a second look
Stephen Corry
The Mail & Guardian’s article on the Bushmen of Botswana (“Going back to their roots”, August 31) accurately reports that more than 1000 of them were removed from the Central Kalahari Game Reserve and put in bleak resettlement camps where social and economic problems are rife in contrast to false claims by the Botswana government that the people wanted to go and that they like the camps.
But the article goes on to call the current negotiations about land use for those remaining in the reserve a “stunning victory”.
We believe this goes much too far. It is not a success “for indigenous people worldwide” as the article claims: on the contrary, mere “land usage” completely ignores natural justice and falls far short of rights long recognised internationally and taken for granted by indigenous peoples elsewhere.
Under international law, indigenous and tribal peoples have full ownership rights over the lands they live on and use. This important principle was spelled out in United Nations conventions in 1957 and 1989 yet Botswana fails to recognise or apply it.
The Central Kalahari Game Reserve was initially set up as a safe haven for the Bushmen who have lived there for thousands of years. In recent years, the Botswana government has gone to great lengths to evict them, flouting international law.
In 1997 officials tore down Bushman houses and trucked them to the camps, which the Bushmen call “places of death”. Those accused of hunting in the reserve are still tortured, and high-handed threats to cut off services there are made every so often (most recently, just last month).
Wildlife officials are now talking of “allowing” the Bushmen to stay, to gather veld food and so forth. Far from being a cause to celebrate, this is colonialist arrogance.
The Bushmen already have the internationally recognised legal right to stay where they are, to gather, to hunt and, what is more, to own their ancestral lands. South Africa has already shown its recognition of at least some of this. It is surely time for Botswana to catch up.
The British and other European invasion of North America wiped out some 95% of the native population: this is rightly seen as colonial genocide. Yet the destruction of most of the Bushmen in southern Africa in recent centuries is a comparable tragedy, and a crime, perpetrated by both white and black, which is still largely unrecognised.
By refusing Bushmen land ownership, the Botswana government continues the injustice and shows itself to be decades behind many other governments with tribal minorities.
The government responds that the “backward” Bushmen must be “integrated” whether they want it or not. It is time for the Botswana government to cast off this backward mentality, which wants everyone to become the same, and to embrace a modern multiculturalism which takes pride in diversity.
Survival International’s campaign has nothing to do with “keeping people as they are”. Rather, it is about letting people decide their own future and supporting those whose very existence is threatened by denying their land ownership. Bushman society, like all societies, has always changed, and we are not trying to prevent this; that would be absurd. In supporting what the Bushmen themselves want, Survival is not a group of Europeans dictating to Africans. Survival’s supporters come from over 80 nationalities and our campaign has already been welcomed by many citizens of Botswana, Bushmen and non-Bushmen, black and white. We have worked on many dozens of similar cases, all over the world, for more than 30 years.
Governments cannot “give” people human rights, they can only recognise and uphold those rights which are accepted by the international community and enshrined in international laws or, like Botswana, they can fail to do so. Defending the victimised is not meddling in other countries’ affairs, it is the business of all of us and is it not the point of human rights?
Stephen Corry is director general of Survival International