Meanwhile, I have some stories to keep us going till we launch Season II. I’ve called them Sabbatical Stories and you’ll find them either through links in my letters or here:
Sabbatical Stories
Friday 19 September 2025
Prof. Ryan Blumenthal, forensic pathologist
Ryan Blumenthal is one of South Africa’s leading forensic pathologists. He talks about some of his standout cases and what the dead can teach the living.
My Stories
Your responses to our questionnaire revealed that you were keen to hear stories from my life and adventures. So this episode contains the first of them. I’ve titled it “Two ladies in a mortuary”.
Season I
Episode 7 – April 2025
Tales from the Kalahari
This month I journey to an old stamping ground of mine: the southern Kalahari. I haven’t been there for seven years and had forgotten how extremely hot the place is, how starkly beautiful and how resilient the people are who live there.
Insplorations
Nanette Flemming
Nanette Flemming has spent 25 years with the Khomani San in the southern Kalahari. She was there in the early days of their successful land claim and has seen the hope and cultural knowledge of that time in great danger of disappearing. She talks to us about the kind of precious experiences she had with the elders of the community who are all but dead.
Potpourri
People of the Southern Kalahari
Willie Rossouw
[05:47]
At 75, Willie Rossouw has seen more floods and droughts than most in this hard, hard land. He’s been on the land for 50 years and tells me about the trials he’s faced and the decisions he’s made to keep his farm going for his children.
Johannes Tities
Johannes is renowned in the Andriesvale area for his ability to track and eliminate the predators which are the bane of the local sheep farmers’ lives. But this drought is so dire that he’s seen an alarming change in behaviour of a local mammal. You will simply not credit which one.
Paulina Kruiper
Paulina is diminutive even by San standards but she has giant ambitions and is well on her way to realising them. Born and raised in a grass hut on a sand dune she dreamt of being a chef in an upmarket hotel. She tells me about that unlikely ambition and how far she is in realising it.
Hans Knoetse
Hans Knoetse has a camel dairy. It’s a noisy, jostling and very amusing place. And it’s producing milk that is increasingly sought after by the health conscious and by people with autism.
Eleanor Knoetse
Started making camel milk soap in her kitchen. Many litres of her disastrous attempts to do so lie buried in the garden, but now she has a range of beautiful products that are flying off the shelves.