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The Diamond Tears of Botswana
Source Correspondent
In this week’s *Source4Thought*, we consider the plight of a group of people, who are as much the subject of "colonialism", as any country during the 19th century.’Why must I move? They will kill me for my land... We are oppressed until we die, and soon there will be no one left.’ - Mogetse Kaboikanyo, who died in June 2002, after being forced to move.
The last self-sufficient ’Bushmen’ of the Kalahari Desert have been brutally thrown off their land and dumped in resettlement camps.
Unless they are allowed to return soon, thousands of years of Bushman culture will come to an end. Behind the government’s actions lurks a deep-seated racism - and the prospect of riches from diamonds under the Bushmen’s land.
The pattern is an old, but familiar one.
The biggest "tribe" allows a much smaller one to occupy an area of land solely because there is no apparent benefit to be gained by occupying the area itself. Later on it transpires that there is wealth to be had after all and a campaign is launched to gain control of the area and to find an excuse to move the occupants owners off it.
The US government did it with the native Sioux Indians, when gold was discovered in the Black Hills of Dakota and now the modern day equivalent is being played out in Botswana.
The Gana and Gwi Bushmen and their neighbours the Bakgalagadi are the original inhabitants of the central Kalahari.
During the last 200 years, however, their land has been increasingly encroached on by both Bantu tribes, who now make up the majority in Botswana, and white colonists.
In 1961, in an effort to protect their land, it was declared the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, a name chosen because it was thought too controversial to call it Bushman land.
In 1966, Botswana won independence, and soon afterwards huge diamond deposits were discovered outside the reserve. Botswana is now a rich country and the world’s largest exporter of gem diamonds.
In the 1980s, intensive exploration for diamonds began inside the Bushman reserve.
In 1986, the government stated that its official policy was to move the Bushmen off their land to ’relocation camps’, called New Xade and Kaudwane, outside the reserve.
Life soon became difficult for the Gana and Gwi and their neighbours the Bakgalagadi.
After living by hunting and gathering for millennia, they were told hunting was now illegal without licences, which they had to apply for in much the same way as tour companies operating hunting holidays for rich tourists.
This was despite the fairly obvious fact that one of the main reasons that tourists came to the area was to see the Bushmen going about their lives. With their eco-balanced lifestyle, they were as much a part of the natural scenic canvas, as the plants and animals they co?existed with.
Persecution increased, and there was several, well documented, instances of torture by officials.
Families came under constant pressure to move to the relocation camps: at a typical meeting the minister of local government told the Bushmen, ’I have not come to talk of anything else except to tell you that you will move, because this place is for wildlife.’
Meanwhile, at least two substantial deposits of diamonds were located inside the reserve - near the Bushmen villages of Gope and Gugama.
Test mining at Gope in 1997 revealed a deposit described by an industry source as ’the best new target in the Kalahari’.
Towards the end of that year, officials moved out over 1,000 Bushmen by force, loading people and their dismantled homes onto trucks.
The entire settlement of Xade, which was equipped with a borehole, clinic and primary school, was destroyed. Many arrived in the camps to find their lives a mixture of dependency, boredom and despair.
Alcoholism and violence became rife and it is not as though this should have been thought of as a surprising outcome. After all, there are many well-documented histories of what happened to the Aborigines in Australia, who suffered a not too dissimilar fate.
Many Bushmen tried to move back to the reserve and some succeeded, but by early 2002, less than 1,000 Bushmen remained on their land.
In February, in an operation overseen by a retired army general, trucks moved in, the Bushmen’s water pump was disabled and their water tanks emptied.
Since surrounding cattle ranches use most of the previously available water and have lowered the water table, the Bushmen, whose land is desert, now depend on water pumped from boreholes, rather than natural water sources that supported them for millennia.
Almost all the Bushmen were trucked out and some were even threatened with being burned in their homes if they resisted.
Survival International, the worldwide organisation supporting tribal peoples, believes the reserve’s diamond deposits are the principal reason behind the evictions.
Under international law the Bushmen are the rightful owners of their land: it is likely that in the government’s eyes this puts at risk future exploitation of the deposits.
De Beers, the massive diamond company, which operates the country’s major diamond mines in 50:50 partnership with the government, claims it has no plans to mine Gope for ’the foreseeable future’.
However, it presently has an abundance of supply, and it would not be in its interests to mine another deposit at this stage, but they are a company that believes in planning ahead.
It currently claims the find is ’sub-economic’: in 1997, however, it admitted it was ’moderately large’ and De Beers has not given up the concession.
Survival is campaigning for those Bushmen and Bakgalagadi, who wish to return to their land, to be allowed to do so and to live there in perpetuity without fear of persecution.
There is no justification for the actions of the Botswana government and they don’t even have the pseudo excuse of a modern-day "Custer’s last stand" to provide even the smallest defence for their actions.
For more information
see www.survival-international.org
, or contact telephone +44 (0)20 7687 8700.
Source Correspondent - 30/10/2002
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