The Bushmen of 31 Battalion fought on the losing side and now they are paying the ultimate price, writes Adam Alexander
IN the Karoo desert, the sun is setting over an army camp unlike any other in the world. This is the time when the sea of mudbrown tents called Schmidtsdrif springs to life.
The encampment has been home to a desperately damaged community for seven years. Here, under the auspices of the army, 4 000 people live and die on the banks of the
Vaal river, 72km from Kimberley. Neglected, in some cases to the point of starvation, they are the remnants of South Africa’s 31 Battalion — the force of fighting Bushmen.
“Many have died of hunger here,” said Riano Nduve, a 23-year-old Bushman who teaches Afrikaans at the camp. “Sometimes the doctors at the sick bay tell them they have something else and that it is not hunger. But it’s not the truth.”
Nduve, who works as part of a new government education programme to aid the Bushmen, claims that as many as 100 people have died of starvation since the camp was formed and that many are now afraid to visit the sick bay at the camp in case they, too, “disappear”. “My mother went with only a headache. I never saw her alive again,” said one Bushman. Most of the Bushmen here do not trust the army anymore.
It is a wonder they trust anyone. Yet few communities need a sick bay as much as this one. Twenty-five years of almost continuous war have shattered these naturally non- aggressive people, used as frontline troops first by the Portuguese colonists in Angola, then by the South African defence forces against Namibia.
“They are the most traumatised community in the world,” said human-rights lawyer Roger Chennels, a member of a trust board set up to help the Bushmen. “They are the only group of Bushmen in Africa who will kill each other with a bow and arrow over an argument.”
They were brought to this corner of the military training ground of Schmidtsdrif in 1990 after Namibia’s independence and they have been in limbo ever since, living on the meagre salaries of the few soldiers still employed by the army and on endless broken promises. “Nothing could be worse for Bushmen than to put them in straight lines and tell them to live in one place. They’re used to roaming southern Africa and being free,” said Chennels.
The army is now busy integrating more than seven armies into one new force and has more to think about than the Bushmen who served the country so loyally and bravely. Fewer than 100 have been integrated into the 3 Infantry Battalion based at Kimberley.
Former infantryman Smit Tjiohimba (34) looks much older than his years. He has been trying for three years, since his demobilisation, to get an army pension to support his wife and two children. His letters to military headquarters in Pretoria have met with no reply. “They promised us we would get pensions but we never got them,” said Tjiohimba, who keeps his family alive by fishing in the Vaal and selling his catch in the nearest town 40km away.
His eyes are bloodshot from cheap wine as he watches a traditional dance next to his tent, and his face betrays the profound disappointment that pervades the camp.
Yet he is one of the lucky ones. Walk into the sick bay and you pass uniformed Bushmen who lost limbs as frontline trackers for the army. There are 50 amputees at the camp. They will tell you about the mine or grenade that maimed them but they will not talk about the war or how they feel now. “They are very secretive,” said Captain Steve Moyo, a nurse at the sick bay.
Moyo believes the Bushmen are deteriorating rapidly — mentally and physically. “They have no income and they don’t know where they stand. They live for today. Tomorrow they don’t know where they will be. They got a lot of promises that they would be resettled in a month or two — and this is now their sixth year.”
The latest promise is of a farm outside Kimberley, bought for them by the government two months ago. They are forbidden to grow food on any reasonable scale at Schmidtsdrif, so this would at last give them an area where they could feed themselves.
But the Bushmen are wary of promises. Sergeant Major Engelbrecht, second-in- command at Schmidtsdrif, said: “The whites migrated up from the south and the black tribes from central Africa migrated down – — and the Bushmen were caught in the middle. They fought on the Portuguese side in the Angolan civil war and they fought on our side in the Namibian civil war — and they’ve been fighting on the wrong side ever since.”
Swapo’s victory in what is now Namibia threatened the Bushmen with possible retribution. Engelbrecht explained: “They were given a choice — to stay or to come back with us — and 500 of them, with their families, decided to come with us. The idea was to spend
R52,5-million building a town for them here at Schmidtsdrif, and that 31 Battalion would carry on as an ethnic type of battalion like the British Gurkhas.”
Mandela’s government had other ideas. It disbanded the battalion in 1994. Having taken up South African citizenship, none of its members could return to their homes in Namibia or Angola. Yet the army claims to have only a “municipal” responsibility to them now — providing water, sanitation, refuse collection and the sick bay, but not food.
The officers who led them in the war against Swapo praised them at the time as skilled trackers and brave soldiers. They certainly needed to be brave: the 500 now at Schmidtsdrif left another 500 dead in battle. “They took very heavy casualties,” said Engelbrecht. “But they are people who can easily adapt. Nowadays we use the Bushmen in 3 Battalion with the same success in the townships.”
For those left at Schmidtsdrif, hopes of a return to the old way of life lie with the children. Their faces do not bear the scars of war. They burst with happiness. The smallest ones carry bows and arrows fashioned from twigs and nylon cord, and deftly search for what little bush fauna exists here.
When the sun has set on Schmidtsdrif, the elders tell stories of how they lived before the world found them and carved up the land they roamed freely. Many have turned to Christianity for support. A bizarre double dose of Western culture is provided in the shape of a church that doubles every Friday night as a cinema. Sermons are currently vying with the Mutant Ninja Turtles.
There is also a government education programme involving 26 teachers, priming the Bushmen with new skills in preparation for the long-awaited move.
When that move comes, Schmidtsdrif will eventually be handed over to a group of Tswana people who won it in a recent land claim. The Bushmen will be glad to see the back of it but they won’t believe it until it happens.
Wisely, it seems. “We cannot say that 1998 is written in gold as the year they will be resettled. If we can manage it by the year 2000 then it’s thumbs up,” said Engelbrecht.