Evidence in a court case in which Botswana’s San Bushmen are fighting for rights to ancestral land in the Kalahari wound up in court this week, with a rights group on Thursday calling for a speedy end to the case.
The Bushmen are taking Gaborone to court to challenge their eviction four years ago from the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, one of the world’s largest sanctuaries and an area they have called home for the past 20Â 000 years.
“Tuesday was the final day of evidence in the Bushmen’s court case,” said Survival International, which is helping the Bushmen in the case.
“The court is likely to hear the lawyers’ arguments in September,” the London-based organisation said in a statement.
Making headlines as far away as London and New York, the emotive land-claim issue resumed earlier this year after a five-month break called by the Bushmen’s lawyers to raise funds.
As the country’s longest-running case resumed in February, a lawyer for the Basarwa, as they are called in Botswana, mooted the possibility of an out-of-court settlement.
Survival’s director Stephen Corry told Agence France-Presse on Wednesday, however, that “there is no indication that the [Botswana] government has shifted its position”.
“That puts us under the obligation to continue pressing,” he said.
“We are pleased that the evidence has finally concluded, and we urge the court that a decision is reached without delay,” he said.
A group of 200 Bushmen filed an urgent application in April 2002 challenging their eviction from the game reserve, but the case was thrown out on a technicality. The high court agreed in 2004 to hear the complaint.
Survival International, which has waged a 30-year campaign in support of the Bushmen, maintains they were driven out of the Kalahari to make way for diamond mining, a claim the government has denied.
The government has maintained that it resettled the Bushmen in villages where it could provide them with water and social amenities.
But the plight of the Bushmen has nevertheless blemished Botswana’s international reputation as a model for democracy and tolerance in Africa.
Once numbering millions, roughly 100Â 000 San are left in Southern Africa, with almost half of those — 48Â 000 — in Botswana. Others are spread across Angola, Namibia, South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe. — AFP