About 40 San Bushmen have returned to their ancestral homeland in Botswana following a court ruling that found they were wrongly evicted by the government and could return, a statement said on Tuesday.
”A group of 40 Bushmen have managed to return to their homes in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve this weekend despite a heavy police presence and attempts to persuade them to stay in the relocation camps,” rights group Survival International said.
”All the Bushmen in the convoy were allowed into the reserve by the wildlife guards at the gates, although some were only issued with temporary permits,” it said.
A court in the southern city of Lobatse ruled last month that hundreds of Bushmen were wrongly forced out from the Kalahari Game Reserve after a marathon legal battle.
Since a group of about 200 indigenous Bushmen first filed an application in April 2002 challenging their eviction from a game reserve, the case became a cause celebre with the applicants gathering the backing of celebrities including Nobel laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu and film star Colin Firth.
The Bushmen maintain they were driven out of the Kalahari when vital supplies were cut off in order to make way for diamond mining, a claim the world’s top diamond producer has denied.
Survival said Botswana police tried to convince the Bushmen to stay on at the New Xade camp where they had been relocated, saying President Festus Mogae wanted to first talk to them, but they refused.
Survival’s director Stephen Corry said: ”We hope that the authorities will not try to make life difficult for the Bushmen wanting to return home.
”The Bushmen are ecstatic and are full of gratitude for all those who supported them, both in Botswana and throughout the world.”
The Botswana government had cut off water and food supplies to force the Bushmen out.
Once numbering millions, roughly 100 000 Bushmen are left in Southern Africa, with almost half of them — 48 000 — in Botswana. Others are spread across Angola, Namibia, South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
The Botswana government says the brouhaha surrounding the Bushmen is fed by a Western view of the ”so-called Bushmen as some sort of exotic race living in splendid isolation from other peoples as subsistence hunter-gatherers”. — AFP
