Court case to determine rights of Bushmen
JOHANNESBURG, 1 Jul 2004 (IRIN) - A historic court case on the legality of the forced resettlement of the San communities of the Central Kalahari Game Reserve (CKGR) will open in Botswana on Monday.
It is the first case in Botswana to argue that the San, being the indigenous people, have a right to their ancestral land and culture. "Our cultural identity and traditional lifestyle cannot survive the removals from our land," Mothambo Ngakaeja, coordinator of the Botswana section of the Working Group of Indigenous Minorities in Southern Africa (WIMSA) told IRIN.
The government had argued that many residents of the CKGR were becoming settled agriculturists, raising crops and rearing livestock, which was incompatible with wildlife conservation. It stressed that resettlement in villages with schools and clinics would benefit the San, and it was uneconomic to provide those services in the reserve.
The government does not recognise the San (or Bushmen) as the original inhabitants of the country, but archaeological evidence shows the San have lived in southern Africa for at least 30,000 years. As first peoples elsewhere, through the centuries they have suffered land dispossession, social exclusion and discrimination. In Botswana the term for San is Basarwa (those who don't raise cattle), an implied slur, and "dirty as a Bushman" is a common insult.
But the San's belief system, oneness with the environment and indigenous knowledge have captivated many. Their healing trance dance and rock paintings are African cultural icons. Ironically, the logo of the Botswana Department of Wildlife and National Parks is based on San art.
REMOTE WILDERNESS
In 1961, the British colonial regime set up the CKGR to protect the habitat, the wildlife and the lifestyle of its residents. They comprised the G/wi and the G//ana San and a few hundred Bakgalagadi Bantu people, who 400 years ago moved into what is now the reserve and mixed with the San.
In 1966, the constitution of newly independent Botswana restricted entry and residence of non-Bushmen in the CKGR. This, say lawyers for the San, means the San have a right to live and hunt on their ancestral land.
But in the late 1980s the government decided to resettle roughly 2,500 CKGR residents outside the reserve. "At no stage during the relocation exercise did government or its public officers involved in the relocation use force, coerce people residing in the game reserve or threaten anyone of them in any way. The emphasis has always been persuasion and voluntary relocation," a government statement stressed.
However, the plan sparked local and international protest. The pressure group First People of the Kalahari (FPK), formed in the early 1990s, rallied residents to resist. A Negotiating Team comprising representatives of the residents, FPK, WIMSA, human rights group Ditshwanelo and the Botswana Council of Churches, was set up in 1996. After negotiations failed, the team brought the court case in April 2002.
Larger than Denmark at 52,600 sq. km, the CKGR is one of Africa's most remote, unspoiled wilderness areas. Besides prides of lions and herds of antelopes, the CKGR has diamond deposits at Gope. The real reason behind the removals, alleges Survival International, a UK-based advocate for indigenous peoples, is to allow diamond mining by the government and De Beers, its 50-50 partner.
De Beers says mining at Gope would be "subeconomic". Survival replies that "subeconomic merely means they don't want, or need, to mine it at present." But the government has stressed that the only license awarded in 2000 to an exploration company for Gope lasted for only three years, renewable for a total maximum of six years.
"There has been no decision to proceed with any mining project anywhere in the CKGR, as the only known mineral discovery in the CKGR, the Gope deposit, has proven not commercially viable to develop into a mine," the government statement said.
REMOVALS AND RESETTLEMENT
In 1997, 1,740 people moved out of CKGR into the settlements of New Xade and Kaudwane. "By carrot or stick or monkey tricks," commented Ngakaeja. Another 530 left in early 2002, when the government cut off water, food, health and social services to the reserve.
Some 200 people have stayed in remote areas, eight or 10 hours on foot from the nearest park entrance. Among them is Keletso Ketalelago. She took a look at New Xade ("place of death", the San call it) and headed back home. Her village of 300 people, Molapo, had been razed by park officials, but Ketalelago and some 50 others rebuilt a handful of branch-and-thatch huts.
