BOOKS
93
STRUGGLE
IN AFRICA
IN
A
PROVINCE,
by
Laurens VanDer Post. Coward-McCann,
$2.50.
In A Province
is a first novel by a young Dutch South African.
Greeted by English literary critics with salvos of acclaim this initial work
by
Laurens Van Der Post has been almost unanimously neglected by
American reviewers. Though less clear in its revolutionary pronounce–
ments than either Malraux's
1J1an's Fate
or Silane's
Fontamara,
it is yet
a worthy contribution to the young, virile body of literature of revolution
which is progressively developing throughout the entire world today.
The youth and early manhood of Johan van Bredepoel, an orphan,
around whom and through whose consciousness the entire movement of the
novel takes place, are spent at Vergelegen, in the African farm country
with Mynheer Willem van Bredepoel and Tante Margrieta. Johan's
aunt and uncle who emigrated from Holland as young people after a con–
siderable decline in the fortune and position of their family attempted
to establish themselves in the barbarian country of great promise; for a
short time they were successful, but after the War (the Boer War, un–
doubtedly, though it.is never specifically mentioned by that name) the whole
effort of ·reconstruction exhausted them : the farm was neglected and the
elder van Bredepoel entered politics.
If
anything went wrong, the War
was blamed; "the war seemed to have cut roughly through their psycholo–
gical development, at the same time sealing it arbitrarily ... the rhythm
of their lives, in the fullest sense of the word, had been broken, and they
were incapable of taking it up again. At the same time Johan noticed
in himself and in other boys that the parent generation had conveyed to
all of them its own special sense of discord-a discord which had its roots
not in the lives of the children but in a life long since gone. And because
this discord persisted long after the circumstances which had created it,
it was the source of much confusion, and gave the lives of people like
Johan an emotional content which they could not properly possess.
But
what the lives of the elders lacked in breadth they made up for in faith:
a vigorous Dutch Protestant morality.
Young Bredepoel's education was haphazard, and when his guardians
were away from home (as they were wont to be most of the time) he was
left with native servants or a tutor. Mcneer Broeksma, a Pangloss-like
instructor, sceptical and with acid .disposition, threw Johan back on him–
self ... "he was gradually driven to seek companionship in books rather
than in people. No control was exercised over his reading, so that presently,
although interested in many points of view, he found he had none that he
could strictly call his own; between his knowledge and his experience
there was a very wide gap." This deep-rooted hiatus existed throughout
the span of Johan's entire life, first in Vergelegen, later in Port Benjamin,
a coastal city where he was employed as a clerk, and finally in Paulsted
on the border of Bambuland,-and was the cause of his varied quixotic
activities.
The theme of the book as a whole is the irreconcilable conflict be–
tween bourgeois society and the individual. In one sense the book is an
indictment of bouregois society (its descriptions and analyse3 of life on an
