Botswana’s government on Thursday grudgingly accepted a High Court order to allow the country’s last hunter-gatherers to live in their ancestral lands in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, but attached tough conditions likely to frustrate the return.
The court on Wednesday said that the Basarwa, often known as the Bushmen, were wrongly forced off the land they had lived on and owned. It said the refusal to allow them enter or hunt on the reserve without a special permit since 2002 was illegal and unconstitutional.
The verdict — by a 2-1 majority — was hailed as a victory for indigenous peoples around the world.
But in a statement on Thursday, Attorney General Athaliah Molokomme set the scene for a showdown by laying down strict conditions for the government’s implementation of the court order.
”The Central Kalahari Game Reserve remains state land,” said the statement. ”It is owned by the state and subject to the laws of the republic.”
Molokomme said that only the 189 people who filed the lawsuit will be given automatic right of return with their children — short of the 2 000 the Basarwa say want to go home. Anyone else would have to apply for special permits.
She said the Bushmen can take building materials into the reserve ”for constructing non-permanent structures”, implicitly questioning the court ruling that the Basarwa had legally lived on the land before 2002.
The statement said those returning can take water for ”subsistence needs”. Park authorities have the right to restrict the amount of water to what is ”reasonably required”. This is likely to be a major obstacle, given that the government shut the main borehole in 2002 and that water resources are scarce in the vast territory.
The government statement also said that no domestic animals can be taken into the park. It said anyone wanting to hunt — the main form of survival for the Basarwa — has to apply for special permits.
Defiant
Tribal leaders reacted with defiance. ”The ruling says that we own that land,” said Junanda Gakelevone, of the First People of the Kalahari, a group representing the Basarwa. ”We have constitutional rights to stay and occupy that land.”
He said that the court ruling also entitles the Basarwa to take domestic animals with them.
”We are going back to the Central Kalahari Game Reserve with our horses and donkeys,” he said. Without motorised transport — which the Basarwa lack — it takes about one week to walk from the main resettlement camp to the reserve.
Between 1997 and 2002, about 3 000 people were resettled from the reserve.
The government said the Basarwa agreed to move as part of efforts to protect the wildlife in the game reserve and received compensation for their land. It said that it provided schools, medical facilities and job training in the resettlement centres.
But critics said the crowded resettlement camps merely encouraged scourges such as alcoholism, Aids and prostitution and made once-proud hunters dependent on food aid and government handouts.
The Basarwa also claimed that Botswana — the world’s biggest diamond exporter — was motivated by prospects of mining for the precious gems. But the judges in their ruling found no evidence of this.
This particular part of the verdict was welcomed by mining giant De Beers, which controls the diamond mines with the government.
”De Beers has always maintained that diamonds were not the reason for the relocation. I am pleased that all of the judges in the case have recognised and unanimously confirmed this,” said Sheila Khama, chief executive of De Beers Botswana.
Khama said that none of De Beers’s explorations in the Kalahari currently show any signs of ”generating an economically viable deposit”.
”Even if a viable diamond deposit were found and mined successfully, there would be no need to arbitrarily remove or resettle any communities,” she said.
Embarrassment
Botswana is regarded as a model of democracy and good management on a continent plagued by corruption and poverty. The long-running row over the reserve — and support for their cause from notables like Nobel laureate Desmond Tutu — was a severe embarrassment to the government.
The Basarwa are the last of the clans of hunter-gatherers who survived in central Botswana’s stark, desert plains. They were the original inhabitants of a vast area stretching from the tip of South Africa to the Zambezi valley in Zambia and Zimbabwe. Their rock paintings, wildlife knowledge and ability to survive in one of the harshest environments on Earth have fascinated scholars.
They were even the subject of a hit movie, Jamie Uys’s The Gods Must Be Crazy. Only an estimated 100 000 are left today, most living in poverty on society’s fringes.
Survival International, which campaigns for the rights of indigenous people and backed the Basarwa in Botswana’s longest and most expensive court case, urged the government to cooperate with the Bushmen.
”It would be terribly sad, both for the Bushmen and for Botswana, if the government tried to make life difficult for the many Bushmen who want to return and who are now expecting to be able to,” said Jonathan Mazower, research coordinator at Survival. — Sapa-AP