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BOTSWANA: Culture
under threat - Special Report on the San Bushmen ( I )
© Survival International
The San have lived in Southern Africa for 30,000 years, but the
fate of a unique lifestyle is in the balance
MOLAPO, 5 Mar 2004 (IRIN) - Drinking cool water in an ostrich egg
shell after a long hot trek. Praying with the parents by the
ancestors' graves. Sharing water pans with lions. These are
Jumanda Gakelebone's memories of his life as a San resident in
Botswana's Central Kalahari Game Reserve (CKGR).
The fate of this lifestyle hinges on a court ruling later this
year on the legality of the government's controversial eviction of
the San people from their ancestral land in the reserve.
"The CKGR case has a symbolic importance, because its
communities are the last among us San to have this special
connection with the land," says Mothambo Ngakaeaja,
coordinator of the Botswana section of the Working Group of
Indigenous Minorities in Southern Africa (WIMSA).
The resettlement of roughly 2,500 CKGR residents, first mooted in
1986, has sparked local and international protest, and tarnished
the image of Botswana, one of Africa's longest-running democracies.
The relocation began in 1997, when, according to government
figures, 1,740 people moved out of the CKGR into the settlements
of New Xade, three hours west in a 4x4, and Kaudwane, 8 hours to
the south over rough, lion infested terrain. Another 530
reluctantly moved out when the government cut off water, food
rations, health and social services to the reserve in early 2002.
Those who moved received a measure of compensation in money and
cattle.
But about 50 die-hards refused to leave. Today, perhaps another
100, unhappy with life in New Xade, have trekked back into the
reserve, rebuilt their branch-and-thatch huts, and live off the
land. Many others in New Xade also want to return.
Their hopes are pinned on the court case.
FIRST INHABITANTS
The hunter-gatherer San have lived in Southern Africa for 30,000
years. About four thousand years ago, waves of cattle-raising
Bantu people from Central Africa moved south and pushed the San
into dry areas like the Kalahari, the vast sheet of sand that
spreads over parts of three countries in the heart of the region.
The arrival of white settlers in the 1600s brought dispossession,
enslavement and slaughter of the San.
Also known as Bushmen, the San are not one people but several
groups, speaking languages that belong to seven linguistic
families. Today the San number roughly 100,000 across Southern
Africa: 48,000 in Botswana, 32,000 in Namibia, 4,300 in South
Africa, 2,500 in Zimbabwe and 300 in Zambia. Last year, 3,500 San
were located in southern Angola; more may live in Western Angola.
Like first peoples elsewhere, from the Native Americans to the
Maoris, the San have a history of discrimination, poverty, social
exclusion, erosion of cultural identity and denial of rights as a
group. In Botswana they are called Basarwa (those who don't raise
cattle), a term the San find demeaning.
Yet the San have also captured the attention of anthropologists
and the media with their extraordinary survival skills, wealth of
indigenous knowledge, rich traditions and oneness with the
environment.
Recognising the uniqueness of San culture, the British colonial
government set up the CKGR in 1961 to protect the habitat, the
wildlife and the lifestyle of its residents. This comprised the G/wi
and the G//ana San and a few hundred Bakgalagadi - Bantu people
who moved into the reserve some 400 years ago and mixed with the
San.
Larger than Denmark, at 52,600 sq km the CKGR is one of Africa's
most remote, unspoiled wildernesses, an open savannah of gold-red
sand, silky grasses, thorny scrub, a few tall acacias, camel thorn
trees and underground rivers, but no surface water. Herds of
gemsbok, eland, kudu, wildebeest and hartebeest gather at the salt
pans. So do the predators - lions, cheetahs, hyenas and jackals.
The environment holds few secrets for the San. In a few square
metres they can find a pantry, a pharmacy and a well: water in fat
tuber roots, edible berries, medicinal leaves, nutritious beetles.
Even the scorpion's deadly poison is useful as a dip for hunting
arrows.
EVICTION
But some San mixed traditional hunting - on foot with bow and
arrow - with modern methods, using horses and, says the
government, the occasional suspected use of firearms. The
authorities argue that these practices, along with owning small
herds of goats and donkeys in the reserve, are incompatible with
wildlife conservation.
However, documents from the Department of Wildlife and National
Parks state that between 1986 and 1996, "wildlife biomass
more than doubled" in the CKGR.
The government's key point is an insistence that the San are
better off in settlements with health and education facilities and
that to provide social services in the CKGR is too expensive.