The day IRIN talked to her, Ketalelago, in her mid-30s, had collected wild berries and firewood, then repaired her hut. At night, the group gathered around a fire for story telling in their musical click language.
"I know what to do here, but I don't know how to live in New Xade and I don't like it there," she said. "This is our land. Our forefathers were here. I am not moving."
Cut off from their traditional lifestyle, those San who have moved to New Xade and other settlements have joined Botswana's underclass of rural poor, dependent on government handouts. Alcoholism, prostitution, begging, low self-esteem, TB and AIDS have set in. The CKGR communities are the last to fully live the special San connection with the environment.
COURT CASE
The government's stated intention with its removals policy has been to "bring the standards of living of Basarwa up to the level obtaining in the rest of the country, as well as to avoid land use conflicts in the CKGR, i.e. allowing permanent settlement, growing of crops and rearing of livestock inside the reserve, which is not compatible with preserving wildlife resources".
The court case on Monday is to examine: whether it was unlawful for the government to end essential services to the residents in January 2002; whether the government has an obligation to restore these services; whether the residents were in possession of their land and were deprived of it forcibly; and whether the government's refusal to issue game licenses to the residents and allow them to enter the CKGR is unconstitutional.
To get a court date took two years and many problems. One was for the three judges requested by government to agree on a date. Hearing the case in inhospitable and remote New Xade, which lacks accommodation and facilities, instead of the district capital of Ghantsi, makes it hard for lawyers, witnesses and the media to attend.
The case has implications beyond Botswana. If the San are not recognised as Southern Africa's indigenous inhabitants and accorded the same rights under international law as Australian aborigines and Native Americans, it could lead to similar denial of rights for other African first peoples.
"The future of the two San tribes of the CKGR hangs in the balance, but the case is pivotal for the pygmy peoples of West and Central Africa and the hunting people of East Africa," said Stephen Corry, director of Survival International.
Neigbouring South Africa restored land rights and benefits to the =Khomani San in the Kalahari Gemsbok Park in 1999. In 2003, in a case involving a diamond company and 3,000 Nama people in the Richtersveld in Northern Cape province, South Africa's Constitutional Court ruled that indigenous people have land and mineral rights over their territory.
The San case has become infused with emotions. Survival International's strident campaign has annoyed the government and hardened its position. By portraying the anti-removal campaign as meddling by foreign NGOs and the former colonial power in a sovereign state's internal affairs, it rallied domestic support under the flag of patriotism.
WIMSA's Ngakaeja is sceptical over the impartiality of the court. "To use only Batswana judges is tantamount to a denial of fair trial, because it is unlikely they will rule against their Tswana government in favour of Bushmen," he alleged.
Culture under threat - Special Report on the San Bushmen (I)
MOLAPO, 5 Mar 2004 (IRIN) - Drinking cool water in an ostrich egg shell after a long hot trek. Praying with the parents by the ancestors' graves. Sharing water pans with lions. These are Jumanda Gakelebone's memories of his life as a San resident in Botswana's Central Kalahari Game Reserve (CKGR).
The fate of this lifestyle hinges on a court ruling later this year on the legality of the government's controversial eviction of the San people from their ancestral land in the reserve.
"The CKGR case has a symbolic importance, because its communities are the last among us San to have this special connection with the land," says Mothambo Ngakaeaja, coordinator of the Botswana section of the Working Group of Indigenous Minorities in Southern Africa (WIMSA).
The resettlement of roughly 2,500 CKGR residents, first mooted in 1986, has sparked local and international protest, and tarnished the image of Botswana, one of Africa's longest-running democracies.
The relocation began in 1997, when, according to government figures, 1,740 people moved out of the CKGR into the settlements of New Xade, three hours west in a 4x4, and Kaudwane, 8 hours to the south over rough, lion infested terrain. Another 530 reluctantly moved out when the government cut off water, food rations, health and social services to the reserve in early 2002. Those who moved received a measure of compensation in money and cattle.
