Rupert Isaacson is an author and journalist whose many publications include The Healing Land (Fourth Estate, 2001). He is the author of Cadogan guidebooks to South Africa, Zimbabwe and Botswana and Namibia.

Recent articles

Hunters in Britain are challenged by legal bans and animal rights campaigns. They need an imaginative leap over mental boundaries, by reaching out to native peoples such as the Bushmen/San, now facing harsh modernity without any right to choose. Is it possible to create a new, global narrative that joins both types of hunter in a shared defence of human rights and fragile wildness?

The recent forced removal of 2,000 Bushmen/San people from their homeland in the Kalahari area of central Botswana is not just a brutal act of ethnic cleansing; it also means the end for a hunter–gatherer society whose care and knowledge of their fragile eco-system hold many lessons for the rest of humanity. The Johannesburg summit must attend to the inhumanity on its doorstep.