Women of the Basarwa tribe rest by their hut in the Kaudwane settlement outside the Central Kalahari Game Reserve in Botswana. The southern Africa country is the world's largest diamond producer.
Dec. 13, 2006, 10:22PM
Gem land ruling favors Bushmen
They win right to live in reserve in Botswana
By SELLO MOTSETA
Associated Press
LOBATSE, BOTSWANA - A court ruled Wednesday that Botswana's Bushmen were entitled to live and hunt on their ancestral lands in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, after they accused the government of illegally evicting them to exploit the diamond and mineral potential in the vast area.
But the three-member High Court also said the government was not obliged to provide basic services, such as water, to anyone returning to the reserve.
The Bushmen, also known as the Basarwa, were backed by the British-based advocacy group Survival International in Botswana's longest-running court case. They accused the government of evicting them in 2002, often at gunpoint, to clear the way for prospecting for precious gems.
The southern Africa country is the world's largest producer of diamonds.
The government had argued that the Bushmen agreed to move off the land as part of efforts to make the Central Kalahari a game reserve and that they received compensation. The government said it already owned the mineral rights even if Basarwas were in the reserve.
"Today is the happiest day for us Bushmen," one of their leaders, Roy Sesana, said. "We have been crying for so long, but today we are crying with happiness. Finally we have been set free."
"I want to go back home now," said Junanda Gakelevone of the First People of the Kalahari, which represents the Bushmen, amid singing and dancing by some two dozen Basarwa, many wearing traditional clothes and horns.
There was no immediate comment from government representatives.
Some 2,000 of the Bushmen have moved to two new settlements, leaving a handful of holdouts. Government authorities say their living conditions have improved on the settlements, with the provision of drinking water, schools and medical facilities.
Representatives of the Bushmen argued that they have suffered from the disruption to their way of life and have fallen victim to scourges such as alcoholism and HIV/AIDS.
British colonial authorities set up the Central Kalahari Game Reserve in 1961 to protect an area rich in wildlife. Botswana supported traditional communities after independence in 1966, providing water, food and mobile clinics in the reserve.
With time, however, once-nomadic Basarwa families started building permanent settlements, raising goats and planting crops. Instead of hunting on foot with arrows tipped in poison, they started using horses and four-wheel-drive vehicles, drying and selling excess meat to outsiders.
By 1985, wildlife officials were worried about environmental damage and local administrators were complaining about the cost of providing services to the remote settlements.
Botswana is regarded as a model of democracy and good management on a continent plagued by corruption and poverty. The conflict over the Bushmen — and support for their cause from notables such as Nobel laureate Desmond Tutu — was a severe embarrassment to the government.
The Bushmen had appealed for help in their plight from actor Leonardo DiCaprio, whose new film Blood Diamond shows how the gem trade financed civil war in Sierra Leone in the 1990s.
Houston Chronicle 12/13/06
SOME BACKGROUND ARTICLES:
National Geographic News:
Bushmen Driven From Ancestral Lands in Botswana
Leon Marshall in Johannesburg
for National Geographic News
April 16, 2003
Few are left of the many San who once roamed southern Africa, for a period believed to go back at least 20,000 years. Their sad fate has recently been brought starkly to mind by a furor that has erupted over the removal of two small remaining communities from Botswana's sprawling Central Kalahari Game Reserve.
San, or Bushmen, are collectively known as Basarwa in Botswana. The two affected tribes, which at last government count in 2001 came to 1,645 individuals, are called the Gana and the Gwi.
The Botswana government's explanation for moving them is that it wishes to ensure the park's integrity as a nature reserve, and that it wishes to integrate the San into the country's social and economic life.
The removals started in 1997, and most of the community has since been relocated to settlements outside the park. In exchange for their traditional hunting-gathering existence, the Botswana government says they have been granted title deeds to the land apportioned to them, and they have been given goats and cattle.
An extensive explanatory document from the Botswana government says the uprooted San are provided with schools, water supplies, and health services. A fund has been set up to provide them with training and start-up facilities for small-scale enterprises. The intention, the government says, is to bring their standard of living "up to the level obtaining in the rest of the country as well as to avoid land-use conflicts in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, such as allowing permanent settlement, growing of crops and rearing of livestock inside the reserve which is not compatible with preserving wildlife resources."
