I think I have discovered the clinching argument for closing the United Kingdom’s House of Lords. It is the presence in that chamber of a peer called Lady Jenny Tonge. Last week the baroness opened a debate about Botswana with an attack on the Gana and Gwi Bushmen of the Kalahari.
She said they were trying to ”stay in the Stone Age”, described their technology as ”primitive” and accused them of ”holding the government of Botswana to ransom” by resisting eviction from their ancestral lands. How did she know? In 2002 she had spent half a day as part of a parliamentary delegation visiting one of the resettlement camps into which the Bushmen have been forced. Her guides were officials in the Botswanan government.
Lord Pearson, a man with whom I seldom find myself in sympathy, alleged that something was missing from her account: the trip, he claimed, including first-class air travel, was funded by Debswana — a joint venture between De Beers and the government of Botswana — which owns the rights to mine diamonds in the Bushmen’s land in the Kalahari.
”I took the precaution,” Pearson reported, ”of hiring my own interpreter, so I was able to hear exactly what some of the 200 Bushmen and their families … were saying. I heard them describe it as a place of death, where they had nothing to do but drink, take drugs and catch Aids. Many of them felt that they had been evicted because Debswana wanted their land for its diamonds … I, for one, came home more convinced than ever that a great injustice was being done.”
He might have added that Hill and Knowlton, the PR company famous for the unsavoury nature of its clients, were assisting Debswana. It advised the Chinese government in the wake of the Tiananmen massacre, set up lobby groups for the tobacco companies and coached the girl who told the false story about Kuwaiti babies being thrown out of incubators that helped to launch the first Gulf War.
Tonge’s timing was also unfortunate: she made this speech just six weeks after Survival International launched its campaign to try to discourage people from characterising indigenous people as primitive and living in the Stone Age. Stone-Aged and primitive are what you call people when you want their land.
The animal theme comes up quite often too. ”How can you have a Stone Age creature continue to exist in the age of computers?” asked the man who is now Botswana’s President, Festus Mogae. ”If the Bushmen want to survive, they must change, otherwise, like the dodo, they will perish.”
The Minister for Local Government, Margaret Nasha, was more specific. ”You know the issue of Basarwa [Bushmen]?” she asked in 2002. ”Sometimes I equate it to the elephants. We once had the same problem when we wanted to cull the elephants and people said no.”
When speaking to an international audience, the government takes a different line. Like Tonge, it insists that the Bushmen must be evicted from the central Kalahari game reserve for their own good. ”It has never been easy for government to extend social services to the sparsely populated remote settlements. People have thus been encouraged to move into settlements with schools, health clinics and other training and vocational opportunities.”
Since 2002 the Gana and Gwi have been seeking a court order to allow them to return to their lands. But the government, aware that eventually the Bushmen’s supporters will run out of money, has been dragging out the case. It has now repealed the section of the Constitution to which they were appealing.
When, in the 1960s, the Innu of Canada were evicted by similar means and for similar purposes, they fell prey to alcoholism, petrol-sniffing and suicide; 50% of the population now has diabetes; 35% of the Innu children in schools in Labrador have foetal alcohol syndrome. Suicide rates are around 12 times higher than the national average. This will be a familiar story to anyone who has witnessed the forcible relocation of indigenous people. Though the Botswanan government refuses to keep statistics for the evicted Gana and Gwi, they appear to be succumbing to the same psychic and physical collapse with extraordinary speed.
Tonge later explained that she used the word primitive to mean belonging to ”another age”. But the Gana and the Gwi exist today, and what they do belongs to the present as much as anything anyone else does. There is no scala natura of human validity that places them at the bottom and us at the top. They can also understand the benefits of Western healthcare and education, but they want to use them if and as they choose, not as the paternalists in Botswana or the House of Lords determine. — Â