The Healing Land

An exploration - part travel writing, part personal quest - of Africa's oldest and most famous population. The Bushmen have long been mythologized and are firmly entrenched in the Western mind. But what is it about hunter-gatherers that is so attractive us, and why do we need these myths? Fascinated by this disappearing population, Rupert Isaacson has been venturing into the Kalahari since he was a child and his book is a search for this truth about the Bushmen through Namibia, Botswana and South Africa. Part travel writing, part history of the Bushmen, part personal quest, the work records what he found there, the landscapes he travelled through, the wildlife he hunted and ate, the characters, corruption and confusion of a people who have wrenched themselves out of the Stone Age (it wasn't until 1948 that it became illegal to kill Bushmen) into a cash economy over the last decade of the 20th century.