Reading Matters (week 048) 25 November 2025

One day we will open Kalahari Diaries by Allen Zimbler with an ache in our hearts as we read the stories of a Jo’burg raised, Wits University professor, about his impressions of the Kalahari Desert Bushmen.  He spent 15 years visiting a vanishing peoples, scribbling in his notebooks and taking photographs.

Allen is one of a few people in the world who have followed the Bushmen, legendary for their running prowess, on a hunt. He saw their trance dances, witnessed a traditional healer save the life of a troubled young man, made friends with them but never impinged on their lives.  Allen now lives in England where Paul Holberton Publishing produced this handsome, hard cover, exemplary book that is distributed here by Jonathan Ball Publishers.  I’m passionate about it.

I’m also passionate about 10 Years of Remembering Wildlife (Wildlife Photographers United) for scores of brilliant, internationally renowned photographers including a sizeable number of SA’s, have donated their art to the cause of preserving wild animals.

British Margot Raggett, who founded Remembering Wildlife, has raised nearly 28 million Rand and published over 55,000 books since Remembering Elephants was published in 2016. Now this 2025 commemorative book, which has a stunning cover picture of a pangolin, has been dedicated, says Margot, to the unwavering heroes of pangolin conservation.  They are fighting to preserve a mammal that dates back 80 million years to prehistoric times. It is now the world’s most trafficked mammal, its scales used for medicine and its meat as an Asian delicacy.

Two exceptional books focused on fighting extinction.

Reading Matters with Sue Grant-Marshall