The San and the Hobbits - The Darwinian Tourist - page 278

Figure 124 A bumper crop of Buprestid jewel beetles. They are an acquired taste.
the San were reduced to shadowy, almost legendary inhabitants of areas so
remote and undesirable that the invaders did not bother to follow them.
In the 1950s the South African war hero Laurens van der Post penetrated
deep into the Kalahari on a BBC-funded expedition to fi lm the San peoples.
In his vivid Lost World of the Kalahari (1958) he recounts how vague stories of
these tribes had peopled his childhood. 1 The San had been reduced to the
status of half-understood legends by the cruelty and rapaciousness of van
der Post's own ancestors. His accounts of his actual encounters with the
San were embroidered with fancy, but he reintroduced the world to these
remarkable people and helped to catalyze the establishment of the Central
Kalahari Game Reserve. It is to be hoped that we denizens of our new and
slightly more kindly world will be more likely to let the San survive than van
der Post's ancestors did.