At a tiny settlement in the centre of Botswana’s Central Kalahari Game Reserve, a small village is fighting a rearguard battle against removal from their land. These are the bittereinders, among the last of the first people of Southern Africa. Photographer Paul Weinberg and writer Tony Weaver report
Author’s note: I freely interchange the words San, Basarwa and Bushmen. Strictly speaking none of them are politically correct. If the various agencies involved with the Bushmen spent less time being politically correct and more time fighting the good fight, this story wouldn’t be happening today.
We drove into the Central Kalahari Game Reserve navigating from maps decorated with photographs of wizened Bushmen hunters staring into the desert fastness. Our guide books all begin with phrases like “this ancestral hunting ground of the Bushmen”. Chris and Tilde Stuart’s 1989 guide says: “This 51 800km2 game reserve is still inhabited by groups of Bushmen and for this reason it is closed to the general public.”
Ten years later the reserve is open for business. In February last year, Veronica Roodt’s Shell Tourist Guide to Botswana records that “the Central Kalahari Game Reserve … was initially set aside primarily for the use of people who choose to continue their traditional hunter-gatherer way of life … the San people have lived here for perhaps 30 000 years … today there are between 1 000 and 2 000 people living permanently in the area … The majority of these people live at Xade, which is a settlement near the western border.”
A year later, there are no San people left at Xade, the place to which the original removals, over a period of 20 years, took place. In a sleight of hand, the Botswana government has created New Xade, 70km from Xade, 45km outside the western reserve border, and moved them all.
All that is left of Old Xade is a ranger’s post, a staff compound, a camp site and a deserted school. Nothing else. Paul cannot believe it. “When we came through here in 1996 there was a huge settlement. They must have moved more than 1 000 people.” The beehive huts with droopy roofs lie broken on the ground. At one destroyed settlement there is an enamel bucket and a paraffin tin, valuable items, abandoned in the ruins of the kraal.
The village has pathetic touches: thorn bushes dragged across the entrances of huts to keep out predators, the head of a plastic doll, a half-burned pile of fire sticks, a supermarket bag hanging in the thorns of a zizyphus.
At the game scout camp there is an air of military discipline. Some young guys playing soccer in the yard are on “national service” with the Department of Wildlife and National Parks. In the office we get grilled: Why do we want to go to Xaxa and not Deception Pan? Why do we have a Basarwa (Bushman) with us? Are we really tourists? Why did we not book in Gaborone the way we are supposed to?
He relents, and gives us a pamphlet on the reserve: “The people commonly known throughout the world as Bushmen, but more properly referred to as the Basarwa,” it says, “have been resident in and around the area for probably thousands of years. Originally nomadic hunters and gatherers, the lifestyle of the Basarwa has gradually changed with the times and they now live in settlements, some of which WERE (my capitals) situated within the southern half of the Central Kalahari Game Reserve.
“Government has, however, encouraged these people to move to areas outside the reserve in order that they may be provided with modern facilities, schools, clinics etcetera, and to integrate them into modern society.”
We could be chasing a chimera, looking for people who no longer exist. This is a 600km detour off our planned route, 600km of deep, deep, grinding Kalahari sand where covering 200km in six hours is speeding, an expensive chimera.
In Ghanzi and in D’Kar, strongholds of Basarwa/San/Bushmen/Expat aid and passive activism, none of the “experts” seemed to have any first-hand knowledge of what was happening in settlements like Molapo and Metsimanong, another rumoured bittereinder hideout.
In D’Kar, Mathambo NgaKaeaja is a co- ordinator with Wimsa, the Working Group of Indigenous Minorities in Southern Africa. He is pissed off and frustrated and part of an influential younger crew in regional San politics. They have seen academics and writers and photographers and aid workers and priests and philosophers and film-makers come and go and get famous on their story. Now they are dying because of their fame. Everybody is too polite and too dependent on government permits to speak out.
All except Mathambo and a handful of others: “Don’t believe what you hear that there are no more of our people living in the Central Kalahari. There are still more than 250 staunch people who are staying inside, who will not move out of there. This is where our people have lived since before the beginning of time, for thousands and thousands of years, and we will not move.”
Government Notice number 38 of 1963 of the Bechuanaland Protectorate states that “no person other than a Bushman indigenous to the Central Kalahari Game Reserve shall enter the said reserve without having first obtained a permit in writing from the District Commissioner, Ghanzi.”
But diamonds speak louder than moral rights in Botswana. The Kalahari Desert is enormously rich in diamonds. They are already being extracted at Gope, another traditional home of the Basarwa, 36km inside the eastern part of the reserve. According to all the literature, the San have lived in the Central Kalahari for 30 000 years or longer, ergo, they own the land and the diamonds. And the animals and the pans and the bushveld and the tourist revenues. That’s how simple it is.
And that’s why the government cannot allow them to stay.
We drove through fields of giraffe and kudu and bat-eared foxes and got to Molapo mid- afternoon when the light was beginning to turn golden. A small crowd gathered, all very young or very old. Slowly, carefully, younger men and women begin to emerge as the word spreads that we are friends, not foe.
