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.”

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