van der Post, Laurens. The Heart of the Hunter. New York: William Morrow and Company, 1961.

THE SONG OF THE RAIN Woman: Under the sun The earth is dry, By the fire Alone I cry. All day long The earth cries For the rain to come. All night my heart cries For my hunter to come And take me away. Man: Oh! Listen to the wind, You woman there; The time is coming The rain is near. Listen to your heart, Your hunter is here.

Growing up on his South African farm, Laurens van der Post was obsessed with the Bushmen who had lived there before him. Years later, he led an expedition into the Kalahari Desert to discover if there were any left who still lived as hunter-gatherers, with their ancient stone age culture intact. These two books describe the people he found there.

The San Bushmen, or Qhwai-xkhwe, are the first people of southern Africa. They are not closely related to most African ethnic groups, and have many physical and linguistic traits that are unique to them. Very few are left today, their lands having been taken over by Bantus, Europeans, and others.

The small bands of Bushmen van der Post found hunted eland, other antelopes, and ostriches with poisoned arrows. They were expert trackers and runners. They knew every feature of thousands of square miles of desert, so they never got lost. They gathered dozens of species of wild edible plants. Wild honey was their only luxury. They kept water in the shells of ostrich eggs, and made beads of them. Besides a few weapons, beads, tools and animal skins, they owned nothing. They moved frequently, carrying their possessions in skin bags and building new brush shelters on arrival. They were supremely healthy and physically fit.

The Bushmen van der Post came to know were dignified, generous, and sensitive. They were brave in the face of physical hardship, but their self-confidence could not withstand contact with Europeans for long:

Indeed I have lived with primitive people so much that I have an inkling now of the almost paralytic effect our mere presence can have on their natural spirit. It is as if, when they first encounter us, the independence of our minds from instinct and our immense power in the physical world, which to them is not composed of inanimate matter but is another manifestation of master spirits, trap them into the belief that we are gods of a sort. Either they feel it impossible to be themselves in our presence, or they find it so exhausting to maintain even a part of their selves… that the Bushman is left as a rule profoundly humiliated, without any shred of honour with himself…

The Bushmen lived in a world where every plant, animal, rock and star was a spirit who knew them. Every person was a kinsman. In the desert, no Bushman felt alone.

Our ancestors lived as nomadic hunter-gathers too, related by kinship to every other person and surrounded by nature and spirits. van der Post believes that we’ve lost something important by becoming modern.

By his own admission, van der Post has no formal training in anthropology, psychology, or science, and he has loved the idea of the “wild Bushman” since he was a little boy. So, he is not wholly reliable as an interpreter of his experiences. But his thesis is compatible with what we know about Bushmen from other sources, and with what we know about other hunter-gatherer peoples around the world.

home