"People have been encouraged to move out to give themselves
and their children the benefits of development," says
Clifford Maribe, press secretary at the Ministry of Foreign
Affairs.
The UK-based activist group, Survival International, who defends
the rights of tribal peoples worldwide, believes that the real
reason is the government's plan for diamond mining in the reserve.
The government denies this because, it says, mining the CKGR
diamond deposits is not economically worthwhile.
WIMSA sees other powerful interests at play. "Cattle-ranchers
and conservation are the two bulls fighting the San, with minerals
in a third place," says Ngakaeaja.
Ditshwanelo, the Centre for Human Rights in Botswana, looks at the
broader context. The government's one-size-fits-all model of
development does not cater for minorities with a different
lifestyle. The Tswana (the majority ethnic group) model of social
organisation is based on cattle-raising, agriculture, and villages
organised hierarchically under a headman. The
hunter-gatherer San, with their loose and egalitarian social
organisation, and extensive land use, do not fit the majority
model.
"The tragedy is that we are replaying the colonisation game
if we don't allow the San their right to be different," says
Alice Mogwe, director of Ditshwanelo.
SAN RESISTANCE
The rumours of eviction began circulating in the late 1980s. The
local pressure group, First People of the Kalahari (FPK), rallied
the residents to resist expulsion from the CKGR and demand the
right to their ancestral land.
Some San resettled voluntarily. Others were persuaded, according
to Ngakaeaja, "by carrot or stick or by monkey tricks",
which ranged from promises of large compensation to alleged
threats of forced removal by the army and police.
New Xade has been dubbed the "place of death" by the
San. There is no hunting, and they are far from the graves of
their ancestors, where the San find healing and guidance.
*The San have suffered a history of discrimination, poverty,
social exclusion, erosion of cultural identity and denial of
rights as a group*
"Why does the government want to move me like a parcel? The
government found me here at independence in 1966," says
Motuakgomo Zandu, an old man who refuses to leave the reserve.
He and 58 others are encamped in Molapo, one of the six original
San settlements inside the CKGR, five hours by sandy track from
the Xade park entrance. Once a thriving community of 300 people,
Molapo was razed in 2002, its huts dismantled, water tanks emptied
and taken away.
Molapo today consists of a handful of huts. The men, women and
children are in rags, destitute, and highly vulnerable to any
medical emergency but fiercely proud of their culture.
The CKGR San hold on to their lifestyle. "There is no bush
food in New Xade," is a phrase often heard. More than diet is
at stake. Hunting and gathering wild food is central to their
cultural identity, and the residents suffered a major blow when
the government cancelled their hunting licences in October 2001.
"The development the government offers us does not include
what we are proud of," says Jumanda Gakelebone, acting
coordinator for FPK. "We know how to provide for our families
in the bush, but in New Xade we depend on government handouts.
Instead of every day going to find food in the bush, we go to the
shebeen to drink. This is killing our culture."
The new lifestyle "has led to many problems, including
alcoholism, communal tension, and a rise in TB and AIDS cases,
because the people were not prepared for such a change," says
a 2002 report by the Kuru Family of Organisations, a consortium of
NGOs working with the San.
The government is spending plenty of money - more than US $5
million, it says - on New Xade. This amount, activists point out,
could pay for the delivery of essential services to the CKGR -
estimated by the government at US $11,000 a month.
New Xade's newly built hospital and maternity ward, classrooms,
students hostels and government staff houses, equipped with solar
panels and water tanks, contrast with the basic branch-and-thatch
huts of the San. But there is rubbish everywhere and no latrines.
Only a few government vehicles drive by on the sandy roads. Goats
and donkeys wander around as aimlessly as the people.
By noon, the youth at the Cool Way Bar are drunk and bored. They
aggressively beg from the occasional foreigner. At family shebeens,
people sit on the sand and share bowls of Qgari, a traditional
fermented beer.
All the neat new brick buildings cannot hide the fact that New
Xade stands on a bleak piece of scrub, with little shade and no
water - a far cry from the rich savannah of the reserve.
ABORTED DIALOGUE
Since 1996, a negotiating team, comprising representatives of the
residents, FPK, WIMSA, Ditshwanelo and the Botswana Council of
Churches, has protested the relocation, while seeking dialogue
with the authorities.
A first step was to register 250 adults as CKGR residents, which
gave the negotiating team a mandate.
A second step was the mapping of traditional hunting and gathering
territories in the reserve, done by FPK members using oral history
and modern technology, including satellite global positioning
systems.
