Laurens Van der Post
| Sir Laurens van der Post | |
|---|---|
| Born |
Lourens Jan van der Post 13 December 1906 Philippolis, Orange River Colony |
| Died | 16 December 1996 (aged 90) London, England |
| Resting place | Philippolis, Free State, South Africa |
| Education | Grey College, Bloemfontein |
| Spouse(s) | Marjorie Edith Wendt (1928-1949) Ingaret Giffard (1949-death) |
| Children | 4 |
| Parent(s) | Christiaan Willem Hendrik and Lammie van der Post |
| Family | Christiaan Willem Hendrik van der Post Snr married to Bernice (Reed) van der Post |
Sir Laurens Jan van der Post, CBE (13 December 1906 – 16 December 1996), was a 20th-century Afrikaner author, farmer, war hero, political adviser to British heads of government, close friend of Prince Charles, godfather of Prince William, educator, journalist, humanitarian, philosopher, explorer and conservationist. However, his reputation suffered after his death.
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, and 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 criticised 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.
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