The `Wind of Change' in 1926
                    for European Empire Around the World


This is a excerpt from the 1982 book by Laurens van der Post titled, Yet
Being Someone Other. This portion of the story occurs during his passage on
the Japanese cargo ship Canada Maru in 1926 from Port Natal, to Mombasa in
Kenya, and thru the islands `slung along the equator like a girdle of
emeralds' as Conrad's Lord Jim had found Malaysia and what is today called
Indonesian to be, and on to Japan.

This segment is included here because it serves to convey some inkling of
the love the author had for history and its deeper psychic significance than
what usually passes for the story telling of what our forebearers saw and
did. But history includes so much more than what it is usually consigned to
by this sort superficial recounting as van der Post describes in the
beginning of his 1975 biography of Carl Jung, Jung and the Story of Our Time
:

         History was written in a way that did not explain history and
     threw no light on its latent meaning. The legends and myths in
     which it has its roots and of which the dreaming process seemed so
     dynamic an element, as I had concluded in my amateur way. There
     seemed an underworld of history filled with forces far more
     powerful than the superficial ones that it professed to serve.
     Until this world was brought out into the light of day,
     recognised, and understood, I believed, an amply discredited
     pattern of self-inflicted death and disaster would continue to
     reiterate itself and dominate the human scene. I had even coined a
     name of my own for it and called it the "mythological dominant of
     history." I came to suspect that this area in myself, from which
     my childhood interest in dreams had come, was connected with it in
     a way not understood, because it was itself the subject of one of
     the most dangerous errors in our thinking. We assumed that
     "without" and "objective" were one and the same thing, as were
     "subjective" and "within." I believed that they were by no means
     synonymous and that there was something as objective within the
     human being as great as the objective without, and that men were
     subject to two great objective worlds, the physical world without
     and a world within, invisible except to the sensibilities of the
     imagination.   [pp.20-21]

This segment begins with the approach of the Canada Maru to the tropical
shores of east Africa south of the equator. It is with the sixth paragraph
that van der Post begins his explication of his own sense of the changes in
European Empire that were underway throughout the world at that time, and
the openings such change provides the possibility of for "a recharging of
the arrested post-renaissance spirit into greater and more significant forms
of being."



         In this fashion, after many days, almost precisely at noon
     (wherein, my teacher had just informed me, midnight is born), we
     had our first glimpse since we had left Port Natal, of the coast
     of East Africa. It did not cause much excitement in Plomer or
     Mori, for whom it was little more than a landmark proving how
     faultless his navigation had been. Seen from the shade of our
     little deck on a day white with heat and a haze almost as dense as
     fog, it was indeed not a dramatic sight. It appeared just a dark
     line drawn firmly on the infirm air; now and then surges of white
     of a ghostly kind against it marked the breakers of the Indian
     Ocean swell. But through the glasses that I borrowed and when Mori
     told me it was the port of Mozambique, it was another matter. I
     could then just see the flamingo pink coral below the line of the
     land, and the fort or castle resting still intact on the
     foundations Vasco da Gama had provided for it (so legend had it),
     in stones carried as ballast from Lisbon, four hundred and
     twenty-eight years before. I knew both legend and history well.
     The Portuguese had had to fight desperately against disease,
     malnutrition and stubborn rivals like the Dutch, in order to
     maintain their hold on that strategic base on their route to the
     Far East. Immediately that mere outline in the light of a day so
     fierce that it hissed like a serpent in my ears, became an
     ideogram of the kind that I had been studying that morning with
     direct access to all the emotions of endeavour and seeking that
     had brought us to Africa and, in sense, had impelled me to follow
     through as an odd sort of pilgrim of history, in the wake of Vasco
     da Gama and his successors. I continued to watch the land until it
     vanished not below the horizon but burnt out like ashes into the
     fire of the day. I went to lunch marvelling at the indifference of
     everyone at table to the event, and resolved that no matter how
     far and long I travelled I would not allow so culpable an ennui to
     overcome my spirit at any first glimpse of land after days at sea.

