SOS Bushmen

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.

“I miss my land, the beauty of my land, my ancestors, and seeing my people living next to their ancestors, practising their culture,” he said during a recent court recess, speaking in a dialect of Khoisan, a language of clicks and trills that sounds a bit like a slow stream running over pebbles. “That place is ours. It's not a game reserve; it's our home.”

Botswana's government disagrees and nearly a decade after government trucks first rolled up to cart the San from their home, judgment day looms. The court has ordered that the case — the longest and costliest in Botswana's history and one that has attracted unwelcome international scrutiny to a country better known as an African success story — must wrap up by May 15.

Throughout the long trial, the San people have been at constant risk of running out of the volunteer donations that pay for their lawyer, a London commercial barrister named Gordon Bennett with a long-time personal interest in tribal land claims. He took on the case initially imagining a commitment of a few months but has stuck with it as something of a labour of love.

Mr. Sesana heads a group called First People of the Kalahari. He is one of 243 plaintiffs who are now years into a battle to overturn their eviction by Botswana's government from the Game Reserve. Only 37 San people remain there, struggling to survive after the government sealed off their access to water. They are the last San, also known as Bushmen, to maintain the traditional way of life of the aboriginal people who first settled southern Africa some 20,000 years ago.

The government says the San were voluntarily relocated from the reserve into two resettlement camps, where they are being provided with regular access not only to health and education facilities, but also a variety of income-generating opportunities. The San had to move because they had abandoned most of their traditional nomadic lifestyle and were proving a threat to the Kalahari ecosystem — to plants and wildlife — which needed protection, government spokesman Clifford Maribe said. He added that the San were compensated for what they left behind.

Mr. Sesana and his fellow plaintiffs see matters differently. They insist that the relocations were forcible, that the settlement communities are equivalent to death camps, where AIDS and alcoholism have taken a fierce hold on a population uprooted from all of its traditional surroundings and activities, and that the government wants them out because their former home is chock full of diamonds.

“They want us out because of minerals and wildlife,” Mr. Sesana said. The San, he said, are the most marginalized and powerless of all Botswana's tribes. Government officials, on visits to the communities, have told them the issue is access to the diamonds beneath the Kalahari sands, he said through a translator.

The Central Kalahari Game Reserve, which covers an area the size of Switzerland, was created in 1961 by the British administration that then ruled Botswana to preserve the desert ecosystem and its wildlife, and as a refuge for the San, who were persecuted, sometimes even hunted, by other tribes who viewed them as inferior and a form of slave labour. A few thousand San, the remnants of a population of 45,000 in Botswana (there are thousands more in South Africa and Namibia) lived in the reserve relatively undisturbed for the next 25 years.

But in the mid-1980s, according to Mr. Maribe, the government realized that the San were no longer living their traditional nomadic way of life, but rather had planted crops and begun to herd livestock (cattle and goats) that presented a threat to the wild game. “Studies showed that the [reserve] was more of a poverty trap,” he added.

The government decided in 1986 that the social and economic development of the five San communities in the reserve should be frozen and viable sites identified outside the reserve, and residents encouraged, but not forced, to relocate.

(While Mr. Maribe said the San hunters were decimating wildlife stocks, government witnesses at the trial have testified that in fact wildlife numbers were flourishing.)

The sharp-cheekboned, almond-eyed San have long fascinated anthropologists. Each group speaks a different click-filled language, all of them incredibly rare and fast disappearing. But they were of less appeal in modernizing Botswana. This country is the world's largest producer of uncut diamonds, and one of the richest countries in Africa. “How can we continue to have Stone Age creatures in the age of computers?” President Festus Mogae said at the time of the first relocations.

A half-San man named John Hardbattle founded the First People of the Kalahari in the 1980s, to advance the idea that the desert belonged to the San who lived on it, and his eloquence staved off relocations for years. But Mr. Hardbattle died in 1996 and the next year government trucks, with an armed escort, rolled into the reserve, dismantled straw houses and fences, set loose the livestock for the lions and carted the people away.

