In the late 1970s a Swedish collector and dealer in rare postage stamps who lived in the Isle of Man, an offshore tax haven in the midst of the Irish Sea, contemplated the problems of the world. Not so much the grand problems of the Cold War or the meaning of the universe; more the everyday problems of human development and mankind's relationship with the environment. Jakob von Uexkull was a man interested in solutions.

He put it to the Nobel Foundation that they award two new annual prizes for those who had found practical solutions to these world problems. When the Nobel Prize committee turned him down, he decided to undertake the task himself. He sold his business to set up a prize fund of US$50 000 and named it the Right Livelihood Award, with a mission to ‘honour and support courageous people and organisations offering visionary and exemplary solutions to the root causes of global problems’. The award soon gained international prestige and the media dubbed it ‘the Alternative Nobel Prize’. Patrick van Rensburg (1931–2017), the subject of this biography, was one of three laureates honoured with the award in 1981, the second year in which it was presented. His was awarded ‘for developing replicable educational models for the third world majority’.

In view of his origins Van Rensburg might seem a most unlikely candidate for such a prestigious honour. Born into a broken family of modest means, he was a white South African who grew up in the 1930s and 1940s within the cushion of white privilege and prejudice that dominated much of Africa in those years. His surname indicates that he was an Afrikaner, a member of that specifically South African ‘white tribe’ whose chosen form of ‘nationalism’ tied its future on the African continent to a racially defined system of separation and dominance known as apartheid (separateness). But was Patrick van Rensburg really an Afrikaner and did it matter, other than what he did from his position of racial privilege?