DEVELOPMENT-BOTSWANA: Tourism May Save the San from Cultural Extinction

By James Hall Reprint | | Print |

James Hall

GABORONE, Jul 11 2003 (IPS) - The government of Botswana’s decision to permit the San, or the Bush People, to have a say in how their lands are developed by tourism industry, is an indication of the changing nature of tourism development in the region.

"The San are now considered stakeholders," Thapelo Pabalinga, a guide with Penduka Safaris, told IPS.

Penduka is a pioneer in the business of bringing visitors through the stark beauty of the Central Kalahari Desert to the camps where the San have been assembled. Pabalinga said that tourists to Botswana wish to see the fabled Bush People as much as they want to see the Big Five group of animals – elephant, lion, rhino, buffalo and leopard.

"Exactly," countered rights activist Pauline Molefe in Gaborone. "The San are now a tourist attraction. They have finally proven their ‘worth’ to government, and so they are given some belated attention. The tourism industry is afraid that if the San are not happy, they won’t cooperate when the tour groups arrive."

IPS went on a Penduka tour of the government areas set aside for the San. The formerly itinerate ethnic group has been corralled into mud and thatch villages around a water source. The hunters, who once provided the principal nourishment for their families, are now restricted by a quota of animals they may kill. Government agents strictly enforce the quotas. Small garden plots intended to provide alternative food sources struggle to flourish in the desert heat.

Rights activists have long championed the cause of the San against a government that insisted the tribe had no real claim on any one area because they were itinerate, and moved in search of animal herds. The villages constructed to "herd" the San into permanent locations were decried as "rural township slums" and "concentration camps" by rights activists.

The San were also discriminated against in urban areas, where tribal youth went in search of jobs, and often ended up as drug users and sex workers. Young men forgot the desert skills of their forefathers. "It was cultural genocide, just so government could clear the land for diamond mining," said Molefe.

That was before the advent of "cultural tourism". A growing segment of visitors to Southern Africa – about 12 percent according to a survey by RETOSA, the tourism board of the 14 member states of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) – said their chief interest in coming to the region is to see how the people live.

"Cultural tourism is gaining interest. People still want to see the natural environment, the mountains and beaches, and of course the game park animals. Most Europeans think a cultural experience is seeing a hotel dance group put on a show at cocktail hour. But a lot of people want to see how ‘real Africans’ live. They want to stay in grass huts, and eat impala meat," Swazi game ranger Themba Vilakati told IPS.

Whether the motive is to genuinely assist an underprivileged group and to redress an historic crime against a people, as tourism promoters say, or whether it is a cynical attempt to gain the San’s cooperation for tourism ventures, as rights activists suggest, the San will now be involved in decision making and job creation in their areas.

"This is a policy of empowerment. It is a model for other nations to follow," Botswana’s President Festus Mogae said earlier this year.

Indeed, other nations in Southern Africa are already calling on local peoples to become engaged in tourism ventures. "Community tourism" has been a buzzword for a few years. The San hope to regain their lost youth from dire circumstances in the city, bring them back into the traditional fold to reacquaint them with tribal skills from hunting to hut building. With tourism as the motive, the people will display their desert survival abilities for visitors, but not the goal. The goal is to reinvigorate customary life, with tourism merely paying the cost.

Similarly, in Swaziland, rural youth are engaged in community tourism projects intended to keep them on their ancestral lands. Urbanisation was decimating the countryside of its youthful population.

"Everything was happening in towns. Jobs and the lifestyle we want. There was nothing going on in the rural lands before tourism opened some opportunities for us," Jabulani Tsabedze told IPS.

Tsabedze saw no future in scratching out a subsistence living as a small landholder farmer on communal Swazi Nation Land. But he found little joy as a cane cutter at a sugar plantation in Mhlume, and was drawn back to his home in the Lubombo region when his community decided to open a small game park.

"We can’t compete with the big game parks when it comes to luxury accommodation or animals. But we’ve opened our traditional homesteads, and visitors come to see how Swazis live," he said.

A SADC report noted that seven Southern African nations have community tourism projects. These are characterised by local ownership, with financing coming from developmental agencies like the UN Development Programme (UNDP) and US Aid for International Development (USAID).

"Small tribes and groups of people can defend their land by proving its value to the national economy. Tourism gives us that opportunity," said Tsabedze.

In Botswana, the initiative may have saved one legendary ethnic group from cultural extinction.