Kalahari Bushmen win ancestral land case By Alex Duval Smith 14 December 2006 The Botswana High Court has given more than 1,000 Kalahari Bushmen the right to return to their ancestral hunting grounds by ruling they were wrongly evicted by the Botswanan government four years ago. Campaigners said the landmark decision will advance the rights of indigenous people all over the world. Supporters of the Bushmen - traditional hunter-gatherers whose proper name is the San - accused the government of evicting them to exploit the potential diamond and mineral wealth on their reserve. A panel of three judges in the southern Botswanan town of Lobatse ruled that the San were illegally moved from their ancestral land in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve. After a 2-1 ruling, Judge Mpaphi Phumaphi, who delivered the swing vote, said the government had forced them out of the reserve by depriving them of their livelihood. "In my view, the simultaneous stoppage of the supply of food rations and the stoppage of hunting licences is tantamount to condemning the remaining residents to death by starvation," he said. Miriam Ross, of the London-based pressure group Survival International, said the ruling was historic because it added to a "growing body of case law and a mounting international consensus that recognises the rights of indigenous peoples". She said a similar case in South Africa three years ago had granted the San rights to mineral revenues from their ancestral land. But the Botswana case marked the first time a modern African court had recognised the ancestral land access rights of indigenous people, she added. The Botswana government would not comment on the ruling but said it was considering appealing. There are estimated to be 100,000 Bushmen in southern Africa, and about half are in Botswana. None live the 20,000-year-old traditional hunter-gatherer life centred on tracking and killing game on foot using poison arrows. Because of their change in lifestyle, it is unlikely that many San will return to the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, which is the size of Belgium. The ruling gives them the right to do so, but does not compel the government to provide services such as water, clinics and schools in the park. The San have suffered decades of discrimination at the hands of the local Setswana population whose name for them, Basarwa, means "people without cattle". White settlers once hunted them for sport. Renowned for their ability to track game by reading delicate signs in the sand, the San in South Africa were used by its armed forces as frontline "trackers" in the Apartheid era. Yesterday's ruling reverses 20 years of a Botswana government policy to "encourage" the San to leave the reserve. From 1997, the authorities began to cut services to them, such as mobile clinics, in the park. Payments were offered to those who volunteered to move to a resettlement camp 30 miles away. For that reason, the government has always argued that it did not evict anyone. However, human rights campaigners in Botswana say the authorities took advantage of the San's low levels of education by spreading rumours that boreholes in the park would be sealed and those who remained would be killed by the Botswana Defence Force. San advocacy groups say they have been watched by police. Most anthropologists have been denied research permits to study them in the park. But it is unlikely that many San will return to the park. Even before the evictions began 20 years ago, most had given up their nomadic existence in the park and had settled around boreholes in it. Nevertheless, life in the park - close to the ancestors who are crucial to the wellbeing of the San - was better than at the New Xade resettlement camp, where residents have no jobs, resettlement grants are spent on alcohol, and Aids is rife. Desire for tourism in the Kalahari and concern for its dwindling wildlife are the government's principal motives for resettling the San. Claims from European pressure groups that the government is motivated by a desire to allow diamond mining in the park have been discredited. Even if true, the move would produce such an international outcry that it would be unlikely. But it will take major investment to make the park viable for tourism. Animal populations, down to a mere 5 per cent of levels 30 years ago, were decimated by government-built cattle fences around the park, which cut off game from natural migration routes and water. De Beers boycotters ask DiCaprio for support The creators of a new website designed to promote an international boycott of the De Beers diamond company have placed a full-page advertisement in Variety, the Hollywood entertainment newspaper, appealing to the actor Leonardo DiCaprio to help with their campaign. The site, www.boycottdebeers.com, accuses the company of complying with the government of Botswana in forcing bushmen from land in a park in the Kalahari desert, created to protect them from the encroachments of modern civilisation. The diamond giant has denied any connection with the eviction of the bushmen. However, several international models, including Imam, Lily Cole and Erin O'Connor, who have previously worked for De Beers, are supporting the campaign and have vowed not appear on behalf of the company again. DiCaprio plays the lead role in the newly released thriller Blood Diamond, which highlights the money-trail from diamond mining to conflicts in Africa. De Beers has responded to the film by saying its diamonds are 100 per cent untainted by war and violence. David Usborne