         At last we came to our first landfall after Port Natal. The
     drama for me was set the evening before when the Canada Maru felt
     her way delicately through the last coral water between
     Dar-es-Salaam (The Haven of Peace) and the Sultanate of Zanzibar.
     Almost on the equator now, the sky was heavy with thunder-clouds,
     black as Mohamet's coffin below but piled so high above it that
     they were pure and white in a sky of peacock blue. From somewhere
     behind them, the sun at the exit of the world enfolded all with
     wide arch-angel's wings of light, in an immense and final clasp of
     valediction. Just then we saw to the east on our starboard bow the
     sail of our first chow, all gold in the last of the sun. It came
     to us like a bird out of A Thousand and One Nights pecking away at
     the dark blue fathoms between us, as it went up one roll of the
     satin swell and then over into the gleaming stretch of
     smoothed-out water before the next swell. Behind us, the wake of
     the Canada Maru changing course became more and more calligraphic.
     English helmsmen used to speak of their steering as writing their
     names on the sea. Our helmsman seemed to be doing so with the hand
     of a Zen master recording sudden revelation and illumination. My
     excitement was heightened when I saw that, small as the Arab ship
     was, it looked an exact reproduction of the craft that I knew from
     the earliest Portuguese and Dutch lithographs and paintings. Also,
     of course, it was still bound on the same sort of occasion then as
     its predecessors had monopolised for years between the Persian
     Gulf, the coast of Malabar and Africa. A light stirring of air out
     of the east brought a sharp, provocative scent to fall over our
     ship from the pagoda of its masts to the inner sanctuary of its
     captain behind the bridge. It was the smell of cloves which grew
     in islands of coral, emerald and palm just beyond the edge of the
     dark. These cloves, I was to find, spilt out from their bales for
     inspection on the floors of the market in Zanzibar so profusely
     that I had to wade up to my knees through them. Even in our ship
     the air was heavy as if filled with the scent of pinks and
     carnations. As a result we went ashore the next day, as if
     initiated in an order of centuries.

         Yet there was little of history on show in the offshore island
     of Mombasa itself and particularly where the Canada Maru lay. She
     had been tied up at the new harbour of Kilindini to load a dull
     cargo of potash from the strange lake of Magadi in the south-east
     of Kenya. All around us were cranes, sheds, railroads and trucks
     of steel. Compounds of tin and metal, glittering piercingly in the
     sun, brought an ague offever to the heat of the shimmering day.
     Beyond a scattered and sprawling township of galvanized iron
     roofs, brick walls and dark little verandahs behind mosquito-proof
     netting, any expectation that one might have had of a continuation
     of history in stone was killed. The influence of Arabia was
     visually absent except in the loose, white, ankle-length dress of
     tall men who looked more Bantu than Hamitic as they tacked like
     sails from one sandy street to another. The atmosphere of the
     East, however, was out in force along the streets lined with
     Indian stores and eating houses. The smell of hot curry seemed to
     be as much a part of the day as the sunlight. Every now and then a
     flash of colour from some Indian lady in a sari (one of the few
     forms of dress that defies change because of its perfection of
     line and colour) appeared briefly in a pool of silver light
     between one purple shadow and another, and was as fresh and
     immediate as an explosion of cannas in Cochin.

