San group goes to court

2004-07-04 09:21

Maun, Botswana - The plight of southern Africa's earliest inhabitants, the San, comes to the fore on Monday when Botswana's high court begins hearing a landmark land case in the Kalahari desert.

A group of 243 San are challenging their resettlement from the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, one of the world's largest sanctuaries and an area they have been calling home for the past 20 000 years.

"We are determined to remain on our ancestral land," says Mathambo Ngakaeja, a co-ordinator of the Botswana chapter of the Working Group on Indigenous Minorities in Southern Africa (WIMSA).

At issue is a decision by the Botswana government in 2002 to cut off water, food and health services to the Bushmen of the Kalahari due to costs, and regrouping them in settlements built outside the reserve.

"The government has trampled on our rights, and terminating basic and essential services is tantamount to forced evictions," says Ngakaeja.

"We seek the courts to declare that those who had been effectively forced to move due to the termination of services, should be returned to the CKGR," the Central Kalahari Game Reserve.

According to the government, there are 20 000 San remaining in Botswana but various rights groups estimate their number at closer to 48 000.

The San took the government to court in April 2002 seeking an order declaring it illegal to terminate the services to the Bushmen living in the reserve, which was established in 1961 to protect the hunter-gatherer lifestyle of the San.

The case was dismissed on a technicality but last month the San won the right to have their claim heard again.

President Festus Mogae has already declared that he is determined to win victory and plans to appeal if the ruling does not go in the government's favour.

Mogae has dismissed the San demands as "nonsense", arguing that as the first settlers in the region, the San could theoretically lay claim to the whole of southern Africa.

He also maintains that the San's nomadic way of life is a vestige of the past and that they now are "settled agriculturalists".

The high court will begin examining the case on Monday with on-site inspections of San villages in the Kalahari reserve, including one that was flattened by the government since the relocation began in 1997.

The government claims that there are now only 17 San living in the reserve but rights groups say 200 have gone back in defiance of Gaborone's campaign.

South African lawyer Glynn Williams is to begin presenting the defence's case during hearings opening on July 12 in New Xade in western Bostwana, a resettlement village outside the sanctuary.

- AFP