But about 50 die-hards refused to leave. Today, perhaps another 100, unhappy with life in New Xade, have trekked back into the reserve, rebuilt their branch-and-thatch huts, and live off the land. Many others in New Xade also want to return.
Their hopes are pinned on the court case.
FIRST INHABITANTS
The hunter-gatherer San have lived in Southern Africa for 30,000 years. About four thousand years ago, waves of cattle-raising Bantu people from Central Africa moved south and pushed the San into dry areas like the Kalahari, the vast sheet of sand that spreads over parts of three countries in the heart of the region. The arrival of white settlers in the 1600s brought dispossession, enslavement and slaughter of the San.
Also known as Bushmen, the San are not one people but several groups, speaking languages that belong to seven linguistic families. Today the San number roughly 100,000 across Southern Africa: 48,000 in Botswana, 32,000 in Namibia, 4,300 in South Africa, 2,500 in Zimbabwe and 300 in Zambia. Last year, 3,500 San were located in southern Angola; more may live in Western Angola.
Like first peoples elsewhere, from the Native Americans to the Maoris, the San have a history of discrimination, poverty, social exclusion, erosion of cultural identity and denial of rights as a group. In Botswana they are called Basarwa (those who don't raise cattle), a term the San find demeaning.
Yet the San have also captured the attention of anthropologists and the media with their extraordinary survival skills, wealth of indigenous knowledge, rich traditions and oneness with the environment.
Recognising the uniqueness of San culture, the British colonial government set up the CKGR in 1961 to protect the habitat, the wildlife and the lifestyle of its residents. This comprised the G/wi and the G//ana San and a few hundred Bakgalagadi - Bantu people who moved into the reserve some 400 years ago and mixed with the San.
Larger than Denmark, at 52,600 sq km the CKGR is one of Africa's most remote, unspoiled wildernesses, an open savannah of gold-red sand, silky grasses, thorny scrub, a few tall acacias, camel thorn trees and underground rivers, but no surface water. Herds of gemsbok, eland, kudu, wildebeest and hartebeest gather at the salt pans. So do the predators - lions, cheetahs, hyenas and jackals.
The environment holds few secrets for the San. In a few square metres they can find a pantry, a pharmacy and a well: water in fat tuber roots, edible berries, medicinal leaves, nutritious beetles. Even the scorpion's deadly poison is useful as a dip for hunting arrows.
EVICTION
But some San mixed traditional hunting - on foot with bow and arrow - with modern methods, using horses and, says the government, the occasional suspected use of firearms. The authorities argue that these practices, along with owning small herds of goats and donkeys in the reserve, are incompatible with wildlife conservation.
However, documents from the Department of Wildlife and National Parks state that between 1986 and 1996, "wildlife biomass more than doubled" in the CKGR.
The government's key point is an insistence that the San are better off in settlements with health and education facilities and that to provide social services in the CKGR is too expensive.
"People have been encouraged to move out to give themselves and their children the benefits of development," says Clifford Maribe, press secretary at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
The UK-based activist group, Survival International, who defends the rights of tribal peoples worldwide, believes that the real reason is the government's plan for diamond mining in the reserve. The government denies this because, it says, mining the CKGR diamond deposits is not economically worthwhile.
WIMSA sees other powerful interests at play. "Cattle-ranchers and conservation are the two bulls fighting the San, with minerals in a third place," says Ngakaeaja.
Ditshwanelo, the Centre for Human Rights in Botswana, looks at the broader context. The government's one-size-fits-all model of development does not cater for minorities with a different lifestyle. The Tswana (the majority ethnic group) model of social organisation is based on cattle-raising, agriculture, and villages organised hierarchically under a headman. The
hunter-gatherer San, with their loose and egalitarian social organisation, and extensive land use, do not fit the majority model.
"The tragedy is that we are replaying the colonisation game if we don't allow the San their right to be different," says Alice Mogwe, director of Ditshwanelo.
