President visits San to map out the future

Just over a month after a landmark court ruling allowing the San to return to their ancestral land in the Central Kgalagadi Game Reserve (CKGR), Botswana's president, Festus Mogae, and a host of ministers and senior government officials, held a public meeting with the San to map out a future for the reserve.

The High Court found that the San, also known as the Bushmen, had been wrongfully evicted in 2002, and ordered that they be allowed to return to the reserve, which covers an area roughly the size of Switzerland.

According to a presidential statement, Mogae told the public meeting this week at New Xade, a resettlement camp in the Kalahari Desert for those evicted from the CKGR, that "those who might wish to return to the CKGR must bear in mind that the regulations which had always governed the reserve with respect to the protection of its wildlife, remain in force."

Presidential spokesman Jeff Ramsay told IRIN the reserve's regulations forbid the rearing of domestic animals or poaching, and the San would be provided with special hunting licences in accordance with the recent judgment.

Judge Mpaphi Phumaphi, one of a panel of three High Court judges that ruled in favour of the San, said in his summation that the refusal to issue hunting licences to the San had been "tantamount to condemning the remaining residents of the Central Kgalagadi Game Reserve to death by starvation".

Rights groups had claimed that the forced removal of about 2,500 San from their land was to make way for diamond exploration in the CKGR, an allegation denied by the government, although they acknowledge that there are known diamond deposits in the reserve.

Mogae told the New Xade gathering of about 200 San that "in the years before independence, most Batswana relied on hunting and gathering to feed themselves, but with modern development people's lives have been changing for the better" and "through a process of further consultations, concerned parties would be able to achieve a common understanding for the future development of the CKGR in the context of the recent court judgement".

New Xade San chief Lobatse Beslag agreed that "preserving one's culture should not mean remaining poor and underdeveloped ... hunting and gathering belonged to the past".

Ramsay said the government envisaged that the reserve would become a wildlife conservation area allowing for mass migrations of animals, and so contribute to the country's tourism repertoire, which includes the world-renowned Okavango Delta. It would also add another dimension to Botswana's economy, at present dominated by the diamond and cattle industries.

Mogae noted that some members of the San had been sent to the Universities of Botswana and Namibia to study wildlife management, and "such individuals could assist the community in realising the sustainable use of its natural resources, so that future generations would also benefit."

The CKGR was created in the last days of British colonial rule before Botswana's independence in 1966 and was designed to guarantee the San continued occupation of the land their ancestors have lived on for thousands of years.

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