A Culture at Odds

Unlike our co-writers on Mystery is Everywhere, Stan and I haven’t just finished a book. Well, we did finish it - eight months ago - but now we’re about to start a rewrite to address comments and input from our editor in London, Sherise Hobbs. It’s great to hear how much she liked the book, but it would be very disappointing not to get serious feedback to help improve it. She certainly hasn’t let us down on that front! We’re hoping to get input from our editor in New York soon also, but we may end up with two independent rewrites to address the approaches of two different editors. Hmmm. That could be interesting. Our second book was the same in the two countries but had two different titles. Our third will have the same title in the UK and the US – Death of the Mantis - but may be two different books!

The backstory of the book is the plight of the Bushman peoples in the Kalahari desert in south-western Botswana, and a really complicated backstory it is, too.

The Bushmen have been nomadic peoples – there are many different groups with a variety of languages - for hundreds of thousands of years. As other population groups crowded them, they moved into the arid regions of southern Africa and developed a very successful if spartan lifestyle. They would dig for water and suck it out of the ground through straws or use Tsama melons for fluid. Sharing was a survival strategy. They moved with the seasons, following game which they hunted using bows and poisoned arrows. The poisons make a story in themselves, ranging from snake venom, through extraordinary desert plants, to an extraction of the larva of a beetle which is so poisonous there is no known antidote.

Their culture includes a rich tradition of story-telling

Fast forward to the twenty-first century. (There’s some pretty sickening stuff in the years we’re skipping over, including a period when the Bushmen where hunted like animals.) Now things in Botswana are very different. Much of the Kalahari is declared as the Central Kalahari Game Reserve. Diamond mining drives the economy. Bushmen numbers have declined.

Their ancestors left a wonderful legacy of rock art

And how you interpret the situation depends on your perspective. Here is my superficial summary of the way some of the Bushman leaders see it, and how support groups like Survival International see it:

The Bushmen have always lived in the Kalahari. Fences and private land ownership – which is alien to them – interfere with their nomadic behaviours, and rules concerning hunting force them near starvation. Their culture is not respected and is being destroyed by the change in environment and legal constraints with which they don’t agree. In order to keep the Kalahari for tourism and – according to some - for diamond mining, the Bushmen are being forced out of the Kalahari game reserve and into settlements little better than concentration camps on the verges of the land they once regarded as their own. Yes, there is some compensation, but this is soon frittered away leaving nothing. Financial investing is completely beyond their ken.

And here is how the Botswana government sees it:

The government has an obligation to provide appropriate infrastructure for all its citizens. This includes proper schools (Botswana has a policy that schools should be within walking distance from where people live), health care at least at a primary level, water and sanitation. Furthermore the Kalahari is remote and inaccessible, an ecological treasure that must be preserved. Discrimination on race is forbidden by the constitution; if the Bushmen live there, how are other population groups to be prevented from living and hunting there? And now the Bushmen hunt with guns rather than bows and arrows. Their nomadic behaviour has changed to informal settlements where water has to be supplied by road, rather than found in depressions or melons. Crudely put, the traditional culture is already dead; only the inconvenience remains. Thus a group of planned settlements set up in appropriate places with schools and services is the way to go. Appropriate compensation is paid to the people who have to move. They have a new and better life ahead.

In the wide gap between these two viewpoints is a variety of groups trying to negotiate a scenario which would bring the two sides closer together. Among these is Ditshwanelo, an amazing human rights organisation led by the equally amazing Alice Mogwe. (Ditshwanelo is a Setswana word meaning variously: obligations, merits, duties.) Nevertheless, with such extreme perspectives, and the muscle behind each side, it was almost inevitable that the matter would end in the Botswana High Court.

One of the three judges was the remarkable Unity Dow – first woman High Court judge in Botswana, member of the Kenyan Constitutional court, novelist. (Stan wrote about her last week, and I wrote about her mystery novels in http://murderiseverywhere.blogspot.com/2010/03/screaming-of-innocent.html.) Broadly, the judges ruled in favour of the Bushmen. In the judgement, Dow said that the case was ‘ultimately about a people demanding dignity and respect. It is a people saying in essence: "Our way of life may be different, but it is worthy of respect. We may be changing and getting closer to your way of life, but give us a chance to decide what we want to carry with us into the future”.’ (For those interested in more detail, there is an good summary by David Beresford published almost exactly four years ago in The Observer http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/dec/17/davidberesford.theobserver.)
That was 2006. Unity Dow has now retired from the High Court, though she has certainly not retired from the law. When we met her on our trip to Gaborone a few weeks ago, we asked her whether she felt the issues had been resolved by the ‘the most expensive and longest-running trial’ Botswana has ever had. She smiled sadly and shook her head.

Michael - Thursday