SAN RESISTANCE
The rumours of eviction began circulating in the late 1980s. The local pressure group, First People of the Kalahari (FPK), rallied the residents to resist expulsion from the CKGR and demand the right to their ancestral land.
Some San resettled voluntarily. Others were persuaded, according to Ngakaeaja, "by carrot or stick or by monkey tricks", which ranged from promises of large compensation to alleged threats of forced removal by the army and police.
New Xade has been dubbed the "place of death" by the San. There is no hunting, and they are far from the graves of their ancestors, where the San find healing and guidance.
"Why does the government want to move me like a parcel? The government found me here at independence in 1966," says Motuakgomo Zandu, an old man who refuses to leave the reserve.
He and 58 others are encamped in Molapo, one of the six original San settlements inside the CKGR, five hours by sandy track from the Xade park entrance. Once a thriving community of 300 people, Molapo was razed in 2002, its huts dismantled, water tanks emptied and taken away.
Molapo today consists of a handful of huts. The men, women and children are in rags, destitute, and highly vulnerable to any medical emergency but fiercely proud of their culture.
The CKGR San hold on to their lifestyle. "There is no bush food in New Xade," is a phrase often heard. More than diet is at stake. Hunting and gathering wild food is central to their cultural identity, and the residents suffered a major blow when the government cancelled their hunting licences in October 2001.
"The development the government offers us does not include what we are proud of," says Jumanda Gakelebone, acting coordinator for FPK. "We know how to provide for our families in the bush, but in New Xade we depend on government handouts. Instead of every day going to find food in the bush, we go to the shebeen to drink. This is killing our culture."
The new lifestyle "has led to many problems, including alcoholism, communal tension, and a rise in TB and AIDS cases, because the people were not prepared for such a change," says a 2002 report by the Kuru Family of Organisations, a consortium of NGOs working with the San.
The government is spending plenty of money - more than US $5 million, it says - on New Xade. This amount, activists point out, could pay for the delivery of essential services to the CKGR - estimated by the government at US $11,000 a month.
New Xade's newly built hospital and maternity ward, classrooms, students hostels and government staff houses, equipped with solar panels and water tanks, contrast with the basic branch-and-thatch huts of the San. But there is rubbish everywhere and no latrines. Only a few government vehicles drive by on the sandy roads. Goats and donkeys wander around as aimlessly as the people.
By noon, the youth at the Cool Way Bar are drunk and bored. They aggressively beg from the occasional foreigner. At family shebeens, people sit on the sand and share bowls of Qgari, a traditional fermented beer.
All the neat new brick buildings cannot hide the fact that New Xade stands on a bleak piece of scrub, with little shade and no water - a far cry from the rich savannah of the reserve.
ABORTED DIALOGUE
Since 1996, a negotiating team, comprising representatives of the residents, FPK, WIMSA, Ditshwanelo and the Botswana Council of Churches, has protested the relocation, while seeking dialogue with the authorities.
A first step was to register 250 adults as CKGR residents, which gave the negotiating team a mandate.
A second step was the mapping of traditional hunting and gathering territories in the reserve, done by FPK members using oral history and modern technology, including satellite global positioning systems.
The third was the preparation of a land claim by a team of South African lawyers, who had successfully negotiated royalties for the San from a pharmaceutical company developing an appetite-suppressant derived from a cactus traditionally used by the San.
Things looked better in 2001 when the Department of Wildlife and National Parks, in consultation with the San and the negotiating team, drew up a draft management plan granting the San user rights and Community Use Zones inside the reserve.
"The plan was a healing process between residents and wildlife officials," Alice Mogwe told IRIN.
Survival International rejected the plan for lack of ownership and hunting rights, and intensified its worldwide campaign, accusing the Botswana government of "genocide" while launching a boycott of its diamonds.
The group also angrily protested the alleged torture of some San poachers at the hands of police.