         Yet what redeemed Mombasa was not town and modern endeavour,
     brave as it was, but the land and what issued so abundantly and
     passionately from it in vegetation. It was my first encounter with
     tropical Africa and the quick, electric-green of the thick,
     surging grass, brush, flamboyants, jacarandas, acacias already
     crowded with sun-beetles and crickets to salute the day with
     platinum voices. In a few hours Plomer and I had seen most of the
     town and hastened back to our cabin and its shade. There we were
     visited by the editor of the local paper. He was a courageous,
     independent Scot of forty who looked seventy, aged by the impact
     of the powerful, overbearing character of the land of Africa and
     its influence on his interests and expectations. It appeared that
     now he seemed to live only for the redemption of the violent
     exercise of its power and assault on body and senses during the
     day by the coming of night and alcohol. Resentment and
     disappointment were so deep in his defeated, romantic character
     that all his adjectives were pejoratives of the coarsest kind,
     uttered loudly and constantly in an abrasive voice. Plomer, who
     could never deal with violence of mind and deed in others,
     withdrew into himself and maintained a total and somewhat
     apprehensive silence which the basically insensitive Scot felt to
     be an immediate and undeserved cause of offence. I had to work
     hard to keep the peace, and succeeded in doing so only because
     even at my age I had known many people like him and understood how
     desperate human beings became when Africa did not allow their
     lives to fulfil the love and hope with which they had begun.
     Gradually, with the help of ice-cold bottles of Japanese lager,
     the Scot was reduced to relative calm. And when he heard that
     Plomer was a poet and novelist, he convinced himself that Plomer's
     withdrawal from the conversation was proof of great artistic
     sensibility. So he set out then to find common ground between them
     and talked about books.

         There was a book, he said, which had just caused the greatest
     uproar in Kenya he had ever experienced. This was Norman Leys's
     Kenya. Plomer had reviewed it for Voorslag and welcomed it as an
     attack on colour and racial prejudice. I had not read it myself
     then and when I later did so, although I basically agreed with
     Plomer, I had reservations about sitting in judgement as Dr Leys
     was. I also felt as concerned for the accused and for the
     plaintiff. Undoubtedly, however, at that moment it was a
     devastating reappraisal of the colony's history and condemnation
     of the ethics of Empire and the men who served it. Yet, not
     interested in either illumination or understanding, it was
     particularly scathing about the settlers, their great buccaneer
     and titled pioneers as also the commercial community. So I asked
     the editor if I could buy the book in Mombasa. He assured me that
     no one in the town, or even in Kenya, would be so foolhardy as to
     put the book on sale, let alone be seen in possession of it. But
     he had a copy of it in his office and would gladly let me have it,
     indeed would welcome the chance to be relieved of the burden of a
     tiresome and provocative volume. In due course he sent the Canada
     Maru's agent on board with the book wrapped in an African blanket.

         I mention this apparently trivial episode at some length
     because it was one of the first straws in what Harold Macmillan
     was to call many years later, `the wind of change', not only in
     Africa but in the European Empire everywhere in the world.
     Plomer's book, of course, was such another in a different and
     deeper level of the contemporary spirit. It was no `wind'. In
     those windless days under the mediumistic blue of Africa in the
     year 1926, it was little more than a change of atmosphere which
     foretells the breaking of a drought before the thunderclouds mass
     and the rain falls. But to us it was like a postman's knock on the
     door of our time delivering an express summons of fate. Yet, I do
     not want to imply that these immense processes of change with
     which Leys's book was connected began precisely at that time. The
     notion of a precise beginning to living things and events is a
     highly abstract and arbitrary one. In a sense all, at any and
     every moment, is a beginning, and the most one can say, perhaps,
     is that when one refers to something as having begun at such and
     such a point, one is speaking only of one awesome minute (which
     Kipling once called `unforgiving') and where a stream of endings
     are converted into beginnings as fast as they occur; then suddenly
     one can become conscious of a particular change. `Alles ist
     ubergang': `All is transition', an inscription on a church high in
     a mountain valley in Switzerland, was to inform me. So in that
     sense the day in Mombasa was part both of a time of great
     transition and of personal beginning. I accept, therefore, that I
     was predisposed to project an overwhelmingly subjective sense of
     change into the world and the larger scene of life around me. Yet,
     this book was some objective evidence of how much more there was
     of change growing great in the human spirit of the day. But, like
     its mathematical opposite, it may have possessed no substance as
     yet but only position. For I still assert there was already
     something in the heart of the darkness of Africa and that age at
     large, which marked the end of the era in which Bartholomew Diaz
     and Vasco da Gama had been instruments of `beginning'. And this
     `ending' was being made more evident daily by increasing tangibles
     of the beginnings; of cataclysmic convulsions in the lives of men
     and their societies in my lifetime; the falls of darkness; the
     trembling of the earth; the tearing apart of the heavy curtains of
     the temples of the world that always precede the birth of
     something new and unforeseen . . . except by a few whose vision of
     the future is rejected and they themselves left to the cold
     comfort of their own tears. But what then was this objective
     evidence?