The San were taken to new communities called New Xade and Kaudwane, outside the reserve, where they were housed in prefabricated dwellings in a “town” environment, with a school and a clinic — and several bars. Mr. Maribe said those who moved had specifically asked to be relocated, and chose the site of their resettlement themselves.

In 2002, the 600 San who remained in the reserve were moved to New Xade and Kaudwane. Mr. Maribe said these were also voluntary movements. However, the government sealed all the water sources, and emptied the tanks of stored water where people had lived in the reserve. Up to that point, the government had trucked in water, and provided monthly visits from mobile clinics, but these services were stopped.

Just a handful of people stayed behind; confined to a small area and barred from hunting. After the second resettlement, Mr. Sesana and his fellow plaintiffs made an urgent appeal to the court to be allowed to return.

The case, and the international support it has attracted from groups supporting indigenous people, such as British-based Survival International, is something of a thorn in the side of Botswana's government. This country is used to being the recipient of little but praise, for its stable, democratic government, for its careful husbanding of diamond resources for social welfare and for the delights it offers tourists.

Instead, Botswana was in the headlines last month when the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination expressed concern at “persistent allegations that [San people] were forcibly removed, through, in particular, such measures as the termination of basic and essential services inside the reserve, the dismantling of existing infrastructures, the confiscation of livestock, harassment and ill-treatment of some residents by police and wildlife officers, as well as the prohibition of hunting and restrictions on freedom of movement inside the reserve.”

Even as the eviction case has meandered on in court, the government has continued to act against the San. Last August it sealed off the reserve, and detained and beat San men who had left the resettlement camps to return to their homes and hunt. One man died of injuries sustained at the hands of police. Since then, Mr. Bennett has not been allowed in to the reserve to confer with the people he represents.

Mr. Sesana said the government would like to persuade the outside world that its priority is development for the San, but his people know better. “I know a lot of people think like that: that it's a good thing, to have clinics and schools,” he said. “But we shouldn't have to be relocated to get education. And compare the deaths: more of us die now that we are near the clinic than died before. These unknown diseases, HIV and alcoholism: before relocation you never came across that kind of incident.”

Kali Mercier, legal assistant to the San team, believes the true cause of the evictions is not the plants and animals of the Kalahari but rather what lies beneath them.

Diamond money is responsible for the wide avenues and gleaming government buildings in the capital, Gaborone, and for a strong system of social welfare. Government is blunt about its reliance on (and state ownership of) all mineral wealth, including that in the reserve. International mining corporations, including Debswana, a partnership between the government of Botswana and De Beers, and the world's largest mining firm, Australia's BHP Billiton, hold licences to large tracts of the Kalahari.

In 2000, Boometswe Mokgothu, then minister of minerals, energy and water affairs, was quoted in Botswana's media as telling a development council meeting “that the relocation of Basarwa [San] communities from CKGR is to pave way for a proposed Gope Diamond Mine.”

Mr. Maribe, however, denies, any assertion that access to diamonds is behind the desire to relocate the San. “That is a baseless allegation,” he said: The diamond deposit beneath the land where the San were living is not economically viable to mine. He argued that opening a mine in the reserve would draw people in, so why would the government start the process by moving people out?

San people were, in fact, relocated off of Gope, a large diamond deposit that is half-owned by Falconbridge Ltd. of Toronto, in conjunction with De Beers. “There are no operations at the site and, to my knowledge, no development plans either,” Denis Couture, a spokesman for the company, said by email.

Jumanda Gakelebone of the First People's group, who came home from school one day in 1997 to find his parents and their possessions carted off to a resettlement camp, believes the government's promise of “development” rings hollow when they insist the people must move.

“There are a lot of employment opportunities in the reserve. A lot of trackers could be hired. We know a lot about ecology. We could tell people about ecology or culture. It's only because we are not allowed to do those things.”

Mr. Sesana believes everyone will go back into the reserve, if the court allows them to. “They'll all go back. The government has that fear, if they say we can go back, we will all go back. If they deny people are forced, let people go freely, and see who goes.”