WELL EARTHED: Botswana's Bushmen win legal appeal for land access

One of the longest surviving traditions in Southern Africa is that of the Bushmen who have lived for tens of thousands of years in the natural setting of the continental wilderness. It is estimated that there is a population of about 100,000 Bushmen in the sub-continent spanning across South Africa, Angola, Botswana and Namibia. Their way of life has continued in its virgin status of "hunting and gathering" and has thus resisted the outright acculturation that has been synonymous with most altered ways of lifestyles on the continent. Theirs has been the preservation of what the Bushmen tribe has adjudged to be the most preferred and convenient form of existence and survival even against a persuasive modernization onslaught.

Way of life threatened

In central parts of Botswana, there is a place called Central Kalahari game reserve where about 5,000 Bushmen have existed and observed their natural way of life. In the 1980s, diamonds were discovered in this terrain, leading to the government undertaking a campaign to evict the Bushmen from this land in order to allow for the inception of commercial activity. In 1997, 2002 and 2005, evictions of the Bushmen were enforced, subsequently making way for a $3 billion concession of diamond mining operations. This was also then followed up by the setting up of a luxury tourist lodge right on the land where the Bushmen had been evicted.

The evictions therefore compelled the Bushmen to live outside of their original land and along with that came the scarcity of resources that had naturally been available. One of the main challenges that they faced due to displacement was access to clean water, as the land from which they had been evicted had a rich supply through the vast wells that were available to them. In their new settlement they had to sustain distances of hundreds of miles in order to access water or merely rely on rainwater or watermelons. This led to some sporadic forms of resistance leading to incessant breaking of boundaries in order to gain access to the water and animals in the land from which they were now prohibited. Over time, about 50 of the Bushmen were arrested by government for breaching the interdict.