Life is Like a Kudu Horn

Cape Town journalist-turned-researcher Margaret Jacobsohn
swapped city life for a remote Ovahimba settlement on the edge
of Namibia’s liberation war. What she experienced shook her world
view and changed the way she thought about people and nature –
and highlighted our modern deficiency in ecological intelligence.
Drawn into the warmth and richness of rural community life,
and revelling in vast Namibia’s “gloriously unclad geology – a
country that wears its skeleton in the outside”, Margaret became
a Namibian. For the past 30 years she has been part of a team
that pioneered an African way of doing wildlife conservation – an
approach that was regarded as lunatic in the ’80s but which is today
mainstream and demonstrably successful. This work has won some
of the world’s top environmental awards.
Her story is both serious and funny – the conflicts and mishaps, the
triumphs and breakthroughs, and what it takes to break paradigms
while working in remote, inaccessible places, including becoming
involved (reluctantly) in a Himba-owned, award-winning safari
company.
Passionate about community-based action, Margaret sees the
challenges of community conservation work differing only in scale
and content from the international challenges we face today –
whether this be political corruption, plastic pollution of our oceans or
the growing gap between the super wealthy and the poor. They all
require for people to reach consensus, manage conflicts, be willing
to change their attitudes and then translate plans and decisions into
action.
Life Is Like a Kudu Horn is a book that will make you reflect and
deliberate.