BOTSWANA:In a landmark decision, the high court in Botswana has ruled that the government acted illegally when it forcibly evicted the last tribal Bushmen living a traditional life from the Central Kalahari Game Reserve.
The last 2,000 Bushmen living in the reserve were forced out in 1997 and 2002, but Wednesday's verdict centred on the latter eviction of about 1,000 people. The court ruled 2-1 in favour of the Bushmen, also finding they had a right to hunt and gather in the reserve.
"Today is the happiest day for us Bushmen," said one of the leaders of the court action, Roy Sesana, of the advocacy group First People of the Kalahari. "We have been crying for so long, but today we are crying with happiness. Finally we have been set free."
Evicted Bushmen testified that the government emptied thousands of gallons of water from the Bushmen's tanks in the reserve, sealed wells and threatened to send in soldiers if they did not move. Mobile clinics and food rations were also halted.
In a toughly worded finding, Judge Mpaphi Phumaphi condemned the government's decision to stop delivering rations while also forbidding the Bushmen to hunt. Those moves, he said, left them no way to survive.
"In my view the simultaneous stoppage of the supply of food rations and the stoppage of hunting licences is tantamount to condemning the remaining residents of the Central Kalahari Game Reserve to death by starvation," he said.
Judge Unity Dow found that the government ignored the value of the Bushmen's culture and traditional knowledge when it pushed them out. Most were taken to a bleak, arid settlement outside the reserve called New Xade, where they could neither hunt nor find traditional bush food. Alcoholism and violence are rife in the settlement and Bushmen have begun to succumb to Aids.
An April 2002 legal action mounted by a group of about 200 Bushmen lasted years. Meanwhile, many left New Xade and secretly returned to their homes, only to be evicted again by government officials.
Botswana is rich in diamonds and has one of the highest per capita incomes in Africa. Its government is often praised in the West for its economic management, but the plight of those evicted from the Central Kalahari Game Reserve has been a blot on its human rights record.
The Bushmen are the oldest tribe of southern Africa, going back 30,000 years. There are about 45,000 in Botswana, most living in squalor after waves of invaders displaced them from their ancestral lands. As simple hunter-gatherers, the Bushmen were seen as backward and primitive by Botswana's dominant tribes, which measured prestige by livestock ownership.
But their click-filled languages, ability to survive in the desert and knowledge of the fruits and vegetation of the Kalahari have always intrigued filmmakers and anthropologists. The value of their lifestyle was recognised in 1961 by the former British colonial rulers who established the Central Kalahari Game Reserve in 1961 as a haven for both wildlife and the Bushmen.