Bushmen of the Kalahari driven from home by thirst

THEY were on the move beneath an unyielding sun, and for a while their approaching shapes seemed just another part of the desert, their tattered clothes bleached like the thorny scrub around them.

These weary Bushmen - four men, three women and an infant - were nearing the end of a two-day journey, walking their way toward water.

The leader was Gana Taoxaga. He was a tenacious old man, one of the few who had withstood the government's efforts to move his people from this Botswanan game reserve, their ancestral land. He carried a spear, and slung across his shoulder was a hunting satchel with a digging stick, an axe, a bow and several arrows tipped with a poison made from beetle larvae.

Taoxaga was thirsty, and it angered and baffled him that he had to walk so far. Closer by was a borehole, the wellspring to underground water. But the government had sealed it up, and he supposed this was just another way to drive the Bushmen from the home they had occupied for millennia.

"The government says we are bad for the animals, but I was born here and the animals were born here, and we have lived together very well," he said.

However humble their lives, the Bushmen of Botswana's central Kalahari are well known to the world, the subject of books, films and anthropological studies. They are frequently portrayed - or, as many say, romanticised - as classic hunter-gatherers.

But for decades they have been entrenched in a tug of war over their fate that has often gone unnoticed, a saga now replete with edicts and court cases, with alcohol abuse and parted families. Since the 1980s, Botswana, a landlocked nation of two million people, has both coaxed and hounded the Bushmen to leave the game reserve, intending to restrict the area to what its name implies, a wildlife refuge empty of human residents.

Withholding water is one tactic, and in July a High Court ruled that the government had every right to deny use of that modern oasis, the borehole.

These days, only a few hundred Bushmen live within the reserve, and a few, like Taoxaga, still survive largely through their inherited knowledge, the hunters pursuing antelope and spring hares, the gatherers collecting tubers and wild melons, tapping into the water concealed in buried plants.

But most of them have moved to dreary resettlement areas on the outskirts, where they queue for water and wait on benches at the clinic and for the taverns to open so they can douse their troubles with sorghum beer. Once among the most self-sufficient people on earth, many of them now live on the dole.

"If there was only some magic to free me into the past, that's where I would go," said Pihelo Phetlhadipuo, an elderly Bushman. "I once was a free man, and now I am not."

In southern Africa, there are perhaps 100,000 indigenous people commonly referred to as Bushmen. About half are in Botswana.

They are hardly untouched by civilisation. The "myth of the last Bushmen" has been untrue for a century or more, said Dr Jeffress Ramsay, a government spokesman. "Outside myths don't help those of us inside to solve problems," and the Bushmen's biggest difficulty, he said, is poverty.

The Central Kalahari Game Reserve was established by the British colonial administration in 1961. The intention was not only to protect wildlife, but the viability of the people living there. At the time, some wondered if this was in the Bushmen's best interests: were they being preserved as primitives in something like a petting zoo for anthropologists?

Botswana became independent in 1966, and the government's eventual view was that the Bushmen were an impoverished minority living in rugged terrain that made them hard to help. Already, many were moving to Xade, a settlement within the reserve where a borehole had been drilled years before. Besides, government officials said, Botswana wanted to be a modern nation. The discovery of gem-quality diamonds had made it one of the wealthiest countries in Africa. It was unfair to leave them suffering in underdeveloped conditions, the officials said, to use preservation of their ancient culture as a pretext for ignoring their needs.

A group of Bushmen sued the government in 2002, asking to be allowed to return to the game reserve.

Many more have said they want to move back. Ramsay, the government spokesman, said negotiations might allow them to do that but Botswana had strict conditions: it does not want the Bushmen hunting wildlife and raising animals. "It's a game reserve, and that's been the issue from the start," he said.

The government is stinging from the reproach of interloping foreigners, especially Survival International, a UK-based advocacy group which claims the Bushmen were ousted to make way for diamond prospecting and tourism.

In Xade, few people blame diamonds or tourism for their troubles. Rather, they say their countrymen, the dominating Tswana, have always treated them as inferiors. "You can say it is something like racism," said Galomphete Gakelekgolele, a college-educated 26-year-old.