"Attitudes hardened, the plan was shelved, and that was so frustrating," says Mogwe.
The Foreign Ministry's Clifford Maribe told IRIN that "the proposal in question was revised to align the draft management plan with government policies. Community Use Zones have been demarcated in wildlife management areas adjacent to the game reserve."
In fact, according to lawyer and negotiating team member Glyn Williams, the draft management plan conformed to the original government policy for Community-Based Natural Resource Management, which allowed Community Use Zones inside game parks. The policy was changed after the government announcement in 2002 that essential services to the reserve would be cut off.
THE COURT CASE
After negotiations froze in 2001, the team took the Botswana government to court on behalf of the CKGR residents in April 2002. Since then there have been many delays due to technicalities, but the court is expected to rule in June on whether:
- It was unlawful for the government to end basic and essential services to the residents in January 2002;
- The government has an obligation to restore these services;
- The residents were in possession of their land and were deprived of it forcibly, wrongly and without their consent;
- The government's refusal to issue game licenses to the residents, and allow them to enter the CKGR is unlawful and unconstitutional.
The lawyers point out that the Botswana constitution restricts entry or residence of non-Bushmen in Bushman areas like the CKGR, which can only be interpreted as granting the San the right to live and hunt on their ancestral land.
The San derive hope from a landmark case in South Africa last year, involving a diamond company and 3,000 Nama people from the Richtersveld area in the Northern Cape Province. The Constitutional Court ruled that indigenous people have land and mineral rights over their territory, and laws that dispossessed them amount to racial discrimination.
South Africa also restored land rights and benefits to the Khomani San in the Kalahari Gemsbok Park in 1999.
"We hope for a victory because we have good legal arguments, but we fear delays in implementation," said WIMSA's Ngakaeaja.
Back inside the reserve at Molapo, men, women and children gather around a fire. Motuakgomo Zandu tells stories about how the eland and the ostrich got their names. The San believe that animals were once human. Under the starry sky of the Kalahari, Africa's oldest traditions are under threat, but tenaciously live on.
Culture under threat - Special Report on the San Bushmen (II)
DQAE QARE, 10 Mar 2004 (IRIN) - With nimble fingers, Sobo Cgara digs around a plant and unearths a calabash-shaped root full of water. Cgara, 24, is a San guide who shows tourists his people's unique knowledge of the Kalahari at a community-owned game farm near D'kar in Ghanzi district, in central-west Botswana.
He is one of the few San youth with education, a job and a future. The estimated 50,000 San in Botswana are "the poorest of the poor", says Alice Mogwe, head of Ditshwanelo, the Centre for Human Rights.
Botswana is rich in diamonds and cattle, with a population of just 1.6 million. But as an ethnic minority, the San experience both poverty and allegedly discrimination. They are called "Basarwa" (those who don't raise cattle, in the Tswana language), a term they feel is demeaning.
The San (or Bushmen), the first people of Southern Africa, have lived in the region for at least 30,000 years. Over time, the hunter-gatherer San were displaced and lost the rights to their ancestral lands and natural resources to farming, cattle herding, mineral exploitation and nature conservation.
"Our problems are poor health, low literacy, inadequate education, bad housing, poor hygiene, TB, AIDS and malnourishment, fragmentation, stigmatisation, social exclusion and lack of participation in mainstream politics," says Mothambo Ngakaeaja, coordinator of the Botswana section of the Working Group of Indigenous Minorities in Southern Africa.
LANGUAGE BARRIERS
The government of Botswana provides free education but the San have problems in accessing it. Teaching is done in Tswana and English, which many San children do not speak.
One Tswana first-year teacher in Ghanzi district had 40 San-speaking children in her class, but could not comunicate with them. In despair she went for help to the Naro Language Project (Naro is the most widely spoken San language in Ghanzi). Alongside the NGO umbrella known as the Kuru Family of Organisations, the language project works with the government and San communities to improve literacy and education.