The third was the preparation of a land claim by a team of South
African lawyers, who had successfully negotiated royalties for the
San from a pharmaceutical company developing an
appetite-suppressant derived from a cactus traditionally used by
the San.
Things looked better in 2001 when the Department of Wildlife and
National Parks, in consultation with the San and the negotiating
team, drew up a draft management plan granting the San user rights
and Community Use Zones inside the reserve.
"The plan was a healing process between residents and
wildlife officials," Alice Mogwe told IRIN.
Survival International rejected the plan for lack of ownership and
hunting rights, and intensified its worldwide campaign, accusing
the Botswana government of "genocide" while launching a
boycott of its diamonds.
The group also angrily protested the alleged torture of some San
poachers at the hands of police.
"Attitudes hardened, the plan was shelved, and that was so
frustrating," says Mogwe.
The Foreign Ministry's Clifford Maribe told IRIN that "the
proposal in question was revised to align the draft management
plan with government policies. Community Use Zones have been
demarcated in wildlife management areas adjacent to the game
reserve."
In fact, according to lawyer and negotiating team member Glyn
Williams, the draft management plan conformed to the original
government policy for Community-Based Natural Resource Management,
which allowed Community Use Zones inside game parks. The policy
was changed after the government announcement in 2002 that
essential services to the reserve would be cut off.
THE COURT CASE
After negotiations froze in 2001, the team took the Botswana
government to court on behalf of the CKGR residents in April 2002.
Since then there have been many delays due to technicalities, but
the court is expected to rule in June on whether:
- It was unlawful for the government to end basic and essential
services to the residents in January 2002;
- The government has an obligation to restore these services;
- The residents were in possession of their land and were deprived
of it forcibly, wrongly and without their consent;
- The government's refusal to issue game licenses to the
residents, and allow them to enter the CKGR is unlawful and
unconstitutional.
The lawyers point out that the Botswana constitution restricts
entry or residence of non-Bushmen in Bushman areas like the CKGR,
which can only be interpreted as granting the San the right to
live and hunt on their ancestral land.
The San derive hope from a landmark case in South Africa last year,
involving a diamond company and 3,000 Nama people from the
Richtersveld area in the Northern Cape Province. The
Constitutional Court ruled that indigenous people have land and
mineral rights over their territory, and laws that dispossessed
them amount to racial discrimination.
South Africa also restored land rights and benefits to the Khomani
San in the Kalahari Gemsbok Park in 1999.
"We hope for a victory because we have good legal arguments,
but we fear delays in implementation," said WIMSA's Ngakaeaja.
Back inside the reserve at Molapo, men, women and children gather
around a fire. Motuakgomo Zandu tells stories about how the eland
and the ostrich got their names. The San believe that animals were
once human. Under the starry sky of the Kalahari, Africa's oldest
traditions are under threat, but tenaciously live on.
Source: IRIN
/ UNITED NATIONS
BOTSWANA: Culture
under threat - Special Report on the San Bushmen ( II )
© Survival International
San children - among the poorest of the poor in Botswana
DQAE QARE, 10 Mar 2004 (IRIN) - With nimble fingers, Sobo Cgara
digs around a plant and unearths a calabash-shaped root full of
water. Cgara, 24, is a San guide who shows tourists his people's
unique knowledge of the Kalahari at a community-owned game farm
near D'kar in Ghanzi district, in central-west Botswana.
He is one of the few San youth with education, a job and a future.
The estimated 50,000 San in Botswana are "the poorest of the
poor", says Alice Mogwe, head of Ditshwanelo, the Centre for
Human Rights.
Botswana is rich in diamonds and cattle, with a population of just
1.6 million. But as an ethnic minority, the San experience both
poverty and allegedly discrimination. They are called "Basarwa"
(those who don't raise cattle, in the Tswana language), a term
they feel is demeaning.
The San (or Bushmen), the first people of Southern Africa, have
lived in the region for at least 30,000 years. Over time, the
hunter-gatherer San were displaced and lost the rights to their
ancestral lands and natural resources to farming, cattle herding,
mineral exploitation and nature conservation.
"Our problems are poor health, low literacy, inadequate
education, bad housing, poor hygiene, TB, AIDS and malnourishment,
fragmentation, stigmatisation, social exclusion and lack of
participation in mainstream politics," says Mothambo
Ngakaeaja, coordinator of the Botswana section of the Working
Group of Indigenous Minorities in Southern Africa.
LANGUAGE BARRIERS
The government of Botswana provides free education but the San
have problems in accessing it. Teaching is done in Tswana and
English, which many San children do not speak.
