Testament to the Bushmen

Testament to the Bushmen bears witness to the present plight of the Bushmen of the Kalahari. It is also a voyage of rediscovery for Sir Laurens van der Post whose earliest memories are of these gentle, storytelling people. In the long meditation with which he concludes this book, Sir Laurens sees the Bushmen as both a delightful, intelligent people in danger of destruction and, more profoundly, as `frontier scouts' on the borders of the unconscious. For Sir Laurens, the Bushmen represent the primitive in man which we strive so successfully and so tragically to hide behind the mask we call civilization. In a more significant sense the destruction of the Bushmen is the destruction of the best in all mankind. When Sir Laurens first knew the Bushmen, their mythology and customs were still a living force. The Bushmen attitudes were expressed in their pattern of life and in the rock paintings of their ancestors. But things are very different today. In a moving documentary account, Jane Taylor records factually and in detail the life of the Bushmen. She describes how traditionally they lived and painted all over southern Africa. She goes on to show how life is changing for them in their last refuge in the Kalahari Desert: how they are abandoning their nomadic hunter-gatherer existence, while retaining much of their ancient dance and ritual. Testament to the Bushmen is the story of a people who are in danger of becoming a forgotten race. Illustrated with 48 pages of colour photographs (most by Jane Taylor), Testament to the Bushmen is associated with a major television series of the same title, directed by Paul Bellinger, produced by Jane Taylor and presented by Sir Laurens van der Post.