ABSTRACT
Sir Laurens van der Post, a white South African by birth, a vocal opponent of apartheid, author of many books about Africa (including an account of the virtual extinction of the Bushmen), and a close friend of Jung for many years, recounts how he and Jung discussed Africa when they met for the very first time. He told Jung that he had just written a book about Africa and had used as an epigraph a quotation from Sir Thomas Browne: "We carry with us the wonders we seek without us: there is all Africa and her prodigies in us" (1975: 50). For van der Post, as for Jung, Africa is not only a physical reality but also a psychical reality, prodigious in implication. In this sense, the literal Africa serves as a provocative correlative of the metaphorical "dark continent" in the white unconscious, in the geography of the white imagination. In conversation with van der Post, Jung addresses the ambivalent desire and fear that Africa has historically induced in whites:
He generalized at length from his own experience in this regard that night, impressing on me how it inevitably provoked in the white man a great temptation to revert to an utterly uncontemporary version of himself, all the more powerful and difficult to resist because in most cases it was unconscious. As a result the resistance of the white man in Africa to "go black," or "native," as he put it, produced so powerful an undertone in his spirit that it brought tensions which were almost unendurable and caused him either to succumb utterly and become a pale, effete version of the primitive or to reject and hate the dark man who had served to evoke it. The farther from his own instinctive self, the greater the temptation and the greater the fall, or the more intense the rejection in the European we call prejudice and hatred.
According to van der Post, there was, for Jung, an alternative to either primitivism or racism: "The task of modern man was not to go primitive the African way but to discover and confront and live out his own first and primitive self in a truly twentieth-century way" (1975: 51).