The government said it wanted to integrate the communities into "the mainstream society without any detriment to their unique culture and tradition".
Strident Opposition
But the Botswana action has drawn strident opposition from Survival International, a UK-based organization supporting tribal communities and their rights to their land and to decide their own future. Survival says all the government's actions have made clear its contempt for the San and its tendency to regard them as inferior. It quotes a San woman as having told the organization: "They treat us like this because of our race. The government knows we are very small people and there is no way we can cry for help."
Survival has organized petitions in several parts of the world against the removal of the San and handed these to Botswana's embassies in the United States, Japan, Europe and Africa.
The San relocation case has featured in newspapers and on BBC television.
In a report released in August last year, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination expressed concern at the dispossession of their land and prejudicial actions against the San.
There have been several court actions. One such case opposing their exclusion from the park has misfired. Now a second, brought in the name of a few San steadfastly refusing to move out of the park, is headed for Botswana's high court.
Another court case, brought by the state against 13 San accused of exceeding hunting quotas, has been withdrawn.
Diamond Prospecting
At the center of the dispute is the question whether the San are being moved from their ancestral land for purposes not of restoring the park's integrity as a nature reserve but rather to clear the way for diamond-prospecting companies.
The accusation has drawn a furious reaction, with a warning of legal action from De Beers, one of the diamond companies which has been involved in prospecting in the area.
The Survival International campaign has involved a publicity stunt in which a De Beers advertisement outside its new flagship store in London featuring super model Imam was pasted over with a picture of a San woman and the slogan: "Bushmen aren't forever."
In answer to the De Beers threat, Stephen Corry, director of Survival International, said: "Survival has been threatened many times by companies and governments which put profits before tribal peoples' rights. However, we have not the slightest intention of betraying the responsibility which, for many years, so many Gana an Gwi Bushmen have asked us to shoulder.
"The Bushmen have asked us to help them get their ancestral land back, and the campaign will now be stepped up until they are back living on it without fear of further harassment." The International Finance Corporation, part of the World Bank based in Washington, D.C., has also been drawn into the issue with accusations from Survival International that it funded diamond exploration in the park without consulting indigenous communities about the project.
Survival International has produced government maps on its Web site which it says are evidence of how the game reserve has been divided into concessions for mining companies.
But the Botswana government has strenuously denied that diamond concessions are the reason for the San's removal. It says exploration for minerals in the park began in the 1960s, but the only kimberlite (volcanic pipes often bearing diamonds) discovered was found to be not commercially viable.
Botswana President Festus Mogae has said: "There is neither any actual mining nor any plan for future mining inside the reserve."
The Botswana government has issued a statement that gives the assurance that "there is no mining or any plans for future mining anywhere inside the CKGR."
Destruction of Water Pump
Survival International accuses the Botswana authorities of harassment of the San, saying they have been "tortured, beaten up or arrested for supposedly over-hunting, or hunting without correct licenses." It charges that the harassment intensified last year, with the destruction of the Bushmen's water pump in the park and the draining of their existing water supplies into the desert, as well as the banning of hunting and gathering.
Corry said: "The Gana and the Gwi are amongst the last Bushmen who depend on hunting. Unless the Botswana government allows them back on their land and lifts the hunting ban, they will be responsible for the destruction of the Gana and the Gwi as peoples."
The Botswana government's statement says: "At no stage during the relocation exercise did government or its public officers involved in the relocation use force, coerce people residing in the game reserve, or threaten any of them in any way. The emphasis has always been persuasion and voluntary relocation."
In answer to the accusation of destroying the San's water pump and draining their water reserves, it says the few people remaining in the park made the provision of services unsustainable and unaffordable and these were therefore terminated.
The government said that many San had been "engaged in income-generating projects which enable them to live sustainable and self-reliant livelihoods, and not perpetually to depend on government handouts."
BBC News
Monday, 12 July, 2004, 00:33 GMT 01:33UK
Botswana's bushmen battle for land
By Alastair Leithead
BBC, Botswana
The bushmen, of Botswana's Kalahari are a people living in a place, and perhaps a time, that is no longer their own.
