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Bushmen in Botswana Say They Were Forcibly Evicted From Village
Molathwe Mokalaka, with his wife Toiwa Setlhobogwe, said they were harassed into leaving Molapo, one of the last traditional Bushmen villages.
(By Craig Timberg -- The Washington Post)
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Gakeitsewe Gaorapelwe, who appeared to be in his fifties, said the armed wildlife officers told him, "If you don't relocate to New Xade, we will follow you until death."
At about the same time, the portions of the Central Kalahari Game Reserve where the Bushmen lived were sealed off by a government quarantine against the goat disease, making it impossible for supplies to be delivered from the outside by friends or family members.
Leaders of the Bushmen said the government's campaign to drive them from the game reserve has entered its final phase as surveying for diamonds has escalated. Only an emergency appeal made Wednesday and an ongoing lawsuit offer any hope that they will be allowed home, they said.
"The government is just killing people," Roy Sesana, head of First People of the Kalahari, an advocacy group, said in an interview in Gaborone. Depriving them of the means to feed themselves is no different than "cutting a person's throat with a knife," he added.
The day after Molapo was emptied, nearly half the remaining residents of Metsiamanong were transported out by government trucks. Throughout the entire game reserve, an area larger than Switzerland, there are just a few dozen Bushmen left, according to officials and Bushmen leaders. A decade ago, before the government began its campaign of forced removals, there were an estimated 2,000.
There is no indication of when, or if, Mokalaka and the others will be allowed to return.
The government has not set a date for the end of the quarantine. Repeated efforts to deliver food and water to those inside have failed, in one case leading to a clash with police that left two Bushmen injured, according to witnesses.
The government of Botswana, a landlocked nation of 1.6 million directly north of South Africa that is dependent on diamond deposits, has been attempting to drive the Bushmen out of the Central Kalahari Game Reserve since the 1980s.
Officials have argued that human habitation is inconsistent with maintaining the wildlife that make the reserve a major tourist attraction. They also said that it was impractical to provide Bushmen villages the services, such as schools and medical care, that are standard elsewhere in the country.
And although officials acknowledge that diamond companies are surveying within the game reserve, rights to minerals in Botswana are held by the government. Therefore, officials said, human habitation in the Kalahari would have no impact on plans -- should they ever materialize -- to open a diamond mine there.
The government long ago ended water deliveries, banned hunting and required that Bushmen children go to schools outside the reserve where the national language, Setswana, dominates. Forced removals diminished several Kalahari villages, and most Bushmen now live outside the reserve.
The major exceptions were Molapo and Metsiamanong, where dozens of Bushmen had attempted to maintain their traditional lifestyles while staying close to ancestral graves that they visited regularly in search of guidance.
