Laurens Van Der Post
Posted: Tue May 10, 2011 9:36 pmThirty years ago I started reading Van Der Post's works, starting with "A Story Like the Wind", written in 1972, "Lost World of the Kalahari" (1958), "The Heart of the Hunter", and "A Far Off Place", just to name a few. Mr. Van Der Post's writings all show his intense love and insight into his native country of South Africa. For those of you who have not read his works, you are missing something. He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth. I wonder why Wilbur Smith has not? Too much sex in his novels, perhaps?
My wife and I recently took a cruise to the South Pacific on a Holland-American liner, during which I was privileged to share many conversations with an elderly gentleman who had been born in Djakarta, Indonesia. Listening to him tell of how his family had lived there for more than 300 years, and lost everything in the aftermath of independence really brought into focus some of Wilbur Smith's feelings about his family's long tenure in Rhodesia and its subsequent displacement. We here in the United States share a common history with the Dutch Indonesians and the British/Dutch South Africans in that we were all colonialists (As were the Canadians). I cannot imagine millions of Americans being uprooted and their properties being turned over to Native Americans.
My wife and I recently took a cruise to the South Pacific on a Holland-American liner, during which I was privileged to share many conversations with an elderly gentleman who had been born in Djakarta, Indonesia. Listening to him tell of how his family had lived there for more than 300 years, and lost everything in the aftermath of independence really brought into focus some of Wilbur Smith's feelings about his family's long tenure in Rhodesia and its subsequent displacement. We here in the United States share a common history with the Dutch Indonesians and the British/Dutch South Africans in that we were all colonialists (As were the Canadians). I cannot imagine millions of Americans being uprooted and their properties being turned over to Native Americans.