The government has backed the language project's suggestion of having mother-tongue education in the first three school years and hiring Naro-speaking assistant teachers. When classes start, Hessel and Coby Visser, two Dutch linguists with the project, visit every school and show teachers how to write and pronounce San names. Other activities include teaching adults to read and write.
Over the past 13 years, the Vissers have transcribed Naro and have produced reading material like HIV/AIDS information and riddle booklets to encourage literacy. Hessel Visser has mastered Naro's 28 clicks - four main ones with seven modifications each. He has also seen progress: more San children are studying, and a few have even reached university.
DEVELOPMENT MODELS
The government lists many accomplishments by its Remote Area Development Programme (RADP) since 1978, when the Bushmen-Basarwa-San were renamed Remote Area Dwellers, shortened to RADs. The government argues that the 1974 Basarwa Development Programme was "separatist" and the term "RADs" includes all needy ethnic groups in those areas. However, the large majority of RADs are San.
"Under the RADP, the emphasis is placed on the geographic distances from existing social services, as well as economic marginalisation, rather than on ethnicity," says Clifford Maribe, press secretary to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Operating in seven districts, the RADP has brought roads, potable water, primary schools, hostels and health posts, the latest being a newly completed maternity ward costing P4.4 million (US $912,560)in New Xade.
Its Economic Promotion Fund supports livestock schemes, small industrial projects, income-generation, and training in animal husbandry, among other activities. To acquaint RADs with commercial cattle farming, the Fund has established three community-owned farms.
Driving through New Xade, the controversial village where San residents of the Central Kalahari Game Reserve (CKGR) have been relocated, one sees people queuing for drought-relief and food-for-work programmes. The government offers free education and health care, old-age pensions, drought aid, free food for AIDS orphans and free antiretrovirals for people with HIV/AIDS.
In spite of these efforts, rural poverty is endemic and the San remain the poorest of the poor, exploited as farm labourers, plagued by alcoholism, perceived as backward, silent in politics.
The government's largesse may be part of the problem. "The government gives but does not empower. Its progress is based on dependency," says Alice Mogwe.
For the resettled San of the CKGR the problem is more acute. In one move, they went from being resourceful to being dependent.
"Government relief is another way of killing a person; in the Reserve we knew how to provide for ourselves," says Daoxlo Xukuri, head of the activist group First People of the Kalahari.
Moreover, many development projects for the San are designed and imposed from the outside, with little input from the San. "Do they really want to plant hydroponic tomatoes, build bricks and weave baskets with reeds trucked in from the Okavango delta because there is no bush around New Xade?" asked an NGO worker in Ghanzi who requested anonymity.
The Botswana government appears perplexed by the criticism of its approach. A statement on its official website notes: "In a world where governments stand accused of many terrible crimes, it does seem strange that the Botswana government should have to defend itself against the charge of improving the lives of its citizens."
However, it goes on to say: "Culture is not static, all of us have a culture and a past. We must treasure these cultural values that help us live prosperously and discard those that retard progress."
LOSING LAND
For centuries and up to the present, the San have been the losers in the conflict between their need for land on which to forage and the demands of cattle ranching.
In both traditional Tswana culture and the modern Botswana economy, cattle rank high as a source of status and wealth. The government has implemented several plans to promote cattle-ranching, leading to the dispossession and forced relocation of poor rural people (not only San).
The World Bank has estimated that between 28,000 and 31,000 people were displaced by the Tribal Grazing Land Policy, initiated in 1975 to allocate and regulate tribal land where cattle graze. The new National Policy for Agricultural Development and the Fencing Act have the potential to displace many more, mostly in the Western Central District, say analysts.
"Displacement of the landless [has created] an underclass of rural poor who are dependent on the state," says a report by Jenny Clover for the African Security Analysis Programme at the Pretoria-based Institute for Security Studies.
The San also face problems in obtaining secure land and resource tenure rights, including water and grazing. "District Land boards and Councils have been unwilling to grant land rights to groups who make claims on the basis of customary rights and traditional livelihoods," anthropologist Robert Hitchcock notes.
