[LINK] "Comment about Botswana's president sparks debate on Kalahari Bushmen"

[rfmcdonald]

The Globe and Mail's Geoffrey York reports on anti-Bushman racism in Botswana.

It began as a casual quip at a border post. A woman spotted a portrait of Botswana's President and remarked that he “looks like a Bushman.”

Security officers sprang into action. The woman was detained, interrogated at a police station, kept in custody for a night and a day and forced to pay a fine before being freed.

The reason: Her innocent comment about the leader's resemblance to the original people of Southern Africa was deemed “insulting” to the country.

The incident has sparked a fresh debate on the plight of the long-suffering Bushmen, the last indigenous people in Southern Africa who still live in the wild. Their defenders say the Bushmen are the victims of racial discrimination by government leaders who are eager to use the people's ancestral land for diamond mining and tourist developments.

The Bushmen, also known as the San, have fought for years for the right to continue their hunter-gatherer life in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, one of the biggest nature reserves in Africa. But the Botswana government has refused to allow most of them to return to the reserve or to grant them hunting licences.

The latest incident began when Dorsey Dube, a woman from South Africa, was leaving Botswana with three friends in late September. At the border crossing, she saw a framed portrait of President Ian Khama and commented casually that he looked like a friend's father, who had Bushman features.

It was intended to be a compliment. But she was detained, questioned and held at a police station without the right to call anyone for assistance.

“You couldn't have clearer evidence of the racism towards Bushmen in Botswana than this incident,” said Stephen Corry, director of Survival International, a British-based group that campaigns for the rights of tribal groups and indigenous people.

“A South African person thought resembling a Bushman was complimentary, but Botswana officials took it as an insult,” Mr. Corry said in a statement Thursday.

Indeed, the Botswana government has gone out of its way to undermine the material basis of Bushman culture.

Mr. Khama, who was re-elected to a second five-year term as President last month, has been unsympathetic to the plight of the Bushmen. He said in 2008 that their traditional lifestyle is “an archaic fantasy.”

Hundreds of Bushmen were forcibly removed from the Kalahari reserve in 2002. Witnesses described how the authorities cut off the water sources used by the Bushmen to force them to leave, even smashing the ostrich-egg shells in which the Bushmen store water.

Four years later, the Bushmen won a ruling from Botswana's High Court saying that their removal from the Kalahari was “unlawful and unconstitutional.” By refusing to allow the Bushmen to hunt, the government was condemning them to “death by starvation,” one judge said.

According to Survival International, the government had approved plans for a diamond mine on the Bushmen's land on the condition that the mining company did not provide any water to the Bushmen. It also banned the Bushmen from using a water borehole in their community, although it allowed a nearby tourist lodge to pump water from the site, the group said.

Anti-Bushman racism clearly plays a dominant role, here. I've also read that a secondary motive, however, has been Botswanans' fierce resistance to the idea that it would be morally acceptable to set up reserves to let people live a traditional lifestyle: the idea is far too close to that undergirding the South African apartheid-era homelands to be tolerable.