Botswana destroying the San

New African, Sep 2002 by Corry, Stephen

Guest column

Stephen Corry is the director general of the London-based NGO, Survival International. He takes issue here with Botswana for evicting the Gana and Gwi people from their ancestral lands in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve ... to make way for diamond production?

In his interview in the April issue of New African, the former president of Botswana, Ketumile Masire, attempted to justify the Botswana government's brutal evictions of most of the last Gana and Gwi "Bushmen" (or "San") from their ancestral lands. "We do for people," he says, "what we think is good for them."

What the government thinks is "good for" the Gana and Gwi, it seems, is life in bleak resettlement camps, described by one of them as "places of death", where they are dependent on government handouts, and where boredom, alcoholism and depression are rife.

Earlier this year, the Botswana government evicted by force most of the last 700 Gana and Gwi who remain in the reserve, cutting off their water supplies, banning them from hunting and gathering, and forcing them to live in the camps.

This is in fact simply the latest although certainly the most severe - attack on the Gana and Gwi: the government has been trying to push them off their land for 16 years, most intensively over the last five years. Many were evicted in 1997, and men have been brutally tortured, fined and imprisoned for "over-hunting". The San tribes are no strangers to this sort of treatment. For perhaps 20,000 years or more, they were the sole inhabitants of southern Africa. Then, in recent centuries, Bantu cattle-herding tribes began colonising the area: they looked down on these hunters who did not keep cattle, and treated them as less than human.

The oppression which followed entered a dramatic phase when white colonists began moving up from the Cape 200 years ago. The San were hunted down and killed; captives were taken to work on white farms. A San population probably of millions is reduced today to less than 100,000. Of all these, the Gana and Gwi are virtually unique in having maintained hunting as central to their way of life. The Botswana government has at different times given several different reasons for the recent evictions. None are convincing, and none is accepted by the San themselves.

One of the reasons is that the San threaten the game in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve. But San hunting is intelligent, controlled, and has developed over thousands of years, and has never driven animals to extinction.

The argument used by Masire in his interview now seems to be the most favoured: that they are rescuing the San from some "primitive" state and "developing" them. For instance, President Mogae, when vice-president, was quoted as asking: "How can you have a stone-age creature continue to exist in the time of computers? If the Bushmen want to survive, they must change, otherwise, like the dodo they will perish."

Of course, the San's hunting and gathering lifestyle is not "primitive" - anthropologists now recognise it as an intelligent reaction to an otherwise inhospitable climate. Nor are the San living a life that is "unchanged" over hundreds of years they adapt and change just like everyone else in Botswana and the rest of the world. But they must be allowed to choose how.

The government ignores what the San themselves are saying - they want to remain on their own land, where their ancestors are buried. The government is violating their human rights by imposing on them their own plans, which the San oppose and which are proving disastrous.

The government has also turned on Survival as the messenger of bad news, and has made various accusations against us. Survival has no interest, as Masire implies, in keeping the Gana and Gwi in the reserve for the purpose of "anthropological studies". We aim simply to amplify the concerns of the Gana and Gwi on an international level, so that they may choose for themselves how they wish to live, on the land that is theirs by right under international law. Many people suspect that all this is in fact about clearing the San off the land in order to set it aside for diamond production. Botswana presents itself as a producer of "clean" diamonds. But if Botswana becomes known, to its shame, as the place where the San were destroyed, those jewels will begin to sparkle with less brilliance internationally.