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Evicted Bushmen return home
16/01/2007 13:14 - (SA)
Johannesburg - About 40 San Bushmen had returned to their ancestral homeland in Botswana after a court ruling that they were wrongly evicted by the government and could return, said a statement on Tuesday.
Rights group, Survival International, said: "A group of 40 Bushmen have managed to return to their homes in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve this weekend despite a heavy police presence and attempts to persuade them to stay in the relocation camps.
"All the Bushmen in the convoy were allowed into the reserve by the wildlife guards at the gates, although some were only issued with temporary permits."
Last month, a court in the southern city of Lobatse ruled that hundreds of San Bushmen were wrongly forced out from the Kalahari Game Reserve after a marathon legal battle.
Bushmen 'driven out of Kalahari'
Since a group of about 200 indigenous Bushmen first filed an application in April 2002 - challenging their eviction from a game reserve - the case had become a cause celebre with the applicants gathering the backing of celebrities including Nobel laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu and film star Colin Firth.
The Bushmen maintained that they were driven out of the Kalahari after vital supplies were cut off in order to make way for diamond mining, a claim the world's top diamond producer had denied.
Survival said Botswana police tried to convince the Bushmen to stay on at the New Xade camp, where they had been relocated, saying President Festus Mogae wanted to first talk to them, but they refused.
48 000 left in Botswana
Survival's director Stephen Corry said: "We hope that the authorities will not try to make life difficult for the Bushmen wanting to return home.
"The Bushmen are ecstatic and are full of gratitude for all those who supported them, both in Botswana and throughout the world."
The Botswana government had cut off water and food supplies to force the Bushmen out.
Once numbering millions, roughly 100 000 San were left in southern Africa, with almost half of them - 48 000 - in Botswana. Others were spread across Angola, Namibia, South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
The Botswana government said the brouhaha surrounding the Bushmen was fed by a western view of the "so-called Bushmen as some sort of exotic race living in splendid isolation from other peoples as subsistence hunter-gatherers".
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