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Botswana: more on
the San/Kalahari reserve dispute
Monday, July 05, 2004
I have been doing some reading since that last post ... and gained
a new appreciation for the complexity and diversity of
perspectives on the issue. Most useful was a paper
written by James Suzman, a professor at Cambridge University whose
area of research is the Khoisan (San/Bushmen) peoples.
Suzman gives a /broad/ overview of the challenges facing the San
and the cultural/historial context of the government's actions.
It's a fascinating paper and I strongly recommend reading the
whole thing (only 8 pages).
One of the reasons the government cites for resettling the San off
the CKGR is that the San's current lifestyle is not compatible
with efforts to preserve wildlife resources. While Suzman doesn't
buy the argument completely, he does show that the San in the CKGR
stopped living /exclusively/ as hunter-gatherers a few decades
back. Here is how how their lifestyle began changing ...
George Silberbauer worked as the Bushman Survey
Officer in the
Central Kalahari during the 1960s. At that time, the
G/wikhoen and
G//anakhoen San that lived there depended almost
entirely on hunting
and gathering. Unlike much of the rest of the
Kalahari the CKGR has
no permanent surface water and this constrained human
settlement and
mobility patterns. During the brief wet seasons G/wi
and G//ana
congregated at the shallow pans that brimmed with
water following
spectacular thunderstorms. The long dry seasons were
an altogether
different story. [...] The relatively large groups of
people that
congregated at the pans broke up into much smaller
kin-based units
and dispersed into the bush so that they could
exploit available
resources as efficiently as possible. [...] When
Silberbauer sank a
borehole at Xade for his own use in 1961, he
inadvertently set the
ball of change rolling. The year-round availability
of water in Xade
enticed many G/wi from their dry season camps thus
inverting a
seasonal aggregation and dispersal pattern that had
persevered as
long as anyone could remember. It also gave them a
taste for the
spoils of modernity. [Pg. 1]
[...] Even during the 1960s increasing numbers of
CKGR San were
drifting to the Ghanzi ranches and Tswana
cattle-posts in Kweneng
where they entered labour relationships, often
exploitative, with
Tswana and white farmers. [Pg. 2]
[...] With easy water Xade’s population grew
rapidly. By 1980 it was
a permanent settlement and two years later the
Government built a
school and a health centre there. Game avoided the
area, veldfoods
were over-utilised and the people grew increasingly
reliant on state
aid. Residents of Xade also realised that with
permanent water they
could keep livestock. As other water-points were
established during
the 1980s the residents of the CKGR brought more
goats, donkeys,
dogs and horses into the reserve. Horses and dogs
were particularly
prized since they radically increased hunting
efficiency and range.
The anthropologist Masakazu Osaki (1984:53) reported
that during his
stay in Xade between September and February in
1982/3, of the 91
large ungulates killed by hunters only one of these
was brought down
by traditional bow and arrow. Likewise, year-round
access to potable
water allowed the Xade population to experiment with
cultivation.
With support from agricultural extension services
some managed small
harvests of sorghum, maize meal and cow peas. By
1985, it was
reported that almost all G/wi planted gardens. [Pg.
2]
[...] Between 1965 and 1996 the population in the
CKGR fluctuated by
as much as 41% between wet and dry seasons. Many who
left the CKGR
during dry seasons did so to take up work on the
Ghanzi cattle
ranches or for Tswana households in areas adjacent to
the reserve.
Some were seduced by the spoils of cattle-post life
and remained
while others returned to the CKGR for the rainy
seasons. [Pg. 2]
[...] Although the residents of the CKGR complained
about the
restrictions imposed on hunting and the
sometimes-harsh enforcement
practices adopted by over-zealous wildlife officials,
they still
maintained their mixed economy of hunting, gathering,
cultivation
and herding. [Pg. 3] (source)
In the paper, Suzman is /very/ critical of Survival International
<http://www.survival-international.org/>,
the organization that has been championing the G/wi and G//ana's
right to the CKGR. Stephen Corry, the head of the organization,
responded to Suzman's paper.
---
Note: /New Xade/ is the settlement outside the CKGR that was
founded by the government.
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