Sir Laurens van der Post, speaking of his childhood on a ranch in South Africa. It was the first ranch built in the ancestral land of the San, the Bushmen of the Kalahari.

All I know is that in the colorful background of the wonderful home my remarkable grandfather had made of the Fountain of the Bushman, two little old Bushman men moved like twilight shadows. My grandfather, I believed, had found them as children whimpering among the boulders and taken them home to the Fountain of the Bushman to grow up in his service. . . the whole of the Bushman past came to a point for me in those two little men. ...
    From these two old men and others left in my native village I learned something of the imagination of the Bushman and his knowledge of the inmost life of Africa. That was another aspect of the past that confounded me. How little we ourselves knew of the Bushman's mind and spirit! We had killed him off after nearly 250 years of contact without really knowing whom we had exterminated. . .what was known was fragmentary and, to me, reproachful residue which made my slight contact with the few survivors all the more meaningful, since it gave me the actual feel of the living texture and quality of the vanished people. 

For more, see the film of his life, Hasten Slowly - The Journey of Sir Laurens van der Post. During World War II, van der Post was interned in a Japanese prison-of-war camp and witnessed a number of executions. He later wrote:

One didn't want to look at it. I wanted to look away and pretend it wasn't happening. But a voice inside me said, "You can't do that because you are betraying the man whose being killed if you do that. You must go through it with him. That is your contribution here and now. You must be killed with him, if you are going to understand what is going on.” I wanted to look up at the sky and not see it and be somewhere else. I wanted to run away psychologically. But because somehow we lived our lives in prison so that we looked at reality, we looked at it in truth. And what greater gift can you get from life?
- Laurens van der Post, Venture to the Interior

In the film mentioned above, Laurens reflects further: 

In every human situation, every conflict there is always this great responsibility, laid on us by life, that the person that is most aware, that is most highly, most widely, most completely conscious, must accept responsibility for the person who is less conscious, and that is the person who is possessed by anger.