SOS Bushmen

Before Africa's colonisation, the Bushmen population in the south of the continent numbered in the millions. Today the figure is 80,000.

Two-thirds of the Bushmen who remain are based in Botswana where a majority now work as ranch hands, having moved or been forced off their ancestral lands in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve (CKGR), where they had lived for millenia.

A tiny number of Bushmen now remain in the CKGR, but the government of Botswana continues its policy of relocating tribespeople to 65 new settlements (dismissed as slums by campaigners) on the fringes of the reserve. Between 1997 and 2002, 1,550 Bushmen were resettled and by mid-2005 only a reported 66 remained in the CKGR, two thirds of whom were removed later that year.

In the words of Botswana's president, the rationale of the resettlement programme has been "to ensure that all citizens of Botswana have opportunities to share in the wealth of the nation."

Les débats se sont achevés cette semaine dans le procès-fleuve sur les revendications territoriales des bushmen San, qui contestent leur expulsion de la Réserve du Kalahari, dans le centre du Botswana, a annoncé jeudi l'organisation Survival international.

"Mardi était le dernier jour d'audition des témoins dans le procès des bushmen. Le tribunal devrait probablement entendre les plaidoiries des avocats en septembre", a indiqué Survival International dans un communiqué.

Evidence in a court case in which Botswana's San Bushmen are fighting for rights to ancestral land in the Kalahari wound up in court this week, with a rights group Thursday calling for a speedy end to the case.

The Bushmen are taking Gaborone to court to challenge their eviction four years ago from the Central Kalahari Game Reserve (CKGR), one of the world's largest sanctuaries and an area they have called home for the past 20,000 years.

Roy Sesana sits in the back row of the dark-panelled room that houses Botswana's High Court, in this little town 70 kilometres from the capital. The courtroom has parquet floors and a row of judges in gowns and powdered wigs, a legacy of the country's British colonial history.

Mr. Sesana has come here almost every day that the court has been in session over the past four years, yet he could hardly look less at home. He wears a traditional headdress made of beads and the horns of a small antelope. His tea-coloured face is crevassed and worn by a climate very different from the rarefied air of the court.

Yet Mr. Sesana thinks constantly of home: of the sand and scrub trees and low moon of the Central Kalahari Game Reserve where he grew up and where, he hopes, the row of stern, bewigged judges will allow him to return.

Survival International is under fire for criticising Botswana government.

Survival International is at loggerheads with the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Botswana after its chair criticised the charity's work defending Kalahari Bushmen in the African state.

Malcolm Moss MP, the shadow minister for culture, media and sport, has refuted many of Survival International's claims about the treatment of Gana and Gwi Bushmen at the hands of the Botswana government.