         To give an example of something which deserves mention, there
     was for instance the presence there of the Canada Maru. It was, in
     its modest way, evidence of change brought about by the victory of
     Japan in the early years of the century in their war against
     Russia. The consequences of that victory for the European empires
     which were to continue to expand so confidently and brilliantly
     for another generation were, perhaps, too subtle to be understood
     by a singularly impervious age. But they were, nonetheless, lethal
     to Empire: as is said of the incurable illnesses of medicine, they
     were `terminal'. The Japanese shattered forever the European
     hubris of a power and right over the lives of non-western peoples
     all over the world, which they held to be as absolute and lasting
     as it was self-evident. Since the peoples in the empires over
     which Europe did not make the inflexible distinction which it drew
     itself between matter and spirit, but held them to be one and
     indivisible manifestations, the power of the West over their lives
     was automatically regarded for centuries as proof of a spiritual
     authority greater than they themselves possessed. The worst
     consequence of European empire, therefore, was not the
     exploitation of their imperial subjects for greed and commercial
     gain, as is held against it by its critics today. Had that been
     all there was to Empire, it could not have lasted as long, and
     engaged so much of what was good and noble in the many who served
     it with devotion to the welfare of its subjects. That dedication
     was incomparable, and particularly impressive when measured, as it
     should be measured, in the balance of values of its own time. It
     gave, I believe, far more than it took, and hurt itself in the end
     far more than it hurt others, except in the one dimension of
     Empire. There, its worldly power, so great over their lives and so
     ambivalent in their minds, had a paralytic effect on the spirit of
     the governed. It was as if they were hypnotised out of being
     themselves. They lost the will and even desire to `do' and `be' in
     their own natural right. But the Japanese defeat of Russia broke
     that spell, overnight. The paralysis of natural spirit vanished,
     and from that moment on began with a swiftly accelerating surge to
     mobilize sullen and long-arrested forces against the authors of
     empire.

         Already there was Gandhi, who had found his Damascus a quarter
     of a century before in the Port Natal from which we had just come.
     He had broken out of this paralysis of spirit and, with the
     diabolic cunning of which only the saintly are capable, mobilized
     the forces of shame in the British, and used their own innate
     decency as the ultimate weapon of their destruction. The time was
     coming fast when this kind of decency would be carried to indecent
     lengths, and when the Chinese exhortation to men to `be modest
     also about modesty', should have been adapted in relation to the
     British to urge modesty in decency and self-criticism upon them.
     Norman Leys's book was startling evidence of how quick that poison
     of shame had been to act in the spirit of the British, and how far
     already this deadly, partial re-examination of their motives and
     manner of Empire had penetrated their judgement, even to the
     extent of identifying the revolt against Empire with what they
     sloganized as the `class war within our own society'. It was easy
     enough to laugh at these simple settlers for their outrage over
     the book. As simple people do the world over, they recognised far
     more clearly the consequences and the deadly intent of a cold
     calculated disregard of their own humanity than did the
     intellectuals and leaders of the crusade against Empire in Britain
     and Europe.

