The San need access to their ancestral land

Although allowed to hunt in Botswana's Central Kalahari Game Reserve (CKGR), the key issue for the San is the lack of proper access to their ancestral land, according to a regional rights organisation. "The San community are only allowed into the reserve to hunt with traditional weapons, and without donkey carts to carry the meat. By the time they get back to their settlement outside the reserve, the meat is rotten," said Alex Thoma, coordinator of the regional Working Group of Indigenous Minorities in Southern Africa (WIMSA). The group is a San-owned NGO, fighting for the community's rights. Thoma was responding to a statement last week by President Festus Mogae when he restated the government's position that the San were free to hunt in the CKGR, as long as they used traditional weapons. In 1997 more than 3,000 members of the San community were removed from the CKGR because, the government said, it wanted to improve their socioeconomic conditions by providing basic services unavailable in the game reserve. But over 100 San, unhappy with being resettled at New Xade, have moved back into the CKGR, rebuilt their branch-and-thatch huts, and live off the land. The London-based lobby group Survival International (SI), on Friday claimed that the government's acceptance of hunting in the CKGR was "an astonishing reversal" of policy after Botswana had "previously banned all hunting in the reserve, making the Bushmen's way of life impossible." But, said Thoma, "There is nothing new in the government's position - what it [the government] should do is allow the community the right to live on their ancestral land." Mogae told a delegation of four British Members of Parliament on a fact-finding mission last week on the government's treatment of the San - and especially on the circumstances surrounding their removal from the reserve - that the San were free to hunt in the CKGR, "provided they used traditional hunting weapons, such as bows and arrows". Mogae's spokesman, Jeff Ramsay, quoted an independent study which asserted that there had been rapid social change among the San, part of which meant that besides bows and arrows, some now used guns, traps, horses, dogs and other methods not allowed in game reserves. The use of modern techniques, and a shift by some San towards agro-pastoralism, would have an impact on wildlife conservation, Ramsay told IRIN.