Flashback: Kalahari Bushmen lose desert battle Staff and agencies Wednesday December 13, 2006 Guardian Unlimited Bushmen forced out of the Kalahari desert by Botswana's government will not be allowed to return, the country's top judge ruled today. Two other high court judges are still due to deliver their own verdicts later in the day, in a case which has attracted worldwide attention to the fate of the Bushmen, who are among Africa's last hunter-gatherers. However, the decision by the court's chief justice, Maruping Dibotelo, most likely means the Bushmen will fail in their attempt to return to the desert from which they were evicted four years ago. "The contention of the applicants that the government unlawfully deprived them of their land ...must fail," the judge ruled, according to Reuters. About 100 Bushmen, some with animal hides on their clothing, were waiting outside the courtroom in Lobatse, south of Botswana's capital, Gaborone. Roy Sesana, leader of the pressure group which brought the case, said the chief justice's opinion meant the high court could not be considered impartial. "It's not fair. We are very sad about this statement," Reuters quoted him as saying. "They were told how to give the verdict. They were blinded and they had their ears covered." The Bushmen, whose ancestors have lived in the Kalahari for thousands of years, say they have been forced to resettle in bleak camps to make way for diamond mining, Botswana's most lucrative export. Backed by foreign supporters, including Survival International, a British-based pressure group which campaigns for the rights of indigenous and tribal people, the Bushmen launched a civil lawsuit to try to force the government to let them return. The government insists the Bushmen have changed their lifestyle so much that they do not belong in the Kalahari any more and are affecting conservation efforts. They are better off in settlements, where they have access to clinics and schools, it says, adding that diamond mining has nothing to do with the decision. The Bushmen's legal campaign has been strongly backed by international campaigners, among them South African anti-apartheid hero, Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Survival International says that more than one in 10 of the original 239 Bushmen who signed up to the legal case have since died in government resettlement camps. The pressure group alleges that the Bushmen have been forced out to make way for increased operations by De Beers, the world's biggest diamond mining company, which denies any such plans. The government has resettled about 2,000 Bushmen mostly in 1997 and 2002 and says all but about 24 had voluntarily left the reserve. About half of southern Africa's 100,000 surviving Bushmen live in Botswana. The Bushmen have said they will appeal if they lose the case.

Flashback: Bushmen: The harmless people Alison George New Scientist Print Edition 11 November 2006 In 1950, a 19-year-old girl left the elite Smith College in Massachusetts to join her family on an expedition that would change their lives. Prompted by her father's desire to visit unexplored places, the family set off for the Kalahari desert in search of Bushmen living out the "old ways" of hunter-gatherers. The girl, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, went on to celebrate them in her 1959 book The Harmless People, which became a classic of popular anthropology. Nearly 50 years on, Marshall Thomas's latest book The Old Way revisits the story - and finds that the Bushmen's fate is more complex than it seems. Elizabeth Marshall Thomas went on three expeditions to visit the Bushmen of what is now Botswana and Namibia. They were the last major population of hunter-gatherers. Marshall Thomas returned to her English degree at Smith College, Massachusetts, and has written seven books, both fiction and non-fiction, including the best-selling The Hidden Life of Dogs. Her latest book, The Old Way, was published in October (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $25). Westerners mourn the loss of this hunter-gatherer society, but you take a rather different view... Yes, for me they are living in somewhat the same way, but with different economics. The idea that you help your own is still present. This is what kept the human race alive for 150,000 years. The hunter-gatherers told anthropologists they don't define themselves by how they get food but by how they relate to each other. We saw that. They tried to keep jealousy at a minimum, with nobody more important or owning more things than anyone else. You gave things away rather than keep them. You wanted other people to think of you with a good feeling. Is that the "old way" of your book title? Yes. There was a time when the playing field was level and all species lived in this way. How people and their domestic animals live now is profoundly different. Are there still efforts to help the Bushmen regain that idealised notion of the hunter-gatherer life? There are, and I think it's unfortunate. Tourists want to see it, and WWF and other organisations want to preserve the local ecosystems - which is a good thing. But it's the Bushmen's ecosystem and the reason that it's there today is because of their way of life. So I have a little problem with some foreign group telling them what they must and must not do. Also, gathering food is not going to be as viable as it was in the past because back then the population density was one person per 10 square miles, but now there are many more people and much less space. And people don't have the skills they need to live in the old way. Foreign groups are asking young African men to go back to stone-age hunting when these