The Bushmen of Botswana fear for their future, whether they return to ancestral lands in a national park or stay on the desolate reserves where they were forced to move.
KAUDWANE, Botswana -- The Bushmen of Botswana fear for their future, whether they return to ancestral lands in a national park or stay on the desolate reserves where they were forced to move.
Basarwa tribesmen, also known as Bushmen, won a court order in December allowing them to return to land in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve from which the government had expelled them. Government officials, though, say the tribesmen can't take along domestic animals or other items that have become necessities for these descendants of hunter-gatherers.
"They also said they would determine amounts of water we take in," said Keratwaemang Kekailwe, one of the 189 Basarwa who filed suit.
In September 2005, he and 22 other Basarwa were prevented from re-entering the reserve by Botswana police firing rubber bullets. Now he lives in an isolated resettlement camp known as Kaudwane.
President Festus Mogae last week asked the Basarwa to stay where they are until he speaks to them on Thursday in New Xade, another of the camps, about the way forward after the judgment.
"He will also listen to what people have to say," presidential spokesman Jeff Ramsay said Sunday.
Backed by the British based group Survival International, the Basarwa fought the longest running legal battle in Botswana's postcolonial history to return to the reserve.
The verdict by the Botswana High Court that the government's eviction of the Bushmen was "unlawful and unconstitutional" was hailed as a victory for indigenous peoples around the world.
The court also ruled that the Bushmen have the right to hunt and gather in the reserve, and should not have to apply for permits to enter.
The government has said that only the 189 people who filed the lawsuit would be given automatic right of return with their children -- short of the 2,000 the Basarwa say want to go home.
Along with the restrictions on domestic animals and water, they will also not be allowed to build permanent structures. Hunters will have to apply for special permits.
The government shut the main well in 2002 and water resources are scarce.
It's as if the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled Hopi tribespeople could make their homes in the Grand Canyon, and the U.S. government said any that took the opportunity would have to live there as their ancestors had a millennium ago.
The Botswana government argues it must protect the reserve as a national tourism resource. But Joram Useb, from the organization Working Group for Indigenous Minorities in Southern Africa, said the Bushmen should be allowed to take their domestic animals in and there were similar projects in Kenya and Tanzania involving indigenous people that could be studied and applied to Botswana.
"A buffer zone could be established so the domestic animals don't mix with the wild ones," he said, adding the Bushmen should be able to develop an economy for themselves through tourism and other initiatives.
Robert Thornton, a cultural anthropologist at South Africa's University of the Witwatersrand, said the court victory established "that indigenous cultural rights and land access should be protected.
"But the next step is the political commitment and the actual effort to create the conditions under which that lifestyle is sustainable, and that is lacking," he said. "It is our human heritage and (preserving) it shouldn't require more justification than that. It is our genetic ancestry and our cultural ancestry."
Kekaile, one of the Basarwa who filed the lawsuit, spent his early years collecting wild fruits and eating the meat of animals killed by his father.
Now he has to depend on money, a foreign concept to most of the Bushmen. Employment opportunities in the resettlement village are rare and most villagers depend on government food rations and handouts.
The Basarwa are the last of the original inhabitants of a vast area stretching from the tip of South Africa to the Zambezi valley in Zambia and Zimbabwe. Their rock paintings, wildlife knowledge and ability to survive in one of the harshest environments on earth have fascinated scholars. Only an estimated 100,000 are left today, most living in poverty on society's fringes.
The Central Kalahari Game Reserve was established in 1961. Botswana supported traditional communities after independence in 1966, providing water, food and mobile clinics in the reserve.
With time, however, Basarwa families started building permanent settlements, raising goats and planting crops. Instead of hunting on foot they began using horses and four-wheel-drive vehicles.
Wildlife officials worried about environmental damage, and local administrators complained about the cost of providing services to remote settlements.
Between 1997 and 2002, some 3,000 people were moved from the reserve to two settlements, leaving a handful of holdouts.
Basarwa in the resettlement camps have drinking water, schools and medical facilities. But Bushmen argue that they have suffered from the disruption to their traditional way of life and have fallen victim to alcoholism and AIDS.
A tin shack at the entrance to the Kaudwane resettlement camp serves as the local drinking hole. It also provides the only form of recreation, and some relief from the harsh sun.
Life, though, is also bleak for the 30 or so Basarwa who managed to remain in the reserve through the expulsions and the court case.
It takes about five hours to drive from Kaudwane over 100 miles (160 kilometers) of rough roads and bush to the holdout's village, Metsiamenong.
Two men emerge from the shade of a small tree, smiling.
"Water? Please?" said Haki Lokole, wearing a dust-covered black T-shirt reading: "I Love the CKGR," the acronym for the reserve.
Nearby, two children sleep on the bare sand in the shade of a hut. Their mothers ask for food and sugar.
Through sign language and broken English, they indicate they are awaiting the return of other Basarwa, and hope they will bring clothes, water and food.
------
Associated Press Writer Jerome Delay contributed to this report from Metsiamenong.
Source: Associated Press
Contact Info:
