Posted on 03/16/2002 4:22:45 PM PST by Boyd
IN Botswana, Bushmen are fighting a last desperate battle against eviction from their ancestral land. The Central Kalahari Game Reserve (CKGR) -- 52,000 square kilometres of hot sand and harsh, waterless bush -- has been home to Bushmen, southern Africa's aboriginal people, for at least 2000 years.
But in 1997 the Botswana government began a process of forced removals, which saw more than 1200 people and their meagre possessions bundled into cattle trucks and taken to bleak, dusty 'settlements' in the middle of nowhere. About 700 people resisted and have been living lives of desperate hardship, intent only on keeping a foothold on the last patch of land in the whole of Botswana they might call their own.
The resisters have been surviving on water and drought-relief food rations trucked into the reserve, supplemented by what they are permitted under a stringent licensing system to hunt and gather from the veldt. But in recent weeks the government has cut off all services to the people, and obstructed entry to the reserve by Bushmen from outside who were trying to take water and food to their friends and relatives
Now government officials have confiscated seven radio transmitters donated by Survival International, which were the only means by which groups scattered across the vast reserve could keep in touch with each other and with those championing their cause outside.
These actions are just the latest in a long chapter of harassment. Both the Botswana Centre for Human Rights and Survival International have reported torture of Bushmen by wildlife officials who accuse them of hunting more game than their licences permit.
In August 2000, a dozen men were picked up from their huts and driven into the bush for six days of interrogations and ill-treatment. 'They lit a fire next to a big tree and handcuffed me around the tree. The fire was burning me,' said Kqwathiswa Gaorapelwe. 'The next day they handcuffed me to the bush bar [of their Land Rover[ and jumped on my back.'
'I don't know why they do this,' said Ketaletswe Pola, another victim. 'Maybe they want to kill us for pleasure and because they feel bored. The government gave us licences but when we try to hunt we become guilty. Now I'm afraid of hunting because I'm afraid of the wildlife officials. I haven't hunted since this incident.' Last week the men went on trial for the alleged poaching.
The CKGR was proclaimed in 1961 by the British colonial authorities, primarily as a place where Bushmen could pursue their traditional life as hunter-gatherers, as Botswana's territory was progressively parcelled up and fenced off for cattle ranching and other enterprises, squeezing the Bushmen off the land.
Their right of residence in the CKGR was honoured until the mid-1990s, when the government announced its intention to develop the reserve for luxury tourism, and -- ignoring the Bushmen's legendary respect for the animals and plants that have always sustained them -- said their presence was not compatible with wildlife conservation. Moreover, the Bushmen should move to settlements, where they could be provided more easily with services -- schools, clinics and piped water -- and encouraged to join the modern world.
'How can you have a Stone Age creature continuing to exist in the age of computers?' Festus Mogae, then minister for finance and development planning, and now Botswana's president, is reported to have asked when the removals were about to begin. 'If the Bushmen want to survive, they must change, or otherwise, like the dodo, they will perish.'
But the settlements to which the Bushmen are encouraged to go are not places of modern opportunity, but places of despair and social disintegration. The settlement programme was initiated in the mid-1970s to offer Bushmen, and others pushed off the land throughout the country, subsistence plots and houses on sites provided with basic facilities.
But they were set up on marginal land, often miles from anywhere else, and there is almost no work and precious little chance to hunt or gather or grow enough to feed a family. Drunkenness, promiscuity, teenage pregnancy and wife-battering are rife. And people who once dealt with conflict by simply shouldering their belongings, quenching their fires and moving away from one another in the immense space of the desert, now resort to fighting -- or else apathy. One elderly resident of a settlement sums up the situation succinctly: 'How can we have self-respect when the most respectable job available to us is famine relief?' Some 90% of Bushmen in government settlements are dependent on food aid.
Governments everywhere are ill at ease with wandering peoples, and there is little doubt the government of Botswana sincerely believes the Bushmen would be better off settled and integrated in mainstream society. But many believe that neither this nor tourism is the real reason for the Kalahari clearances.
The world's biggest diamond producer, De Beers, which has been prospecting in the CKGR for some years, recently discovered a substantial diamond pipe near Gope in the southeastern corner, and many believe this is the primary reason for wanting the people out.
The Bushmen, whose self-esteem has been ground down to rock-bottom by centuries of persecution at the hands of white and black settlers in southern Africa, have been slow to organise or find a voice. That voice is still incredibly weak and inconsistent but, with the help of human rights lawyers, they are beginning to press for title to their ancestral land. With diamonds beneath its burning sands, the CKGR would be a huge prize -- but also the last place the government would want to have to contest a land claim .
Losing their last foothold in the Central Kalahari will be disastrous for the Bushmen, whose ancient culture is teetering on the brink of extinction, says Survival International. The organisation is holding weekly vigils in London and across Europe aimed at embarrassing the Botswana government -- which has a reputation as one of the most democratic and stable in Africa -- over its policy of starving the people out of the reserve.
'This land belongs to me and belonged to my great-grandparents and not to the government, ' said Thekiso Thaadintshao. 'It's good for the outside world to know about this, even if they can't do anything to help.'
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