About 150 members of the main opposition Botswana National Front held a protest march on Saturday against government moves to relocate Bushmen from their land in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve.
Botswana’s high court is expected to rule on December 13 on a legal challenge by the Bushmen against their eviction. The government says the Bushmen agreed to move from their ancestral lands in cooperation with efforts to make the Central Kalahari a game reserve.
Holding placards that read ”Value Human Life more than Animal Life,” ”Land, Diamonds to People not Multinationals,” and ”Let Basarwa Go Home Now,” they submitted a petition to President Festus Mogae objecting to what they called the forcible relocation of the Basarwa people, popularly known as Bushmen.
Backed by the British based group Survival International, the Basarwa are trying to fight eviction from their ancestral homelands by authorities who they accuse of seeking to exploit the vast area’s mineral and diamond potential.
The opposition members demanded the president, who was not in the country, allow the Basarwa to return to their homeland and that they become co-owners and co-managers of game reserve.
They also urged the government to introduce affirmative action programmes for the Basarwa, to recognise their indigenous status and to ensure they are taught in their mother tongue during the first five years of primary education.
”Government is trying to impose on them an alien settlement pattern which makes them recipients of food handouts. It amounts to ethnocide and cultural genocide and is breeding new problems of alcoholism, prostitution and HIV/Aids infections,” said the party’s secretary general Akayang Magama.
”Condescending top-down bureaucratic approaches to development coupled with whatever material incentives are always doomed to failure,” Magama said.
Botswana is the world’s largest producer of diamonds and the Bushmen have appealed for help from actor Leonardo DiCaprio, whose film Blood Diamond shows how ”blood diamonds” financed civil war in Sierra Leone in the 1990s.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu has also condemned the eviction of the Bushmen and has recorded a video message in support of their campaign.
The case, the longest running legal battle in Botswana’s post colonial history, was filed after the government evicted the Bushmen from the land in 2002.
At least 12% of the original 239 applicants have since died in government resettlement camps, Survival International said.
This year, 135 more applicants asked to be added to the original list.
”The importance of this demonstration is to show solidarity with Basarwa. It shows that it is not only an international issue but that people of Botswana also realise that constitutional rights of Basarwa have been violated,” said Jumanda Gakelebone, spokesman for the First People of the Kalahari, the organisation which represents the Bushmen. – Sapa-AP