Laurens van der Post was a South African author, political advisor, explorer, and humanitarian. In 1925, he began working as a reporter with The Natal Advertiser and a year later co-founded a satirical magazine that was critical of imperialism. As a reporter at The Cape Times at the end of the decade, van der Post began to write more frequently against racist government policy in South Africa. His first novel, In a Province (1934), described the tragedy of racial divisions. During the Second World War, he volunteered for the British Army and served in Africa, the Middle East, and Indonesia. For three years, he was held in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, where he helped to organize a “camp university.” After the war, he returned briefly to South Africa before moving to the United Kingdom after the introduction of apartheid. While working for the British Colonial Office in Africa during the 1950s, he published a number of books about his travels, including his bestselling The Lost World of the Kalahari (1958), which was also a BBC television series. During this time, he also published Flamingo Feather (1955), an anti-communist novel about a Soviet plot to annex South Africa. Van der Post’s contributions to the “noble savage” myth in his writings about the Bushmen provided the inspiration for the colonial government’s creation of the Central Kalahari Game Reserve in 1961. After retirement, he was involved in conservationist movements and the expansion of higher education. He was also a close friend of Margaret Thatcher and an influence on her government’s South Africa policy. He died in 1996. Since, a number of authors have questioned the veracity of van der Post’s claims about his biography and experiences.
In his lecture, van der Post argued that the symbol was the most important subject not only for artists, but also for priests, scientists, and politicians in the current moment. The symbol was the most neglected terrain of the human soul, but it was in the world of the symbol where warnings and meanings are determined and where “the future sings to all ears that can understand.”
Van der Post’s lecture was held on November 23, 1965. Listen to an excerpt below.