Chief Maiteela Segwaba seems a forlorn figure, sitting in his kraal chatting to his friends - now as old and as wrinkled as he is.
There is little to do and no jobs in the resettlement camps
The proud man who once hunted antelope in Botswana's Central Kalahari Game Reserve, and gathered food, medicine and water from its plants, is now chief of a small but sprawling resettlement camp outside the reserve.
"We get food and water from the government every month, so it is good here, but the ancestral land is so much better," said Chief Segwaba.
"When we were sick we could pray by the ancestors' graves. Most people are not happy here," he said.
Beer cartons
The bushmen are taking the Botswana government to court in an historic case to decide whether they have a right to live in their ancestral land from which they say they have been evicted.
Chief Segwaba was one of the first to be resettled, but many more have followed.
There are empty cartons of cheap local beer lying all over the camp - there may be water and basic services, but there are no jobs and there is little to do.
Thousands of bushmen used to live traditional hunter-gatherer lives inside the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, but now there are just a handful. And few still wear their loincloths or use bows and arrows to hunt game.
The waterholes the government provided years ago changed them gradually into farmers - ironically the authorities' refusal to continue supplying that water is now driving the bushmen from their land.
"People would go back if the supply of water was returned by the government," Chief Segwaba said.
But according to the government, this is not an option.
They are not artefacts, they are not animals, they are not a tourist attraction Sydney Tshepiso Pilane
Government advisor
"They can stay if they want to, but we cannot afford to supply them with services," said Sydney Tshepiso Pilane, an adviser to the president and the man leading the government's court battle with the San.
"Every government in every country formulates a policy for the development of all its people.
"They are not artefacts, they are not animals, they are not a tourist attraction, they are people. They do not belong where animals do, they belong in settlements, villages, towns and cities like you and me," he said.
As part of the court's fact-finding mission, judges and lawyers travelled to Kukama, once a bushmen village inside the reserve.
The long line of white four-wheel-drive vehicles swept into the village and drew to a halt.
The three judges, lawyers, barristers, court officials and journalists jumped from their cars to peer around Kukama, where only one family remains.
The women in their brightly coloured clothes and hats shouted above each other, stamping their feet and gesticulating at their huts and their animals.
In broken English and over the cries of the baby strapped to her back, one woman explained they were angry; they did not want to live anywhere else.
A small, elderly woman surged forward. "I want to die in my village," she said.
This was another stop on the court's safari through the central Kalahari, visiting resettlement camps and original villages where the bushmen live or lived.
The inspection is a preview to the court case which will pit tradition and culture against modernisation and development, and decide the future of the country's original inhabitants.
It will sit in the bush at New Xade, the biggest resettlement area, and will decide if the bushmen were illegally evicted from their ancestral land.
'Forced removal'
Roy Sesana, one of those who brought the case against the government, took me around Kukama, showing me where the water tank used to stand and where the homesteads had been burned down.
"The government told us to leave or they would send the army in," he said.
The San's hunter-gatherer life is a thing of the past
"My wife was ill and I was away in the capital arguing about these removals, and they told her to leave or else they would put her in my hut and burn it down."
He is bitter about the resettlement and has been a thorn in the government's side.
"The essence is the right of the people to continue to reside on their ancestral land in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve," explained Glyn Williams, the bushmen's lawyer.
"We believe that right is enshrined within the constitution, and forcibly removing the residents from their land by unlawfully terminating services is to deprive them of that right."
The government says it wants them in one place so water and social services can be provided more cheaply.
There have been rumblings that diamond rights in the reserve are at the heart of this, but this seems unlikely - it has more of the trappings of paternalism and stubbornness when faced with international pressure.
The court case will have serious consequences for both the bushmen and the government - either denying the bushmen the right to their land, or opening the floodgates for other land claims.
But whichever way it goes, the traditional hunter-gatherer lifestyle of the bushmen is already gone, and no court case will ever bring it back.
BBC News, May 2, 2005
Bushmen fight for homeland
By John Simpson
BBC world affairs editor
If you know anything about the quiet Southern African country of Botswana, the chances are that it will chiefly be because you have read the delightful novels of Alexander McCall Smith.