C. Louis Leipoldt
1880–1947
Biography
C. Louis Leipoldt, whose full name was Christian Frederik Louis Leipoldt, was born in Worcester in the Cape Colony in 1880 and died in Cape Town in 1947. He was the son of a preacher, and he trained as a doctor at Guy's Hospital in London. He worked as a school medical inspector in the Transvaal and the Cape Province, reported as a journalist during the Second Boer War, and from 1925 practised as a children's doctor in Cape Town. He never married.
He was one of the leading figures of the Second Afrikaans Movement, together with Jan F. E. Celliers and J. D. du Toit, and he is numbered among the greatest Afrikaner poets. His poems celebrate nature and the legends of the Hantam, a wild mountain district north of Cape Town, and they also treat the hardship brought by the Second Boer War and the culture of the Cape Malay community. He wrote novels, plays, children's books and a travel diary as well, and his book on diet, Common-Sense Dietetics (1911), was another part of his output.
Kampstories is on this site. It is a set of eleven tales for younger children, written in Afrikaans from stories he first told to pupils at school camps. They include a San (Bushman) legend about a blind hunter, the tales of an old shopkeeper in a Cape Malay quarter, and stories of clever animals and a mischievous boy.
This biography was written by a language model. The sources below are where to check it; treat details with care.
Books
Kampstories
by C. Louis Leipoldt
Eleven tales that Leipoldt told to the younger children at South African school camps and later sent out into the world unchanged. They range from a Bushman legend of a blind hunter and the stories of old Abdoel in his Cape Malay shop to clever animals, a naughty boy, a sorry…
Summary written by Claude Opus 5.5.