Kalahari bushmen fight for ancient homeland

Bushmen launch court claim over government land seizures

Government claims it aims only to preserve wildlife

Rights groups claim government is making way for lucrative diamond mines

Key quote

"Our forefathers lived with the animals and the animals didn’t get wiped out. So why does the government think we cannot live with the animals now?" - Gakeolate Keilwe, bushman

Story in full GAKEOLATE Keilwe was born about 60 years ago in the centre of the Kalahari desert, in the time, he said, of "the smallpox, the locusts and Hitler".

His birthplace, the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, was given to the bushmen in 1961 by the British colonial government of Bechuanaland, an act reaffirmed with independence five years later by the first president of Botswana, Sir Seretse Khama.

Now, though, the bushmen, the original inhabitants of southern Africa tens of thousands of years before black or white men arrived, are being forced from their lands and into the towns by the Botswanan government.

The government claims the move is intended to protect the wildlife of the great plains, while aid groups argue the bushmen are being cleared from their land to make way for lucrative diamond mines.

Tomorrow, in New Xade, a bleak settlement outside the reserve borders, a historic court case is due to open on the forced resettlement of Gakeolate and some 2,500 other bushmen who have been pushed out since 1997.

"The Botswana government put pressure on us and said we can’t live among the wild animals," said Gakeolate, speaking through an interpreter in bushman click language.

"But our forefathers lived with the animals and the animals didn’t get wiped out. So why does the government think we cannot live with the animals now?

"We were just removed against our will. [Government officials] walked around and told us to pull down our huts and put them on the trucks. We’ve been tricked. We’ve been cheated because all this land that was ours now belongs to the government."

The Botswana High Court, in a special sitting before three judges, will hear South African human rights lawyer Glynn Williams argue that the Botswana government has trampled on the rights of the bushmen, inhabitants of the Kalahari for more than 20,000 years, and that they should be permitted to return to the reserve.

The Central Kalahari Game Reserve, about three-quarters the area of Scotland, is one of Africa’s most remote and unspoiled wildernesses.

Magnificent prides of lion and some of the last truly huge herds of antelope roam the reserve. The area also has diamond deposits and Survival International, the UK-based campaign organisation for indigenous peoples, claims the bushmen are being moved to allow mining by the government and its 50-50 partner, De Beers, the Johannesburg-based diamond mining giant.

The High Court judges were yesterday touring sites in the reserve where bushmen lived until as recently as 2002. The government claims there are now only 17 bushmen left in the Central Kalahari.

But various human rights groups say more than 200 bushmen have slipped back into the reserve to hunt antelope and gather wild nuts, roots and fruits in defiance of the government’s determination to settle them outside the reserve.

Botswana’s president, Festus Mogae, from the majority Batswana population - a black African, non-bushmen people - yesterday dismissed the court challenge as "nonsense" and has said any verdict that goes against the government will be challenged.

He said the vast majority of bushmen no longer pursue a nomadic life and that if their Kalahari demand is conceded they could theoretically lay claim to the whole of southern Africa.

"Precisely what happened with Australia’s aborigines is happening in the central Kalahari," said Roger Chennells, another lawyer who represents the bushmen.

"There are fewer and fewer sites in the world where the people inhabiting them have links going back tens of thousands of years. For the bushmen this is more than just a loss of their last land. It’s a spiritual loss as they’re wrenched away from the place that gives their life meaning."

The High Court hearing, expected to last several months, will later move to Ghanzi, in western Botswana, and finally to Gaborone, the capital.