For 20,000 years, the Bushmen have lived off the land in Botswana, but today the discovery of diamonds on that land threatens their survival.
When god made this land, he did it in anger.” That’s a common saying among the Bushmen who have lived on the most inhospitable land in Africa, pushed there in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by the arrival of Dutch colonists. And yet even this difficult land was deemed too good for them after diamonds were discovered in Botswana.
The two huge deposits at Orapa and Jwaneng are within the Kalahari Desert, a desolate, nearly waterless expanse that covers nearly two-thirds of the country. The Kalahari extends into Namibia and South Africa, but the bulk of the desert is in Botswana and that is where the majority of the remaining Bushmen — the number is hard to pin down but is estimated at anywhere from 10,000 to 50,000 people — live.
The Bushmen, who trace their presence in Africa back at least 20,000 years, form a direct line to the earliest people of Africa and are often referred to as The First People.
The Earth’s StewardsThe Bushmen’s traditional way of life, however, leaves them defenseless against outsiders. They are not governed by chiefs, relying instead on decisions made by common agreement. They have no system of land ownership, believing that the land is there to be used as lightly as possible, by everyone. Their stewardship of the land is one of the Bushmen’s defining qualities. They take very little, use it wisely and don’t seek to profit from what they find.
Traditional Bushmen have always relied on their extraordinary hunting and gathering skills to wrest a living from the land. The men are renowned for their tracking. After shooting one of their poison-tipped arrows into an animal, always at very close distance, they might track the animal for days until the poison takes effect — following even the faintest traces of tracks in the sand. Once the animal is dead, the Bushmen use every bit of it for food, clothing and tools, always sharing the meat with the other members of their clan.
For their part, the Bushmen women gather mongongo nuts, sour plums, tsama melons, beans, truffles and ostrich eggs. The latter are prized not only for the protein they provide but also for their watertight shells that are decorated and used as containers. The Bushmen women pull roots from the ground, relying on their sure knowledge of the land and its vegetation to find nutrition in the most unlikely looking places. Water is found within these fruits and roots.
The Bushmen’s ancient presence in Africa is well documented in thousands of rock wall and cave paintings that depict Bushmen hunting animals that were once plentiful in the area. One site, the Tsodilo Hills, believed by the Bushmen to be the site of the first creation, has more than 3,500 rock paintings. That story of creation, along with all their history, is passed along from one generation of Bushmen to the next by storytellers.
To the KalahariWhen more aggressive people arrived — Bantu tribes and white settlers — the Bushmen moved farther and farther away, until they had retreated to the Kalahari, where they felt no one would come after them. Who else, they reasoned, would want this incredibly harsh land?
In 1961, the British, who governed the region then known as Bechuanaland, created the Central Kalahari Game Reserve (CKGR) for the Bushmen, giving them hunting rights within the reserve. When Botswana gained its independence from Great Britain in 1966, the new government agreed to deliver basic supplies and health care to the Bushmen and drilled boreholes in the reserve for water.
At that time, Botswana’s economy was based almost entirely on cattle. The “national herd” was comprised of three million head of cattle, spread out on the vast land and managed by a population of approximately 500,000. Today, the human population is just under two million, a figure that would be much higher were it not for the ravages of AIDS. Botswana has the second highest AIDS population in the world, with an estimated one in six Batswana infected. The number of cattle is likewise down, largely because of a disease that led to a massive slaughtering. But cattle still equal wealth in Africa and even city people, with jobs in modern businesses such as computers and nursing, maintain country farms and cattle ranches.
DiamondsIn 1967, however, one year after Botswana became independent, the discovery of diamonds changed everything. The coveted stones were found first at Orapa and then, in 1972, at Jwaneng, deep in the Kalahari. Suddenly, this desolate land became extremely desirable and very valuable — too valuable to be left to the Bushmen, no matter how little of it they used. Diamonds became the engine that drove government policy decisions in Botswana.
To provide the hundreds of millions of dollars necessary to fund the long-term development of this valuable resource, Debswana, a 50-50 joint venture between De Beers and the government of Botswana, was created. The diamond mining company transformed Botswana from an agricultural-based economy to a country with one of the highest economic growth rates in the world. As the country’s largest nongovernment employer, Debswana produces more than 70 percent of the country’s export earnings, 30 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) and 50 percent of government revenue.
On the world stage, Debswana is the largest diamond producer by value and Jwaneng is the richest diamond mine, with Orapa the second richest. In 2007, the country produced 33.6 million carats of diamonds.
But the diamond riches have not benefitted the Bushmen. As the mining companies moved into the reserve, the Bushmen were forced out. Beginning in 1996, the Botswana government demanded that the Bushmen move out of the Kalahari Reserve. In 2001, hunting permits were withdrawn; in 2002, medical care was cut off and water supplies were closed down within the reserve. The Bushmen’s hunting tools — handmade bows and arrows tipped with poison — were confiscated and most of the tribal members were loaded into cattle trucks with their meager possessions and driven to settlement camps outside the reserve.
Although the government has denied any connection between mining and the evictions, there are those who think differently. Survival International, a 40-year-old nongovernmental organization (NGO) dedicated to the rights of tribal people, is one of them. It has always maintained that the Bushmen were evicted specifically to open up the reserve for mining.
In 2006, the Bushmen won a significant legal victory when the Botswana High Court ruled that their eviction was illegal and they had the right to hunt and live in the reserve. Despite the ruling, the Bushmen still are stranded in the settlement camps because the government refuses to allow them use of the water borehole on the reserve or to return their hunting tools or transport them back. Meanwhile, mining operators reportedly are digging their own water boreholes on reserve land.
While diamond demand, and production, are down dramatically right now because of the worldwide financial crisis, diamond-mining companies always take the long view. Botswana has become so important to the world diamond industry that it was able to force De Beers to move its diamond-buying sights from London to Gaborone, Botswana’s capital, and also to establish diamond-polishing operations in the country that employ approximately 3,000 Batswana. The diamond industry’s importance to Botswana makes it unlikely that this David versus Goliath story will end well for the Bushmen.
Article from the Rapaport Magazine - April 2009. To subscribe click here.