imperialist systems; it lasted for three issues before being forced to shut down because of its controversial views. 

Later that year, he took off for three months with Plomer and sailed to Tokyo and back on a Japanese freighter, the Canada Maru, an experience which produced books by both authors later in life. In 1927, van der Post met Marjorie Edith Wendt (d. 1995), daughter of the founder and conductor of the Cape Town Orchestra. The couple traveled to England and, on 8 March 1928, married at Bridport, Dorset. A son was born on 26 December, named Jan Laurens (later known as John). In 1929, van der Post returned to South Africa to work for the Cape Times, a newspaper in Cape Town, where "For the time being Marjorie and I are living in the direst poverty that exists," he wrote in his journal. 

He began to associate with bohemians and intellectuals who were opposed to James Hertzog (Prime Minister) and the white South African policy. In an article entitled 'South Africa in the Melting Pot,' which clarified his views of the South African racial problem, he said, "The white South African has never consciously believed that the native should ever become his equal." However, he predicted that "the process of leveling up and inter-mixture must accelerate continually ... the future civilization of South Africa is, I believe, neither black nor white but brown."