ETHOS OF ANCIENT D
r Margaret Jacobsohn is a Namibian writer, anthropologist and community-based conservation specialist.
She the cofounder and chairman of the board of the IRDNC, Integrated Rural Development and Nature Conservation – an NGO, trust and pioneer of Namibia’s community-led conservation programme, which started as a small pilot project in the 1980s and went on to become an incredible Namibian success story. An authority on the social organisation and cultural economy of the seminomadic Himba people of Namibia and Angola, her PhD thesis was based on more than five years of living and working with remote Himba communities. She is the author of Himba: Nomads of Namibia, and her memoir, Life is Like a Kudu Horn, was published by Jacana in 2019. For her work, Margaret has been awarded some of the world’s top conservation prizes, including the US Goldman Environmental Prize for Africa, which she won jointly with Garth Owen-Smith, the United Nations Global 500 Roll of Honour award and the WWF Netherlands’ Knights of the Order of the Golden Ark. For the past five years, Margaret has helped to mentor and run a small upmarket mobile safari company, Conservancy Safaris Namibia, which is owned by five Himba and Herero communities through their conservancies in Namibia’s far North West. This is her story. WHERE IT STARTED I came here as an archaeologist. I was a journalist for the first twenty years of my life and then became a mature student and went to university quite late in life. I was already nearly thirty and worked at the interface between huntergathering and herding, first in the Cape, through Cape Town University and then on holiday trips to Namibia. I became really interested in working with some modern-day herders and looking at the way in which they used space and technology and material culture.
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