Calls by Namibia’s indigenous San people for their rights to ancestral land to be upheld were given clout by a report released on Friday calling for reforms to end their marginalisation.
Entitled Our land they took — San land rights under threat in Namibia, the report by the Legal Assistance Centre highlights the San’s dispossession of land and their status as the most marginalised ethnic group in the country.
”It’s a disgrace that seventeen years after independence one group is extremely marginalised and lives in extreme poverty,” board member of the Legal Assistance Trust Clement Daniels said at the launch of the report.
Co-authored by Sidney Harring, a law professor at the City University of the New York School of Law, and Willem Odendaal of the Legal Assistance Centre, the report calls for the San to be given the means to live with dignity on their own land and to participate fully in Namibian society.
The study into the dispossession of the 30 000-odd San calls for ”an effective land reform programme” that takes the specific needs of the country’s different ethnic groups into account.
Rendered unable to maintain their traditional hunter-gatherer existence, many San are jobless and the community is wracked by illness and alcohol abuse.
While the country has come a long way since independence in 1990, many laws, especially land laws, are deeply rooted in the apartheid-era social order, the report found.
”Even if the law is well-meaning and adequately meets social needs, it is limited by both human capacity and entrenched interest groups,” the study says.
”For the San specifically, given their marginal place in Namibian society, a greater legal effort must be made to achieve the goal of giving land to the landless and disadvantaged,” it says.
The 2 000-strong Hai Om, one of five San language groups in the country, have repeatedly staked their claim land near Etosha National Park, saying they were driven from the park area a hundred years ago by the German colonial administration.
Following the successful outcome of a similar claim by the San communities of Botswana, the Hai Om are now seeking a meeting with the Namibian government to reiterate their demand for resettlement on farms bordering Etosha National Park.
Endorsing their claim, the Legal Assistance Centre’s report suggested: ”The whole area near Etosha could be redeveloped around a concept of San tourism schemes.” – Sapa-DPA