         More important even, this process of change was not confined
     to colonial Empire alone. At that very moment while we loaded
     potash at Mombasa, leaders of the Commonwealth were being summoned
     to London for the gathering that ended in the Statute of
     Westminster, which was as revolutionary an event in the history of
     Empire as the Great Durham Act of 1830. Nor was evidence of change
     to be found only in the British Empire. The year 1926 saw the
     significant and strangely overlooked revolt in Bantam in Java,
     which was part of what was held to be Holland's superior model of
     empire, despite a long, unfinished war in the Atjeh of Sumatra.
     The Governor-Generals of the Dutch East Indies were by the year
     making more and more use of their powers to exile people in `the
     public interest' and making political prisons out of some of the
     smaller of those outer islands. Because they could do so without
     explanation, and without the bringing of formal charges and public
     trial, the world was not to know this until the end of the last
     War. In French Indo-China the incipient war of centuries between
     North and South which was to explode in Vietnam had not been
     resolved by a central metropolitan authority; and the whole of
     South-East Asia was uneasy, resentful and depressed as the air
     before a typhoon.

         I could not pretend to have had a fore-knowledge then of the
     end to which these illustrations pointed. But I use them merely as
     evidence of a submission that my own awareness of change in myself
     was not unrelated to vast forces released in the world in 1926 to
     give impetus to the formidable energies accumulating on a wide
     front for the transformation of an entire world.

         There is far more to the German concept of Zeitgeist than the
     antiseptic, highly sterilised rationalism of our day will admit.
     Nor is it German alone. The Greeks had it in their concept of the
     Platonic year; the Arabs and their alchemists in Astrology. The
     Ancient Chinese, too, held earlier than any others that time was
     seasonal and not merely a measure of distance travelled by the
     spirit of man. It was also an element with a character of its own
     which contributed significantly to the nature of all things born
     and enclosed in the same moment of itself. Not surprisingly,
     therefore, the German Spangler, however short in specifics but
     long in his intuitive vision of the Zeitgeist or character of the
     time, had recently delivered himself of his resounding warning in
     The Decline of the West - all the more awesome under a German
     title which reverts to the ancient Sanskrit name of Europe: `The
     Place Where the Sun Goes Down' or `The Land of Evening'. Even my
     own sensei had just planted the seed of greater awareness of these
     huge imponderables of life and time in me, through that simple
     Taoist proverb I have cited: `At noon midnight is born'. Perhaps
     that is as good an epigram as can be coined for the essentials of
     all I felt in the atmosphere of time around me in 1926: it was a
     high-noon in which the midnight of today was being born.

         Yet, I must add that even the instruments of the universal
     change implied were not conscious of what they were doing or had
     done. They confused the elemental urge by lusting after the very
     things they were destroying, just as the long-distance men who had
     encouraged the Canada Maru's mission were already busily
     conceiving a dream of the greatest Empire ever. In Japan itself,
     the external catalyst for precipitation of fearsome change
     suspended in the national soul was about to be released. Two
     generations and some years of the great Meiji era were about to be
     relegated forever to history. The Emperor Meiji's successor was
     dying, and indeed was to die before I finally said farewell to the
     world of the Canada Maru. The cold of one of the coldest New Years
     was to begin under a new Emperor, and to bring into rapid being a
     new, dangerous, and, like those of Hitler and Mussolini,
     self-destructive society. But it was on the mainland of Asia,
     across the Sea of Japan in China, that the end of Western Empire
     was nearest of all. A young Chinese soldier, Chiang Kai-Shek,
     fresh from a Russian Military Academy and married to the
     formidable Mei-Lin, one of three gifted sisters of perhaps the
     most powerful Chinese family of the day, was collecting his forces
     at that very moment for his famous march on Nanking. In so doing
     he began the campaign against the great warlords for the
     reunification of a long fragmented civilization, as well as the
     abolition of the rich, self-regulating concessions the British,
     French, Germans and Japanese had established on the most strategic
     areas of the coast, like Canton, Shanghai, Tsingtau and Tientsin.

