SOS Bushmen

A ruling on Botswana's longest-running and most expensive legal battle brought by Kalahari Bushmen against the government will be made next month, Survival International said on Wednesday. The case was filed after the Botswana government evicted the Bushmen from land in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve in 2002, said spokesperson Miriam Ross. "The Bushmen are fighting for their right to live on their land and to hunt and gather freely there." At least 12% of the original 239 applicants had died in government resettlement camps since the case was filed, she said. Survival International is a London-based international organisation that supports tribal people and is helping the Bushmen in the case. This year, 135 more applicants asked to be added to the original list. "We are feeling it in our hearts, waiting for the court case to resume, and if we win it we can go back," Bushman Sellalefatse Gaexhoro said in the statement.

Earlier this year a full page advert was taken out in a magazine asking actor Leonardo DiCaprio to help their cause, Ross said. DiCaprio stars in a film on the diamond conflict in Africa, which will be released in the United States just before the ruling. In their appeal, the Bushmen said they were evicted after the Botswana government found diamonds on their land. Ross said the case was the longest and most expensive in Botswana's legal history. Ruling will take place on December 13. "Together with their children they number [about] 10 000 people," said Ross

AFTER years of debate over the link between the relocation of Botswana's Kalahari Bushmen and diamond exploration, renewed mineral exploration on Bushmen land is rekindling the controversy.

Reports of drilling in the area come just weeks before a key court ruling on the fate of the area is scheduled to be delivered.

Business Day has confirmed that TH Drilling (THD) of Gaborone, Botswana, has sent crews into the Central Kalahari Game Reserve (CKGR) to drill 15 test pipes on leases held by Petra Diamonds in the Gope area.

IN the caves of South Africa's Cederberg mountains, an ancient people left a legacy of rock art that could teach modern man a valuable lesson or two about living in harmony with nature.

That is the view of John Parkington, professor of archaeology at the University of Cape Town, who has spent 40 years in the Cederberg and neighbouring areas researching rock paintings and other artefacts left by the pre-colonial hunter-gatherers who once roamed southern Africa.

A drilling company has started operations for diamond exploration in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, an area that Bushmen believe they were evicted from, Survival International said on Thursday.

TH Drilling confirmed to two members of the First People of the Kalahari organisation that it had started operations in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, Survival International spokeswoman Miriam Ross said.

South African Nobel laureate Desmond Tutu threw his support Tuesday behind a fight by San Bushmen for rights to ancestral land, urging Botswana's government not to destroy their unique way of life.

A final judgement is expected next month in what is Botswana's longest-running court case when a judge is due to rule on the Bushmen's claim that they were driven out of the Kalahari desert unlawfully.

In a newly recorded video message, Tutu said the Bushmen's culture, which dates back tens of thousands of years, was "one of the world's treasures".