They had been hanging back in case we were government and they needed to hide. We have found the bittereinders.
We cry as we listen to the stories, once because of their sadness, again because of their beauty. The chief of Molapo is Seqo G//anako. “I was born here in Molapo,” he says, “and my grandfather and his grandfather and his grandfather again are buried here under these trees. The government says we must move because of the wild animals, but my grandfather and his grandfather lived with the animals, they are like our goats.
“We have always had wild animals around us. We have always looked after them, we never killed more than we needed to eat. When I see wild animals all around us my heart is happy. When I am hungry and I see them I think of food, but mostly when I see them they just make me very happy.”
At dusk we walk around Molapo with Custom Gabogalalwe, the 29-year-old grandson of the chief. Custom’s name is a “protection” name, a Tswana name he has taken to disguise his origins against the racism of Botswana’s unofficial ethnic hierarchy.
“I think the government will come with guns because we refuse to move from here to New Xade. I am not sure what we will do if that happens. This is our land, our traditional land. My great-great grandfathers are buried here. How can we move? They say they want us out of here because of the animals, but we believe it is because of diamonds or oil. If they want to develop that, then they must talk to us, this is our land.”
Xowago Xam is a very old man with biltong feet who is a famous hunter. “Life here is very good, very very good,” he says. “There is veld food and there is bush medicine and the animals are plenty, they have always been like that, even in the long dry seasons. I will not move from here, I will die in this soil, if the government comes with guns and tries to move me, they can shoot me, I will not move, my blood will be in this soil.”
For years, the village has been asking government for a borehole and they have been denied. Once a month, the government sends a tanker carrying 10 000l for a settlement of 200 people, 50l of water per person, less than two litres a day. Custom says they have been warned that if they feed any of the water to their livestock they will be arrested.
His grandfather says, “The game department has told us we have to move so that they can make a water hole here for the animals so the tourists can come. And they don’t want us near the animals.
“We get no money from the government for the tourists coming through here. We get tourists coming who want to go and walk in the bush, or see some dancing or buy some crafts, but the government tries to stop it. We want to work with tourists, and the government must understand that that is a good thing for this park.”
Like Xowago Xam, Chief Seqo Ga//anako is fatalistic: “I think they will move in one day soon and order us out of here, they will come with guns and cars. If they come here with guns and lorries, we will just sit down. If the government wants to shoot us, they can shoot us, we will not climb in their cars.”
Molapo is a vibrant, buzzy community. In one corner, a granny is skinning a meerkat for supper while her grandchildren crowd around. Across the fire, her daughter clips ostrich egg shells, feeding the rounded bits onto a necklace.
Next door a young boy herds goats into the kraal, and everywhere small fires start up at each family’s hut circle. The chief has given us a camp site within the village perimeter, but outside the intimacy.
Custom and his friends come to visit after dark and we share a Kalahari stir-fry with pap and relish. The talk turns to diamonds. “We have seen the vehicles. Some of them were marked `De Beers’.” The young men are fired up with talk of resistance, and insist they want to live in the bush and not in Ghanzi.
“If you are in town and you have got money,” jokes Custom, “you can go straight to the supermarket and be a hunter-gatherer there. But it is much better and much more pleasure to go and hunt and gather in the bush.”
That night, the lions came to Molapo. I fall asleep while following their progress by the shouting and the banging of pans and the whistling that starts at one end of the village and moves down via the dogs barking and the donkeys braying and then the banking up of fires. The next morning, we labour out through the deep, deep sand and do 180km in seven hours, getting into New Xade by late afternoon.
New Xade is the place to which the Bushmen of the Central Kalahari have been moved, their promised land. It is a wasteland.
Estimates are that 2 000 or more Bushmen have been relocated to New Xade. There is hardly a shrub in sight. The trees are all grazed to above standing goat height. Castle and Carling lager cans are the only spots of bright colour. Litter hangs in all the thorn trees and plastic bags vibrate on the barbed wire fences.
A drunk man demands that Paul photograph him and as we drive through, the kids run out screaming “sweets, sweets”. There is an air of listlessness and despair, a feeling that this is the end of the road.
There are air-conditioned bungalows with solar heated showers and satellite TV for the government workers in their own compound. Everybody else lives in urban squalor. Many are still waiting for their compensation of five cattle, eight donkeys, 15 goats and ploughing implements. Some of the adults earn 80 pula a month (R100) on drought relief projects.
We hear stories about prostitution rings operating for the construction workers who are tarring the wilderness roads. We found an ancient culture that is being destroyed in a war of attrition by thirst even as you read this story. New Xade is the prisoner of war camp. It has bad grazing, unfamiliar veld foods and very little game.
An old woman came in from the veld. She was carrying a pitiful bundle of fire sticks and roots. Her name was Xaojuswe Phela. “How is life here in New Xade?” I asked her.
She hawked deep in her throat and spat in the sand. There was blood in her phlegm. “There is no life here,” she said. “I just sit like this and try and gather, but there is very little veld food. I don’t know how I will live. I am lost now. They must just take me to the bush and bury me because the government has thrown us away.”