SĀN PEOPLES OF THE KALAHARI-70,000 YEARS - Survival in the 21st Century

BACKGROUND OF THE SĀN PEOPLES

When you think about the African Continent, do you consider who the first settlers were there? Do you consider the “First Nations Peoples” of Africa? The Indigenous Sān Peoples of Southern Africa or more commonly and derogatorily referred to as the “Bushmen”, have been scientifically found to be among the first people with over 70,000 years of history in this region.

In April 2018, the Inti Raymi Fund attended the world conference of the Permanent Forum for Indigenous Peoples Issues in New York City, USA. During this annual conference, we met the de-facto Sān Peoples' representative Jumanta Gakelebone, who was born in the local Sān village of Metsimanong situated in the heart of the Central Kalahari Game Reserve (“CKGR”) of Botswana.

According to research, the Sān People are among the first inhabitants or “First Nations Peoples” and longest continuous occupiers of the Kalahari Desert Region of the Southern part of the African Continent. Research based upon stone tools and rock art findings has determined an estimated 70,000 year history on these lands. Their territories included lands since colonized and divided among an array of European Colonizers into what today is known as Botswana, Namibia, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Lesotho and South Africa. The Sān Peoples historically were semi-nomadic hunters and gatherers, moving seasonally based upon the availability of water, animals and plants. Traditionally, within these Sān communities, the men were the hunters while the women were the gatherers; however, today there is near equality among the men and women with both sharing equally in life’s sustainability issues. Decision making among  a community utilizes their elders’ knowledge for any “tie-breaker decisions”.

The colonization of Botswana by the Dutch in 1647 by colonial voyage and then the re-taking by war by the British in 1920 with their illegal and unethical land grabs diminished the Sān Peoples Territories tremendously. Then, shortly after independence from United Kingdom of Botswana in 1966, the 1970’s newly formed government’s policies further discriminated and threatened the existence and sustainability of the Sān Peoples by facilitating further land grants of Sān Territories to the majority Tswana population who were agro-pastoralists tribes. Additionally, discriminatory forcible evictions of the Sān Peoples from the CKGR into organized Settlement Camps, dismantling of Sān Peoples’ infrastructure and bans on hunting within their ancestral hunting lands, all threatened their very existence and survival. Lastly, the government made it illegal for the Sān People to drill for water in this desert region, all but “putting a stake in the heart of the Sān Peoples”. While all of these governmental genocidal actions were happening, a former DeBeers executive was securing large swaths of territories in the CKGR to explore for diamonds with his newly formed entity called Gem Diamonds based in the United Kingdom. The CKGR was initially intended as just that, a “Game Reserve” which requires the sustainability of lands and resources for animal husbandry, eco-tourism and human lives not the violent invasive practices of strip mining and bore mining for diamonds and other extractive industries.

The timing of the 1) governmental hunting bans, 2) governmental water drilling moratoriums, and 3) the governmental relocation programs of the Indigenous Sān Peoples into “Settlement Camps” which relocated an estimated 3,000 of the 3,400 Sān Peoples to be "out-of-the-way" for Gem Diamond Company’s mining operations, in our opinion, is a slow and deliberate act of genocide by the Botswana Government and Gem Diamond Company. As a form of an apparent “appeasement by the Gem Diamond Company predecessor, de Beers Diamond Company, and the Botswana Government, reportedly four wells were drilled for the Sān Peoples to use in four spread apart and different communities. We were informed that three of the four wells never produced drinkable water, with only one well ever operational. Considering that there are currently five communities of roughly 400 Sān situated in the CKGR, each located some 30-50 kilometers apart, lends us to be less than appreciative of their paltry peace offering by the perpetrators.

THE BATTLE FOR SURVIVAL:

Survival International (“Survival”) is a United Kingdom based Non-Governmental Organization (“NGO”) which became involved in 2000 to support the land and water rights for the Sān Peoples on their ancestral lands in the Kalahari. It was with this help of Survival that the Sān regained their most important life resource… “water drilling” through their litigation against the Botswana Government. Secondly, Survival had fought yet were unsuccessful supporting of the efforts for the Sān to reverse the current government hunting ban. The water issue technically was won in 2011 after 11 years of litigation by the Sān Peoples, allowing the Sān to drill water wells. During this extensive litigation period; however, governmental policies of forcible relocation the Sān from their ancestral lands into "Relocation Communities" and further regulations disallowing hunting, has converted the Sān Peoples from an independent "hunter-gatherer society" to an "awkward agro-pastoralist society". Today. the Sān have no sustainable "Western Style" source of income or savings to pay for such an extravagance of a water well at an estimated cost of $12,500 each. Additionally, the Sān are overwhelmingly naive and vulnerable to ask for a simple drilling permit from their adversarial government offices which they defeated through the help of Survival International's litigation for water. There is law and then there is “Big Government Law” in the middle of the Kalahari Desert where there are no roads, no phones, no police, leaving no trace.

Currently as of October 2018, the government trucks in water and some food rations to the five remaining Sān communities of the CKGR.  It was revealed to us that each person is only allocated 5.5 litres (1.45 gallons) of water/day. This 5.5 litres must also be shared with their donkeys and horses, used for transportation, their goats and chickens, their new main food source, and their dogs which are their alarm systems for the attacking lions and leopards which periodically eat their goats, donkeys, horses and chickens. There literally is “zero” water left for bathing or washing clothes which is brutally self-evident upon visiting the community. If left alone in the Kalahari, the Sān would not need trucked in water to feed any animals since they prefer to hunt wild animals and they could dig their own traditional water holes in their preferred locations by themselves; however, their lifestyle equilibrium has been severely disrupted by governmental altercations.

