The Sunday Herald: Uprooted and marginalised: how the Bushmen lost out to diamond hunters

FOR YEARS the government of Botswana angrily told the world that diamond discoveries were not the reason for the forcible removal of the Bushmen of the Kalahari from the last place in Africa where they pursued their traditional hunter-gatherer way of life.

But it has now been revealed, just a fortnight before Botswana’s high court gives a final decision on the Bushmen’s claim that they were unconstitutionally banished from the Central Kalahari Game Reserve (CKGR) to make way for diamond exploration, that a British mining company has sent rigs into the reserve to test-drill for diamonds at 15 sites.

The expos by South Africa’s Business Day newspaper and the British pressure group Survival International about the CKGR operations of Jersey-based Petra Diamonds will be a severe embarrassment for the high court. It had previously sent its own investigative team into the reserve, which reported: “There were no current traces of mining operations at Gope.”

Gope is an area in the CKGR - itself a wildlife-rich wilderness more than half the size of Scotland - where the Bushmen and their legal representatives have long said the Botswanan government intends exploiting diamonds.

The Botswanan government has denied any intention to mine diamonds as the reason for the Bushmen’s expulsion. It has argued that the CKGR’s wildlife needs to be undisturbed by human presence and that the Bushmen needed to be removed to bring them into the modern world. Botswana’s president, Festus Mogae, has described the Kalahari Bushmen as “Stone Age creatures who must change or otherwise, like the dodo, they will perish.”

Mogae’s spokesman, Dr Jeff Ramsay, has repeatedly said: “There is no mining activity going on anywhere inside the CKGR.” But Petra Diamonds’ website - www.petradiamonds.com - makes clear its presence in the area and that the intention is to mine the CKGR.

Petra acquired Kalahari Diamonds Limited, a company part-owned by Australia’s BHP Billiton and the World Bank, two years ago. Kalahari Diamonds had acquired access to the CKGR’s Gope area “that is known to host six or seven kimberlites”, says the Petra website. Kimberlite volcanic pipes, formed 60 to 1600 million years ago, are the most important source of mined diamonds.

The company website continues: “Petra’s track record in the development of medium-sized ore bodies will enable the efficient evaluation of such kimberlite occurrences and, if economic, quickly turn them to account.”

It says company planes have been flying across several hundred square miles of the Kalahari trying to spot other places where kimberlite pipes might underlay the swathes of silver sands. These surveys so far indicate there might be at least another 47 diamond-laden kimberlite pipes. Geophysicists are already assessing the content of the Gope pipes, which are covered by a 250ft-thick layer of sand.

SURVIVAL International spokeswoman Miriam Ross said: “The Bushmen have said again and again that they were evicted from their land because diamonds were found there.” She added that, despite all the government denials, the drilling by Petra at Gope, from where the last Bushmen were evicted in 2002, emphasises the truth of the Bushmen’s claims.
South Africa’s Nobel Peace Prize winner Archbishop Desmond Tutu issued a statement backing the Kalahari Bushmen. He said they represent a 100,000-year-old culture that should be considered one of the world’s treasures.

“While progress is necessary, it cannot be that the only way to achieve progress is to remove the San as the Bushmen are sometimes known from their ancestral lands,” said Tutu. “When a culture is destroyed in the name of progress, it is not progress, it is a loss for our world.

“I appeal to the Botswana government, and the world, to find new ways to help solve these issues in a manner that respects the lovely, spiritual culture of the San Bushmen.”
But, through his spokesman, Mogae dismissed the appeal, saying Tutu’s remarks would have no international impact.

The CKGR was given to the Bushmen in 1961 by the British colonial rulers of what was then Bechuanaland as a place where they could pursue their traditional way of life in perpetuity. The first president of Botswana, Sir Seretse Khama, reaffirmed the commitment at independence in 1966.

But Khama’s promise was betrayed after his death, from cancer, in 1980. Roy Sesana, head of the First People of the Kalahari, the main Bushmen organisation, said the new government line was brutally spelled out by a former landowner and local government minister, Patrick Balopi. “He told us that the laws of the president ie Khama died with him and that the laws of Queen Elizabeth have no relevance,” said Sesana.

The Bushmen cleared from the CKGR now live in squalid settlements around the edge, where there are neither animals to hunt nor traditional wild plant foods, including truffles, to harvest. The camps are places of despair, marked by unemployment, alcoholism and disease, including TB and Aids.

Both sides have vowed to appeal the high court decision, scheduled for December 13, if it goes against them, thus prolonging the bitter fight.

© Sunday Herald (Scotland), 27th November 2006