         In Europe, too, Hitler, the sleep-walking missionary and
     therefore the most dangerous of all, was starting his
     Götterdämmerung conversion of a whole people in the back streets
     of Bavaria, as if in total subservience to an ancient Teutonic
     mythological pattern which is the only one I know wherein the gods
     themselves have to be defeated by the forces of evil for the
     quenching of all but a very little light. Mussolini, already
     installed in Italy, had picked up this stirring of strange
     ambitions in Japan and spoken openly against the Japanese,
     referring to them not by name but as "a species of people who
     resembled nothing so much as monkeys who had newly come down from
     the trees". If they did not desist, they would find, I seem to
     remember him thundering at Milan, "thirty million Italian breasts
     and thirty million bayonets barring their way". The Japanese were
     duly insulted but the rest of the world did not, as I did, see it
     as the first open hint that he also had his sights on Abyssinia
     and a dream of Roman Empire resurrected by Italy as the pilot of
     his mind.

         All these things came unbidden, as did the foam and spray of
     the Indian Ocean that we were sailing, to whet my imagination. And
     at times, most unbidden and prominent of these crowding
     premonitions of change, there rose the beautiful face and words of
     the prophet, newly arisen among the Zulu people whom I had sought
     out just before our departure following my instinct despite the
     cynical disapproval bordering on an outright veto from my Cockney
     news editor. But I knew in my blood how profoundly Africa was an
     Old Testament country almost more in need of prophets than medical
     officers. Therefore I was aware how significant an event this
     could be. And how strange, therefore, that my last piece became
     one of the few things I ever wrote not to be published because it
     was, I quote from both News and Chief Sub-Editor: "All my eye,
     Betsy Martin and mumbo-jumbo." The face of the prophet I will
     always remember. It was transfigured and of compelling beauty. My
     final image of the prophet is of him telling how at midnight as a
     boy, a Zulu Samuel, he heard a voice that could not be denied,
     calling and telling him to go to the top of the Sacred Hill of
     Inanda and look up. He did so. He looked up, in another August
     night, to see with blinding lucidity five great stars fall out of
     procession and proceed, against the natural order, to move from
     west to east. He rushed back to his bee-hive hut full of fear at
     so unnatural a sight. Five days later he was told that on the
     morning after the midnight vision, five great nations, five great
     stars of humanity, had fallen out of the lawful progression of the
     universe and gone to war: Germany, Russia, Austria-Hungary, France
     and Great Britain. The First World War had begun. Many more stars
     were about to fall out of their courses, he warned me, and that,
     he stressed, was how and why he had been called on to prophesy and
     warn, for that was all a prophet could do. But warn to what
     effect? It was not for prophet or man to say in an age, he
     declared tragically, when no-one spoke any more of Umkulunkulu,
     the great first spirit. His praise-names were forgotten, and men
     now spoke only of things useful to them. How could I, a child of
     the same Africa, myself have failed then to conclude that no year
     for centuries had been of so meaningful a transition as this year
     of our absent Lord, 1926?

         It would have been even more startling had I known what I was
     to discover only after the last World War, which was in itself
     such a gruesome confirmation of the objective aspect of my
     subjective feelings of change. But then, in the very Kenya which
     Mombasa served as port, Carl Gustav Jung had just terminated his
     sojourn among the Elgonyi of Mount Elgon and returned to Europe
     satisfied that he now possessed all the objective evidence that he
     needed to confirm his hypothesis of a `collective unconscious' in
     man. This, in time, seemed to me at least as great a breakthrough
     for the human spirit as Einstein's `Theory of Relativity' and
     those illustrious others who penetrated the secret of the atom and
     discovered a mysterious universe expanding in reverse. I mention
     these three re-directions of human seeking not because they were
     the only ones but because they are all, for me, part of one
     another. They are aspects of a potential of mind and spirit out of
     which will come, however much and tragically societies were about
     to crumble, the energies for a renewal of life and its movement, a
     recharging of the arrested post-renaissance spirit into greater
     and more significant forms of being.   [pp.134-142]