The official opinion is that the San are nomadic (although they settle for periods and know their foraging areas) and thus have no rights to ancestral land, as San or by customary law, only hunting rights, and even these are very limited.
The Tribal Land Act Amendment Act of 1993 allowed people to get land anywhere in the country, not just in their home districts, provided they developed the land in two years, including water and fencing. In practice, people with means, mainly the urban-based, outcompete locals for land. The losers are the poor.
As casual workers on the ranches in Ghanzi, the San have reportedly endured a history of abuse at the hands of Afrikaner farmers who settled on the fertile land along the Ghanzi ridge in 1890s. In the process they displaced some 5,000 Naro San, who still suffer the consequences of losing their land. "They turned to casual labour, begging, stock theft and piecework for survival. They were demoralised, drunk and apathetic," wrote researcher Elizabeth Wily in 1972.
The Naro describe their lives with the term "sheta", meaning poverty, unemployment, oppression, dependency, impotence, homelessness and landlessness, despair, sickness and death."
POVERTY AND ETHNICITY
In its documents and policies the government consistently talks of the Basarwa, not as a distinct ethnic and indigenous group, but as poor citizens or welfare-needing RADs, like any other poor rural Batswana.
This is an important distinction, analysts say. If the San's problems stem from poverty, that would require a distinct set of policy responses; if their problems are due to their status as a marginalised minority, a different course of actions would be required.
"Brick-and-mortar" solutions (schools and hospitals) and relief food do not solve social exclusion, low self-esteem and discrimination. In the words of a researcher, the government tried so hard to be culture-neutral that it became culture-blind.
"The Basarwa need a place where they belong. But how do you recognise their need of a sense of belonging if you don't recognise their right to their identity?" says Maureen Akena, actvism programme officer at Ditshwanelo.
THE INDIGENEOUS DEBATE
At independence in 1966, Botswana declared itself a non-racial state. At the time, for a nation emerging from colonial rule and bordering apartheid South Africa, to stress non-differentiation and non-discrimination was a progressive policy.
Forty years later, it runs counter to a global trend that accepts cultural diversity as compatible with, and not in opposition to, the idea of a nation state.
The United Nations Working Group on Indigenous Populations promotes the rights of the indigenous to reproduce their cultures, maintain their collective identities, pursue their own social norms and enjoy equal social, political and legal status in society.
In force since 1991, Convention 169 on Indigenous and Tribal Peoples of the International Labour Organisation is a useful tool for governments with ethnic minorities. Countries with large indigenous populations like Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Costa Rica, Peru, Bolivia, Colombia, Paraguay, Fiji and Norway have ratified it.
Among many provisions, the Convention stipulates that indigenous peoples shall not be removed from the lands they occupy, and calls on governments to respect their cultures and spiritual values attached to the land.
Across the world, first peoples are making some progress towards recognition of their land rights and the right to cultural identity.
But the Botswana government does not recognise the San as indigenous people. It strenuously declares that all its citizens are indigenous.
"The concept of indigenous people is a challenge to the African continent," says Mothambo Ngakaeja. "If all blacks are indigenous to Africa, then there are no original inhabitants."
For Sobo Cgara, pointing out the jackal thorn's berries, its roots that cure running tummies and the tiny balls of edible sap on a thorny shrub, is more than a job - it is a way of expressing his spiritual connection with the Kalahari.
"I am proud of my culture and I love the land," he says softly. "I'd like to live in the bush and wear clothes like my ancestors, but the government won't allow me to do it."
His grandmother taught him about plants and animals. After graduating from high school, he was mostly unemployed for seven years, except for casual work operating a road grader. Last year he took a tourism course and this year he was hired by the Dqae Qare (antelope biltong) game farm.
His goals? "To help my community understand the importance of education and to fight alcoholism". His dreams? "That the San community will be respected like all others."
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