Kalahari Bushmen vs. Botswana Government

The lengths diamond companies are willing to go to in Africa have been well-documented – environmental destruction, fomenting civil war, supporting torture, murder and even genocide. So what’s happening to the Bushmen of the Kalahari shouldn’t come as a surprise.

It became public knowledge this year that the government of Botswana has been forcing the Gana and Gwi bushmen off their ancestral lands and into resettlement camps since 1997. The government defended their actions by saying the tribes were damaging the land and that, according to the foreign minister, the bushmen should be able to “enjoy the better things in life, like driving Cadillacs… Why must they continue to commune with the flora and fauna?”

In fact, reports indicate a huge increase in diamond mining concessions, especially to De Beers, which controls more than half of the world’s diamond production, and which has been accused of all but running the country. Botswana produced 29 percent of the world’s diamonds by value in 2001, far more than any other country. In that year, diamond sales from Botswana amounted to $2.3 billion. This accounts for 70 percent of Botswana’s foreign exchange earnings and 50 percent of government revenue. One company, Debswana (De Beers Botswana), which is jointly owned by the Botswana government and De Beers, controls Botwana’s diamond mining industry.

There was some good news for indigenous peoples when it comes to local control of the environment and resources. The Constitutional Court of South Africa ruled that an indigenous people had both communal land ownership and mineral rights over their territory. Laws which tried to dispossess them were “racial discrimination.”

The case concerned the 3,000 Richtersveld people who live in Northern Cape Province. They are from the Nama subgroup of Khoikhoi peoples, and have always lived in the area called Richtersveld until they were evicted in the 1950s to make way for a diamond mine, now owned by the South African government. Five years ago, the people took both the government and the mining company to court, claiming ownership rights over both 85,000 hectares of land and the minerals it contains. They lost the case but then appealed, and the appeal court ruled in their favour. A mining company appealed the decision to the Constitutional Court, whose judgment is final.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 20th, 2007 at 10:11 pm and is filed under Under-reported. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site. Add to del.icio.us.