Bushmen still denied access to Botswana's Kalahari
The ongoing debate over the fate of Botswana’s Bushmen population is still going strong
four years after the southern African country’s high court gave the Kalahari Bushmen
the right to live on their ancestral lands, a decision the government has still yet
to implement. The Bushmen were expelled from Central Kalahari Game Reserve in 2002,
drawing the condemnation of the indigenous peoples human rights group Survival International.
On
Friday, Botswana President Ian Khama accused the group of trying to hold back the
development of the Bushmen, whom he called a people living a primeval life of a bye
gone era.
He said the group “seeks to achieve for a section of our population,
a life of backwardness that appeals to their racist mentality of having people in
Africa live a primitive life of deprivation co-existing alongside wild animals as
was the case in the past.”
“Because the Bushmen hunt, rather than being cattle
herders; because they do want to live in the Kalahari, rather than… live in the capital,
there is really a deep seated racism towards them,” says Miriam Ross, spokesperson
for Survival International.
“That’s not to say they do not want to develop
in their own way, she told Vatican Radio, “but they don’t want any developments in
their future to mean they have to give up their land and give up their rights.”