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SOS Bushmen

Botswana's bushmen feel adrift after government relocations

Officials deem the move necessary to preserve the Kalahari's wildlife and integrate a primitive people leading hardscrabble lives into modern society. But many of the bushmen see their uprooting as a death sentence.
 (Suite)

Botswana: Court Case On San Rights Resumes

The right to live and hunt as their forefathers did in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve (CKGR) is the crux of an application by 243 San Bushmen to overturn their relocation outside the game sanctuary by the Botswana government.

The landmark case, which goes to the heart of minority rights in Botswana, resumed on Monday after a two-month break at the High Court in Lobatse, 60 km south of the capital, Gaborone.
 (Suite)

BOTSWANA BUSHMEN CONTINUE FIGHT FOR ANCESTRAL LAND

Over 200 Botswanan bushmen will continue their fight to return to their ancestral land in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve (CKGR) when their high court case against the government starts on Monday.

The Botswana government has evicted at least 1500 Gana and Gwi bushmen from the land in the last six years, said London based Survival International in a statement on Saturday.
 (Suite)

After 30,000 years, they're evicted - Bushmen fight to remain on ancestral lands

When Dahame Belese left the land of his ancestors, his parents felt as if he had fallen off the edge of the universe. They had no idea of the world outside, never traveled by car or bicycle. They had not even climbed on a donkey's back.

The day he went away, his father was so angry he wouldn't say goodbye and his mother cried herself to sleep. All the long day's drive on government trucks away from the desert where the Bushmen have lived for 30,000 years, Belese knew he was betraying his parents. His father told him not to go, but he did not listen.

After two terrible years, Belese came home, his heart beating quickly. As the sandy Kalahari Desert track uncoiled like a snake before him, he fretted about what his elderly parents would say.
 (Suite)

The Broken String: The Last Words of an Extinct People

The Broken String: The Last Words of an Extinct People by neil Bennun Publisher: Penguin Books , 2005


Un cactus qui fait rêver les Bushmen.

Son pouvoir amincissant peut rapporter groshoodia, un cactus coupe-faim, bientôt transformé en pilule amincissante pour les Occidentaux, les Bushmen d'Afrique australe font enfin une bonne affaire.

Partager 34 000 dollars entre 100 000 personnes peut sembler dérisoire. Pourtant, pour le peuple nomade des Sans qui regroupe les Bushmen d'Afrique australe répartis entre le Botswana, la Namibie et l'Afrique du Sud, cette somme sonne comme une victoire. L'argent qu'ils viennent de toucher concrétise leur titre d`« inventeurs » du hoodia comme coupe-faim. Depuis la nuit des temps, ils utilisent ce cactus lorsqu'ils chassent dans le désert pour ne pas souffrir de la faim ou de la soif. Dorénavant, le monde entier espère maigrir en consommant ce cactus de la taille d'un gros concombre qui pousse en grappe à même le sol sur les dunes du désert du Kalahari.

 (Suite)

Exiles of the Kalahari: forcibly resettled by a Botswanan government eager to clear the way for diamond mining, the Bushmen are battling to regain their ancestral homeland.(

IT'S THE MIDDLE OF THE MONTH, and nearly all of the residents of New Xade, a dusty resettlement camp on the edge of Botswana's Central Kalahari Game Reserve, are lining up in the muggy heat. Today is food-aid day, and sacks of cornmeal are being tossed from a government truck parked near a mound of dirty cabbage. A wizened woman shuffles forward, leading her blind husband behind her by a thin stick. In the reserve she might have foraged for wild sweet potatoes, but here she has no choice but to wait for their rations--the edible plants she knows don't grow here. Nor is there any game to hunt, which perhaps explains why a scrum of men sits sullenly in the shade out front of a bar, building a pile of empty Castle Lager cans.

The 1,500 residents of New Xade represent many of the remaining Bushmen of the Central Kalahari. In 2002, in a move that Botswana's government trumpeted as bringing the Bushmen into the modern age and that international observers decried as a grab for diamonds, these villagers were rounded up from their ancestral homes and relocated--stick huts and all--into three camps like this one. The relative isolation that had kept them safe from the AIDS pandemic is now only a memory. "Here we are burying people week by week or daily," says Roy Sesana, head of the advocacy group First People of the Kalahari (FPK). "We can't call that development."
 (Suite)