By James Hall
MAKGADIGADI PANS, Botswana, Jun 20 2002 (IPS)

The nomadic bush people of Botswana’s Central Kalahari Desert have won certain legal rights this year that will help preserve their traditional way of life and custodianship of parts of their environment, which is inhospitable to all but these diminutive people.

But discrimination and the threat of AIDS now threaten the survival of the pacifist San.

“Life has never been easy for my people, and I fear I will not live to see a better tomorrow for us,” says Tanya, a sloe-eyed, caramel-skinned woman of 25. Her height and AIDS-induced thinness make her appear like a 12-year-old from a distance.

She leans against a mud wall that surrounds a homestead that would be familiar to a Zulu or a Xhosa, but not to her forefathers who roamed the Kalahari. Her family lives in a compound that some rights activists, who have taken up the cause of the San, have classified as “concentration camps”.

Says Doo Apane of Women in Law in Southern Africa: “These are not death camps, but they are places where a nomadic people have been concentrated against their will. There are limits on the number of game animals the San can kill, and there is zero (possibility of) employment.”

The end of the San’s traditional way of life is a cultural calamity, says anthropologist Solomon Eyitay of the University of Swaziland. Tanya shows the immediate danger faced by demoralised, young San people who migrate to towns, where they survive on unskilled jobs or begging, and sometimes – like Tanya – are drawn into crime or prostitution.

Tanya admits she slept with men for a meal in Gaborone, the distant capital she reached when a driver who had given her a lift kept on going beyond her intended destination. Social workers found her starving near a hospital, and arranged for her to be taken back to her tribe’s government-constructed village.

“That girl’s story is so very typical,” says Dave Morgan, a tour guide with one of the safari companies that bring cultural tourists into the Kalahari not only to see its famed lions and other desert wildlife, but also to meet the once-elusive San. The bush people are no longer hard to find, because they have been “herded like cattle”, in Morgan’s opinion, into improvised villages. However, their hunting, tracking, fire-and trap-making skills remain intact to impress visitors.

“We have to sometimes chase San girls away from the camp, because they try to make themselves available to the white tourists,” Morgan observes.

“These are girls who went to town in the hope of a job. All they learned was that people look down on the San as ‘wild animals’, and the girls think they are only good as prostitutes. Men may have sex with them, but otherwise (they) won’t have anything to do with them,” he says.

The women and some young men who were brought back to the San compounds have been infected by the HIV virus, which can lead to the deadly AIDS.

The San, who for millennia lived in such isolation that many scientists questioned their continued existence, were for years spared the diseases that affected other people. But now, like in all of Africa, they have been hit hard by HIV/AIDS.

Botswana is faced with an immense HIV/AIDS crisis. The country has the highest rate of infection in the world. A mammoth 38.5 percent of its sexually active population between the ages of 15 and 40 years is HIV-positive.

The Botswana government is sensitive to charges of human rights violations in its treatment of the San, and perhaps for this reason the Ministry of Health will not release figures on the HIV infection rate among this nomadic people. “We are not exactly sure how many San there are, where they are in urban areas, or how widely spread is AIDS,” says a ministry source.

Morgan, the tour guide, says having worked with the San since the mid-1970s, he can see that young people returning from the towns are ill. He suspects AIDS.

“For thousands of years the peaceful little hunter-gatherers who are the San have been pushed around southern Africa. They’ve been exterminated and forced to flee from most of the sub-continent’s countries, until they found their last remaining home in the desert. No one else wanted the place until diamonds were discovered. Now AIDS may finish off these people,” he says with undisguised disgust.

San were denied the right to pursue their traditional lifestyle because of economic concerns. Wildlife had to be protected to safeguard a valuable asset for the region’s dollar-earning tourism industry, and the desert was mapped and mined for diamonds, the gemstones that have accounted for Botswana’s astounding prosperity.

However, as a result of far-sighted court rulings and treaties signed with the government this year, the San will be allowed to resume their customary ways in the desert. “We recognise that the bush people are the best custodians of the desert environment,” said Botswana’s President Festus Mogae. The San know how to coexist with the desert, he observed.

Tourism may have influenced the government’s decision. Some tourism officials admit that the San are a major attraction for visitors, who do not wish to see them “corralled” in dusty villages, but living free as they previously did in temporary shelters they build to protect themselves from the brutal desert sun. And from temperatures that routinely hit 45 degrees during the summer months.

But after their brush with the world outside the desert, the San may disappoint tourists who expect to see them running barefoot and virtually naked through the bush. None of the young men who greeted a caravan of visitors outside their village would take off their shirts.

To “Tony”, a 19-year-old, who has studied seven years in a missionary school, his raggedly clothes are a source of pride. “I am civilised when I wear a shirt,” he says.

Unlike the tourists, he does not see nakedness as romantic at all, but as a sign of his people’s poverty. He is barefoot only because he cannot afford to buy a pair of shoes.

“I want a job, but (there are) no jobs,” he says, repeating a sentiment common to all the San except the very old.

Agriculture and industry cannot be the answers for a nomadic people who exist in a desert environment. Unfortunately, the inescapable idleness has led to promiscuity, and the spread of AIDS, says Morgan, who feels that the San are being denied their human right to have gainful employment.

“In my opinion tourism, but not the exploitative kind, is the answer to Tanya and other San women who are forced into prostitution, where they can easily get AIDS,” he says. “Tourism is a real growth industry in Botswana. Cultural tourism is just starting, and it has great potential. The San must have a proprietary stake in ‘exploiting’ their own selves.”

Morgan’s practical suggestions on how this can be done includes the means for the tribe to directly collect revenue from visitors, manage tours, and create ways for visitors to see and interact with them.

A health ministry source agrees. “AIDS is very much a disease of poverty and prostitution. Eliminate that, and the matrix that brought AIDS to San women will be broken,” he says.

Excerpt: