Bush Country Boyhood

A STORY LIKE THE WIND by LAURENS VAN DER POST 370 pages. Morrow. $7.95.

This rich memoir in the form of fiction does honor to a part of African culture now mostly dissipated or adulterated: the tribal way of living that civilized people are pleased to call primitive. The author, who knows Africa well and has written of it memorably in The Lost World of the Kalahari, argues in a passionate introduction that the nature of primitive Africa must somehow be recorded so it will "always be there to help thaw the frozen imagination of our civilized systems so that some sort of spring can come again to the minds of men."

The book, which is the account of a solitary white boy's troubled 14th year on his family's ranch in southern Rhodesia, gracefully carries a fairly heavy load of earnest emotion. During a year of violent events that bring his childhood to an end, young Franc,ois Joubert, whose Huguenot ancestors settled in Africa 300 years ago, encounters three men of extraordinary nobility: a Bushman-hunter, a prophet and healer, and a Matabele chief. Their influence moves him toward a rejection of European attitudes.

The plot turns on an invasion from the troubled north by strange blacks equipped with European weapons and a shabby Asian brand of revolution. Francois, a loyal Bushman friend and the pretty 13-year-old daughter of a neighboring rancher escape the massacre by taking refuge in a cave, which Francois has stocked with provisions. There is a strong note of never-never to the story, and while the time apparently is the late 1950s, the impression persists that the author really is saying farewell to his own childhood in Africa decades before.

What raises the book beyond a simple adventure is the exceptional quality of Van der Post's observations of the bush country. He knows the intricate workings of a Matabele law court and the curious fact that baboons teach their young to count aloud to the number three (but not beyond, because to baboons all numbers higher than three are simply "a hell of a lot"). Van der Post is right: the reader finds with great pleasure that such knowledge does thaw the civilized imagination.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.