OUR JOURNEY IN THE KALAHARI DESERT

Our team traveled an absolutely exhaustive bumpy 1,325 kilometer excursion by 4x4 truck on sand trails mostly averaging a speed of 25 km/hour. Furthering our malaise, air conditioning was turned off to conserve fuel and to not overheat the engine with daily temperatures well exceeding 38C/100F in the Kalahari Desert. Six oversized 20 liter/5 gallon plastic tanks were packed in the bed of our truck, sloshing around our "reserve diesel fuel". This extra fuel ensuring we had enough fuel to enter and exit the Kalahari Desert. Additionally, we packed all our food rations and 18 gallons of water to be shared between the three of us during our five-day visits to all the communities. Additional life-saving equipment included, a hose to siphon fuel from plastic tanks into the truck's tank each day, spare tire and jack, tire air gauge, hand air pump, ropes, tow rope, tents and sleeping gear, medical equipment, medicines, headlamps, and satellite phone, yet who would come to rescue us out there? Any misstep or breakdown of the truck along the way could mean possible death after dark as wild elephants, lions, hyenas, jackals and leopards all prey at night on the “weakest link” in Africa. This image was constantly in the back of our minds as we meandered at a snails’ pace most of the time not much faster than a jogger in the sands, always wondering if we were going to spin the tires and sink into the fluffy sand and be stuck. How do you dig out of fluffy beach-like sand in the middle of nowhere?

The first night we arrived in the dark after 10 hours of driving to find the CKGR offices closed. Upon coaxing and pleading with the game reserve personnel at their cabins, we were allowed to camp under the safety of their night light. Much to our surprise, in the night we were greeted by angry thirsty elephants in search for water from the rangers’ facilities which they visit and destroy nightly. As example, their three-meter high by two-meter wide storage tanks were ripped off their foundations and crushed, copper water pipes on the backside of their buildings were ripped off, sewer lines ripped out of the ground, septic systems dug up, restroom windows were invaded by the elephants’ trunks which literally sucked the water from the toilets and their tanks only to be ripped from the walls, and corners of block/cement buildings were pulled off their frames. These elephants with bad attitudes knock over dozens of trees in the CKGR every night. The majority of the landscape in the CKGR appeared to be a barren wasteland of black dead trees exacerbating the desertification of the African continent, frustrating the global warming crisis further.

During our first night sleep on what we like to refer to as the “Pachyderm Highway”, we witnessed many caravans of 5-10 elephants traveling within 50 feet of our tents with one bold elephant awaking one of our team mates by brushing up against his tent for 15 minutes in the night. In the morning, elephant tracks were all over our campsite; however, we were just glad they weren’t lion or leopard tracks which would be no match for our thin nylon tent.

Day two we visited the Government’s Relocation Settlement Camps with an approximate 3,000 relocated Sān People, an informal village of roughly 50, then arrived late afternoon at our final destination which was one of the larger Sān communities with 87 independent members. This village was the home of our Indigenous Sān team member, Jumanta. Upon visiting the community, we were blown away by the scarcity of life resources there, compounded by the insane heat and solar radiation and glare from the sand.

Despite the fact that the government mandated it was “illegal” to camp with the Indigenous Sān Peoples, we nonetheless established camp that evening in this informal community which allowed us to gather the entire community in the morning for our “What do you need?” and “How can we help?” discussions. As planned, in the morning we visited and filmed this priceless sharing of ideas with the resounding Project idea of a water well, being the most urgent and most important Project idea for their literal survival! Even though the government trucks in once a month some water, “what if they stop?” “what if the truck breaks down on its three-hour journey from the water and desalinization plants”? To be 100% vulnerable and dependent upon a government handout, especially one which has been so adversarial and collusive with a Diamond Company tends to make self-determination one’s only option for survival.

With our entire engagement being filmed, we captured the essence of these beautiful Indigenous Sān Peoples' battle for survival “Against the State” and against “Unbridled Capitalism” more commonly understood as “Abuse of Power and Corruption” at the government level.

WHAT THE INTI RAYMI FUND DID:

In our traditional form, the Inti Raymi Fund did not show up with any preconceived ideas about how to help these people in a geography which we honestly didn’t understand; however, we did know who knew what they needed – the community knew.

After four to five meaningful hours of deliberations with everyone, including the elderly and women involved, the resounding choice for our $25,000 grant was for the community to drill its own first water borehole within the community. After this hopefully successful borehole, they would then decide where to spend the remaining funds. The community additionally discussed “who” should hold the funds and be the administrator to pay for the drilling costs etc. Given the fact that the nearest bank was roughly a six-hour drive by the toughest 4x4 and they had no operational vehicles for obvious economic reason, they chose the Inti Raymi Fund to administer the wires and payments for services they would still engage as local advocates on the ground.

With team and group photos secured, we headed out on our two-day journey back out of the Kalahari Desert back to cell coverage and wi-fi into the regional metropolis of Maun, Botswana. We now patiently await further instructions of where to send the initial funds for them to begin drilling their own Sān Peoples’ First Borehole! The Inti Raymi Fund will update this page as progress continues.

If our “Adrenaline Philanthropy” story resonates with you and you wish to get involved in support of the Sān Peoples of Botswana, please contact us for details on how you can directly help them and or visit these communities.