men know perfectly well that everyone else has rifles. So there's no going back? No, though anybody could become a hunter-gatherer - you'd just have to learn it. But you don't see a lot of volunteers stepping forward to do it now because it's much too difficult. After the old lifestyle collapsed, the Bushmen were encouraged to be farmers like other Namibians, and they tried. Some farms were started around a place set up for them called Tsumkwe. But for a number of reasons the experiment didn't work very well and Tsumkwe is now a hellhole with a huge alcohol problem. Even so, if the farmers received the help they needed the farms might be a way of moving forward. On land that the Bushmen own they could do all sorts of things, such as sports hunting, where foreigners pay to hunt big game. The Bushmen could be paid guides, for example. Are these the people you lived with? Some of them are the very same people. We spent most of our time with the Ju/wasi - also spelt Ju/'hoansi in textbooks, but I use the older spelling because it looks closer to how it sounds. The Ju/wasi we knew lived in what is now Namibia. We also visited the /Gwi people who live on the border between Botswana and Namibia. You wrote that the expedition was like voyaging into the deep past? Yes. The Bushmen had Palaeolithic technology. They didn't plant crops and had no domestic animals, no fabric or manufactured goods. They sometimes used small bits of metal for arrowheads, but since the arrows were merely a variation of bone arrows, the technology did not change. What did they eat? Most food was gathered by the women. When people think of gathering, they think of it as mostly plant food, but it produced proteins such as turtle, snake, caterpillar, honey ants and the like. The most exciting food, however, was large antelope that the men hunted, and that amounted to about 20 per cent of their food. The success rate of hunting was a lot lower than gathering, but they could get large amounts of meat that would feed the whole group - usually about 25 people - for a while. A big adventure for a 19-year-old girl. Didn't these experiences end up in a famous novel? Yes. Sylvia Plath also went to Smith College, and we were in the same writing class as part of our literature degrees. Our teacher used to read aloud from our writings, but didn't give names. But I knew that Plath was in that class later because I recognised the style of poetry. I wish I had known her. But I believe I appeared briefly in The Bell Jar as a girl who won a prize for writing about her adventures among the pygmies of Africa. What do you make of the accusations by some academics that your writing is too sentimental? My mother Lorna also wrote about the Bushman culture and we were both accused of over-emphasising the lack of violence in Bushman culture, but we were only reporting what we had seen. In the Bushmen groups we visited, we observed that there was much emphasis on cooperation and on avoiding jealousy. The reason was that life was pretty marginal and one way to get through was to have others who help you in your hour of need. Everything in their culture was oriented to this. So it isn't that they have a natural "niceness" - I never said that they did. They're just like everybody else. What they have done is recognise the damage one person can do to another and try to put a limit on it. What about research that shows if you scale up the violence in Bushman society, it's as bad as Detroit? There is no question that violence did happen in Bushman societies. I knew of a group of 15 where one man killed two others with an arrow. The men in that group killed the killer. So now three had died, and three in 15 is a pretty high percentage: that's higher than the murder rate of Detroit. But the reason the Bushmen we encountered were focused on not fighting was because they were a society that recognised the human proclivity for fighting and tried to remove its causes. They had the same difficulties as everyone else but they treated it differently, and they recognised the value of having a low-violence society. Did you sense that this kind of life couldn't last? It was obvious that in the outside world there was a desire for land expansion. The pastoralists wanted it for grazing, and the white farmers for farms. People thought: "Why not take the land from the Bushmen, they're not doing anything with it?" The farmers and the pastoralists thought the Bushmen would be put to "better use" if they were made to work on the farms. My father saw it all coming. The first year we were there, a farmer followed our tracks and captured some Bushmen for slaves. My dad found out and went and got them back. How did it all come to an end? The /Gwi we knew were displaced by farmers from the lands they had always used. Most of them died of thirst, starvation or disease. Part of the Kalahari was designated "Bushmanland" in 1970. Unfortunately this was meant to be home not only to the original inhabitants but to all Bushmen from all language groups. The density of people meant the end of hunting and gathering. Many of the Ju/wasi now live in Tsumkwe, and depend on the wages of the few who can find work. Did the ideas about Bushmen becoming hunter-gatherers again stop the farms taking off? Yes. And that's my brother John's message too. He made a film called The Kalahari Family, and the last section is titled "Death by myth". He believes Bushman farms failed because they didn't get the support they needed, due to the efforts channelled towards getting them back to a hunter-gatherer way of life. From issue 2577 of New Scientist magazine, 11 November 2006, page 52-53