The Bushmen of the Kalahari were celebrating yesterday after winning the right to return to live on their ancestral land in a vast wildlife wilderness.

Three judges in the Botswana High Court said that the Bushmen, also known as the San, were evicted wrongly by the Government from the Central Kalahari Game Reserve (CKGR) from the early 1990s onwards.

“Today is the happiest day for us Bushmen,” Roy Sesana, a Bushman leader, said as he left the courtroom in Lobatse. “We have been crying for so long, but today we are crying with happiness. Finally we have been set free. The evictions have been very, very painful for my people. I hope that now we can go home to our land.

“I’m very, very much happy at the outcome. I’m going to greet my ancestors at home. My ancestors told me I was going to win,” he said.

Crowds of Bushmen had trekked overland to the court, on Botswana’s southern border with South Africa, to await the verdict.

“It’s about the right of the applicants to live inside the reserve as long as they want — and that’s a marvellous victory,” said Gordon Bennett, the Bushmen’s lawyer.

The judges ruled 2-1 in the Bushmen’s favour. Human rights organisations, led by the London-based Survival International, regard the case as a wider test of whether governments can move peoples from their ancestral lands legally.

Stephen Corry, the director of Survival, said: “The court’s ruling is a victory for the Bushmen and for indigenous peoples everywhere in Africa.” The Bushmen and their supporters argued that they were being expelled from the CKGR because the Botswana Government, already rich from the mining of diamonds in the east of the country, wanted to mine new diamond finds there.

The Government denied any intention to mine diamonds. But it deprived the Bushmen of services within the reserve and they were expelled to squalid settlements where there are neither animals to hunt nor traditional wild food plants. The camps are places of despair, marked by unemployment, alcoholism and disease. Judge Mpaphi Phumaphi said that the stoppage of food rations and hunting licences was “tantamount to condemning the residents of the the reserve to death by starvation”.

The Government argued that the CKGR’s wildlife needed to be undisturbed by human presence and that the Bushmen had to be removed for their own good to bring them into the modern world. Festus Mogae, the President of Botswana, described the Kalahari Bushmen as “Stone Age creatures . . . who must change, otherwise, like the dodo, they will perish”.

The Bushmen argued that they wanted to be part of the modern world, and they can be seen working on computers at some of their settlements around southern Africa. But they also wanted to preserve what Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the South African Nobel Peace Prize winner, described recently as “a 100,000-year-old culture that should be considered as one of the world’s treasures”.

Despite the Botswana Government’s denial, it was revealed two weeks ago that a British mining company had sent rigs into the reserve to test-drill for diamonds at 15 sites. The revelation by the South African newspaper Business Day and Survival International about the operations by Jersey-based Petra Diamonds came at a critical time for the High Court, which sent its own investigative team into the reserve.

Fight for life

In the last five years 72 Bushmen have been arrested for hunting and 44 claim to have been beaten or tortured

Source: Survival International

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