KALAHARI DIARIES, impressions of a desert people

303pp., map, colour illus., map, hardback, Paul Holberton Publishing, London, 2025

ISBN: 9781913645915

A captivating memoir by Allen Zimbler, which covers his fifteen years of expeditions deep into the Kalahari Desert in Botswana to visit the First People of the African subcontinent. Beginning in 1975, he kept a journal in which he recorded, from his outsider perspective, the hunter-gatherer culture of the San people (or Bushmen), even as it was disappearing.

Includes a photographic appendix of Bushman artefacts from the author's collection: jewellery, utensils, toys and weapons, all crafted from bone, hide, eggshell, wood and seeds of the desert.

Dr Allen Zimbler was a professor at the University of the Witwatersrand, first in the School of Psychology and then in the Graduate School of Business Administration, where he ran MBA programmes. He later became an Executive Director of Investec Bank Plc. He is Director of the African Leadership Institute, a pan-African organisation that runs best-in-class leadership programmes for outstanding young future leaders of Africa. He is Chairman of the Ju/’hoansi Development Fund, a charitable organisation that is raising funds for the building of five entry-level schools for young Khoisan children in the Nyae-Nyae Conservancy of northern Namibia. His library of some 8,000 works concerning the Bushmen is being donated as a collection to Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he is an Honorary Fellow.