Waiting for water: Bushmen denied wells by Botswana

By Ingeborg Lichtenberg Jan 26, 2011, 21:49 GMT

Johannesburg - The mythical 'first people' of southern Africa have survived evolution for some 30,000 years. But now, as they near extinction, Botswana is accused of denying water to 650 of the last 100,000 remaining Bushmen.

After a likely Thursday court date, these nomadic hunter-gatherers will know whether they are able to stay on their ancestral land in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve. Five Botswana Appeal Court judges will determine whether it is constitutional to deny them their right to water.

The borehole is critical to their survival in this arid region. But the government argues that allowing Bushmen a borehole threatens conservation.

Their lawyer Gordon Bennett says that numerous conservation crusaders, such as the International Union for Conservation of Nature, found that human presence in such a huge area was 'possible and even desirable.'

'There's no scientific evidence to support what the government is saying,' Bennet said. 'They don't use guns for hunting and the meat is only for personal consumption. And there's no transport to sell animals for commercial purposes either.'

Jumanda Galekebone, of the advocacy group First People of the Kalahari, was raised traditionally - learning to hunt and live in symbiosis with nature on the world's second-largest reserve.

'I am very sad and desperate,' he said. 'The government is racist. To them, the Bushman is nothing.'

He spoke to the German Press Agency dpa a few hours after his release from jail for not carrying a permit to enter the reserve and stay there. 'I refuse to carry a permit. Why must I have a permit to go home?'

Galekebone's sentiments are fuelled by statements such as those of Botswana President Ian Khama, who said the Bushmen's hunting lifestyle was an 'archaic fantasy.'

Khama's predecessor Festus Mogae termed the people as 'Stone Age creatures who must change or otherwise, like the dodo, they will perish.'

And Environment Minister Kitso Mokaila said they were 'living in the Dark Ages in the middle of nowhere.'

But the 'middle of nowhere,' a 51,000-square-kilometre area the size of Belgium, has elicited an ongoing battle for ownership since 1997, when virtually all the Bushmen were evicted in three clearance drives from the land they have inhabited for tens of thousands of years.

'Their homes were dismantled, their school and health post were closed, their water supply was destroyed and the people were threatened and trucked away,' said Miriam Ross of Survival International, a London-based group that champions the rights of indigenous people across the world.

In 2006, after the longest and most expensive legal battle in the country's history, a Botswana court ruled the government's eviction was illegal and unconstitutional.

The court found that the 'simultaneous stoppage of the supply of food rations and the issuing of hunting licences is tantamount to condemning the remaining residents of the reserve to death by starvation.'

'The government is denying me the right of my home,' said Galekebone. 'The democracy of this country is sick.'

The government refutes that it forced the Bushmen off the reserve, claiming instead that they welcomed the developments of schools, clinics and opportunities to improve their quality of life.

For the Bushmen, who live in resettlement camps outside the reserve, they are 'places of death.'

Ross said they suffer from alcoholism, depression and illnesses such as tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS. 'They can rarely hunt, and are arrested and beaten when they do. They are dependent on government handouts.'

So why such a hard fight for a desert-like area? Just last week the government granted Gem Diamonds a 3-billion-dollar licence to mine the reserve, which is thought to have the largest diamond deposits in the world.

It has also allowed Wilderness Safaris to set up a luxury resort. While the Bushmen are denied a borehole, the resort has its own watering hole: A swimming pool and bar where guests can sip cocktails.

'It's clear that the government wants to open the Bushmen's land for diamond mining and for tourism ... this is the reason it forced the Bushmen off their land,' said Ross.

'They must travel hundreds of miles, sometimes on foot, to bring water into the reserve from outside ... Their unique way of life will be destroyed and many of them will die.'