One Tswana first-year teacher in Ghanzi district had 40
San-speaking children in her class, but could not comunicate with
them. In despair she went for help to the Naro Language Project (Naro
is the most widely spoken San language in Ghanzi). Alongside the
NGO umbrella known as the Kuru Family of Organisations, the
language project works with the government and San communities to
improve literacy and education.
The government has backed the language project's suggestion of
having mother-tongue education in the first three school years and
hiring Naro-speaking assistant teachers. When classes start,
Hessel and Coby Visser, two Dutch linguists with the project,
visit every school and show teachers how to write and pronounce
San names. Other activities include teaching adults to read and
write.
Over the past 13 years, the Vissers have transcribed Naro and have
produced reading material like HIV/AIDS information and riddle
booklets to encourage literacy. Hessel Visser has mastered Naro's
28 clicks - four main ones with seven modifications each. He has
also seen progress: more San children are studying, and a few have
even reached university.
DEVELOPMENT MODELS
The government lists many accomplishments by its Remote Area
Development Programme (RADP) since 1978, when the
Bushmen-Basarwa-San were renamed Remote Area Dwellers, shortened
to RADs. The government argues that the 1974 Basarwa Development
Programme was "separatist" and the term "RADs"
includes all needy ethnic groups in those areas. However, the
large majority of RADs are San.
"Under the RADP, the emphasis is placed on the geographic
distances from existing social services, as well as economic
marginalisation, rather than on ethnicity," says Clifford
Maribe, press secretary to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Operating in seven districts, the RADP has brought roads, potable
water, primary schools, hostels and health posts, the latest being
a newly completed maternity ward costing P4.4 million (US
$912,560)in New Xade.
Its Economic Promotion Fund supports livestock schemes, small
industrial projects, income-generation, and training in animal
husbandry, among other activities. To acquaint RADs with
commercial cattle farming, the Fund has established three
community-owned farms.
Driving through New Xade, the controversial village where San
residents of the Central Kalahari Game Reserve (CKGR) have been
relocated, one sees people queuing for drought-relief and
food-for-work programmes. The government offers free education and
health care, old-age pensions, drought aid, free food for AIDS
orphans and free antiretrovirals for people with HIV/AIDS.
In spite of these efforts, rural poverty is endemic and the San
remain the poorest of the poor, exploited as farm labourers,
plagued by alcoholism, perceived as backward, silent in politics.
The government's largesse may be part of the problem. "The
government gives but does not empower. Its progress is based on
dependency," says Alice Mogwe.
For the resettled San of the CKGR the problem is more acute. In
one move, they went from being resourceful to being dependent.
"Government relief is another way of killing a person; in the
Reserve we knew how to provide for ourselves," says Daoxlo
Xukuri, head of the activist group First People of the Kalahari.
Moreover, many development projects for the San are designed and
imposed from the outside, with little input from the San. "Do
they really want to plant hydroponic tomatoes, build bricks and
weave baskets with reeds trucked in from the Okavango delta
because there is no bush around New Xade?" asked an NGO
worker in Ghanzi who requested anonymity.
The Botswana government appears perplexed by the criticism of its
approach. A statement on its official website notes: "In a
world where governments stand accused of many terrible crimes, it
does seem strange that the Botswana government should have to
defend itself against the charge of improving the lives of its
citizens."
However, it goes on to say: "Culture is not static, all of us
have a culture and a past. We must treasure these cultural values
that help us live prosperously and discard those that retard
progress."
LOSING LAND
For centuries and up to the present, the San have been the losers
in the conflict between their need for land on which to forage and
the demands of cattle ranching.
In both traditional Tswana culture and the modern Botswana economy,
cattle rank high as a source of status and wealth. The government
has implemented several plans to promote cattle-ranching, leading
to the dispossession and forced relocation of poor rural people (not
only San).
The World Bank has estimated that between 28,000 and 31,000 people
were displaced by the Tribal Grazing Land Policy, initiated in
1975 to allocate and regulate tribal land where cattle graze. The
new National Policy for Agricultural Development and the Fencing
Act have the potential to displace many more, mostly in the
Western Central District, say analysts.
"Displacement of the landless [has created] an underclass of
rural poor who are dependent on the state," says a report by
Jenny Clover for the African Security Analysis Programme at the
Pretoria-based Institute for Security Studies.
The San also face problems in obtaining secure land and resource
tenure rights, including water and grazing. "District Land
boards and Councils have been unwilling to grant land rights to
groups who make claims on the basis of customary rights and
traditional livelihoods," anthropologist Robert Hitchcock
notes.
The official opinion is that the San are nomadic (although they
settle for periods and know their foraging areas) and thus have no
rights to ancestral land, as San or by customary law, only hunting
rights, and even these are very limited.
The Tribal Land Act Amendment Act of 1993 allowed people to get
land anywhere in the country, not just in their home districts,
provided they developed the land in two years, including water and
fencing. In practice, people with means, mainly the urban-based,
outcompete locals for land. The losers are the poor.
As casual workers on the ranches in Ghanzi, the San have
reportedly endured a history of abuse at the hands of Afrikaner
farmers who settled on the fertile land along the Ghanzi ridge in
1890s. In the process they displaced some 5,000 Naro San, who
still suffer the consequences of losing their land. "They
turned to casual labour, begging, stock theft and piecework for
survival. They were demoralised, drunk and apathetic," wrote
researcher Elizabeth Wily in 1972.
The Naro describe their lives with the term "sheta",
meaning poverty, unemployment, oppression, dependency, impotence,
homelessness and landlessness, despair, sickness and death."
POVERTY AND ETHNICITY
In its documents and policies the government consistently talks of
the Basarwa, not as a distinct ethnic and indigenous group, but as
poor citizens or welfare-needing RADs, like any other poor rural
Batswana.
This is an important distinction, analysts say. If the San's
problems stem from poverty, that would require a distinct set of
policy responses; if their problems are due to their status as a
marginalised minority, a different course of actions would be
required.
"Brick-and-mortar" solutions (schools and hospitals) and
relief food do not solve social exclusion, low self-esteem and
discrimination. In the words of a researcher, the government tried
so hard to be culture-neutral that it became culture-blind.
"The Basarwa need a place where they belong. But how do you
recognise their need of a sense of belonging if you don't
recognise their right to their identity?" says Maureen Akena,
actvism programme officer at Ditshwanelo.
THE INDIGENEOUS DEBATE
At independence in 1966, Botswana declared itself a non-racial
state. At the time, for a nation emerging from colonial rule and
bordering apartheid South Africa, to stress non-differentiation
and non-discrimination was a progressive policy.
Forty years later, it runs counter to a global trend that accepts
cultural diversity as compatible with, and not in opposition to,
the idea of a nation state.
The United Nations Working Group on Indigenous Populations
promotes the rights of the indigenous to reproduce their cultures,
maintain their collective identities, pursue their own social
norms and enjoy equal social, political and legal status in
society.
In force since 1991, Convention 169 on Indigenous and Tribal
Peoples of the International Labour Organisation is a useful tool
for governments with ethnic minorities. Countries with large
indigenous populations like Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Costa
Rica, Peru, Bolivia, Colombia, Paraguay, Fiji and Norway have
ratified it.
Among many provisions, the Convention stipulates that indigenous
peoples shall not be removed from the lands they occupy, and calls
on governments to respect their cultures and spiritual values
attached to the land.
Across the world, first peoples are making some progress towards
recognition of their land rights and the right to cultural
identity.
But the Botswana government does not recognise the San as
indigenous people. It strenuously declares that all its citizens
are indigenous.
"The concept of indigenous people is a challenge to the
African continent," says Mothambo Ngakaeja. "If all
blacks are indigenous to Africa, then there are no original
inhabitants."
For Sobo Cgara, pointing out the jackal thorn's berries, its roots
that cure running tummies and the tiny balls of edible sap on a
thorny shrub, is more than a job - it is a way of expressing his
spiritual connection with the Kalahari.
"I am proud of my culture and I love the land," he says
softly. "I'd like to live in the bush and wear clothes like
my ancestors, but the government won't allow me to do it."
His grandmother taught him about plants and animals. After
graduating from high school, he was mostly unemployed for seven
years, except for casual work operating a road grader. Last year
he took a tourism course and this year he was hired by the Dqae
Qare (antelope biltong) game farm.
His goals? "To help my community understand the importance of
education and to fight alcoholism". His dreams? "That
the San community will be respected like all others."
SOURCE: IRIN / United Nations
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For more details see:
Working Group for Indigenous Minorities in Southern Africa
http://www.san.org.za/wimsa/home.htm
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and - if you need to get the "official" view - see:
Government of Botswana
http://www.gov.bw/basarwa/background.html
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But, please, help and do something, since it is still not to late to reconstitute the rights of the Gana and Gwi and other
Koisan speaking people.
http://www.survival-international.org/bushman_appeal.htm
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