Botswana's Bushmen dispute evictions

METSIAMANONG, Botswana -- When Dahame Belese left the land of his ancestors, his parents felt as though he had fallen off the edge of the universe. They had no idea of the world outside, had never traveled by car or bicycle. They had not even climbed on a donkey's back.

The day he went away, his father was so angry that he did not say goodbye and his mother cried herself to sleep. During the long day's drive on government trucks away from the desert where the Bushmen have lived for 30,000 years, Belese pondered how he was betraying his parents. His father had told him not to go, but he did not listen.

After two terrible years, Belese came home, his heart beating quickly. As the sandy Kalahari Desert track uncoiled, he fretted about what his elderly parents would say.

But he met no bitterness.

"My eyes filled with tears," whispered his father, Kexla Sanao, remembering that night. "I was crying because I was so happy to see my son come back. I had no angry words." Like many Bushmen, Sanao has no idea of his age, but his face is wizened.

Belese was one of 530 Bushmen the Botswana government forced out of the Central Kalahari Game Reserve in January 2002, citing a need to protect wildlife. In their zeal to make the harsh desert uninhabitable, authorities sealed wells and emptied water tanks. Witnesses said they even overturned buckets as women tried to collect the scarce water before it seeped into the sand.

A few dozen, including Sanao, refused to leave. They returned to the old ways, surviving on the juices of plentiful desert melons, digging for water, and seeking out desert hollows that fill during the rains. Dozens more, feeling the pull of their homeland, have defied the government and returned. Now Bushmen removed from their land in 2002 are challenging the evictions in the Botswana high court, but a presidential spokesman, Sidney Pilane, brushed off their chances.

The Bushmen are the oldest inhabitants of southern Africa. But Pilane said the government would be discriminating in favor of Bushmen if it let them stay, because other tribal groups had been moved from their land in the past.

"Yes, they came here before the rest of us did, but we do not accept that they are more indigenous than the rest of us," Pilane said. "We don't think the time people arrived in a place should define their rights in society."

About 45,000 Bushmen live in Botswana; most were swept off their ancestral land in earlier decades and centuries. Until 1997, about 2,000 remained in the game reserve, the last Bushmen in southern Africa living a traditional lifestyle. But after the government decided to evict them in the mid-1980s, there were two relocations, in 1997 and 2002.

"I think they have always had a pretty grim time, and I don't think independence has made a huge amount of difference to them one way or another," said a British lawyer, Gordon Bennett, who is representing the Bushmen in court. "They have been regarded as a subservient, serflike race."

But their extraordinary ability to survive on the fruits and game of the Kalahari Desert has intrigued anthropologists for centuries.

They know the Kalahari more intimately than anyone and can sit around their campfires for hours discussing which desert plants can be found within walking distance. Once those left in the reserve are moved out or die, that knowledge will be lost.

When the moon rises, they often dance, mimicking the indigenous animals. Sometimes, in rituals that go all night, they dance to heal the sick, but sometimes they dance for the sheer joy.

The former British colonial government created the Central Kalahari Game Reserve in 1961 to preserve its wildlife and the lifestyle of the Bushmen. Pilane, the presidential spokesman, said the Botswanan government had to move the Bushmen to protect the animals.

Pilane said the Bushmen, also known as the San people, must be integrated into Botswanan society like everyone else.

Pilane said the Bushmen are no longer nomadic hunter-gatherers because some kept goats and grew watermelons.

Bennett said the Bushmen's case rests on the constitutional right of the people of Botswana to live where they choose and on British common law, which held that native rights existed until specifically quashed by statutes. Botswana became a protectorate of Britain in 1885 and won independence in 1966.

Diamonds were discovered a year later and have made Botswana, a nation of 1.5 million people, one of the wealthiest in Africa. Lobbying groups for the Bushmen say the government hopes to open diamond mines in the preserve; the government has rejected the allegation.

Pilane denied that the government had forced people off their land, but many Bushmen said government officials had given them no choice, emptying the water and threatening to call in the army if they resisted.

"They forced us to do it," said Molawe Belese, who, like her brother Dahame, was moved from Metsiamanong in 2002. "They threatened us that the soldiers would come with guns and shoot us."

The idea of moving to a distant, alien place was shocking and frightening.

In 1997, the government built New Xade to house 1,000 Bushmen it moved that year from Xade, another settlement camp about 35 miles away, on the edge of the game reserve.

Bushmen call it the "Place of Death." To Molawe Belese, living in New Xade feels "just like being sick."