For the past 17 years the San people, whose ancestral home is in the Kalahari Game Reserve in central Botswana, have been struggling to stay on their land. The Government of Botswana has already forcefully relocated 2,000 plus people into camps. The remaining people are being systematically starved of food and water as their hunting and gathering permits are withdrawn and also water tanks and threatened with violence in order to force them to leave their land.

The San are today challenging a decision in 2002 to resettle them and some have already started to return to their lands. The President of Botswana’s has dismissed the demands of the San stating their “normadi way of life was a vestage of the past”. This maybe, but it is their life and their choice to continue to live as they always have on their ancestral lands.

” “If I had had my way, I would have physically resisted the eviction from my ancestral land and I would not be here at all,” he says. “They would rather have killed me as I would have stayed put.”

He was not given the choice. He returned from a long hunting trip in the bush to find that government officials had trashed his entire village and destroyed his water sources. His nine children and two wives had been forces into trucks and transported to New Xade. He says he had no option but to follow his family.
But when the home of another Bushman elder, Nare Gaoboene, was destroyed, and his 11 children and three wives forcibly removed, he refused to quit the land where his ancestors are buried. He slept in trees until he could erect a new hut to protect him from animals.

Survival

San People fight for their land