In future CKGR will be free from Basarwa
By a quirk of judicial fate, there will be no future generations of Basarwa that can lay claim to the Central Kgalagadi Game Reserve (CKGR) in terms of the High Court judgement of 2006.
This salient point is made by Survival International in a report that it published on the occasion of World Parks Day.
“Bushmen continue to be banned from hunting, and punished severely if found with game. Furthermore, only those few named in the court case have been allowed to return; their family members must apply for permits to visit, and their children cannot inherit the permits. If this situation does not change, there will be no Bushmen in the reserve when this generation dies,” SI says.
Following the forced removal of the Basarwa from the CKGR, Basarwa activist and leader of the First Peoples of the Kalahari, Roy Sesana and 241 of his kith and kin, went to the High Court to prosecute claim to the game reserve. The court gave only this group of litigants the right of return - everybody else needs a permit to enter the CKGR. It is this group of people that SI says will be the last legal residents of the reserve.
This is not a point that SI makes but its own campaign to have Basarwa live and hunt in the game reserve would also have to come to an end. This is because this campaign has been largely based on prosecuting the claim of the 242 Basarwa to the game reserve. Throughout this saga, SI has been coordinating its effort with the FPK whose leaders are among the 242. Presently, FPK exists in all but name. In the future it may be difficult for SI to claim to be representing the interests of generations that either don’t identify too closely or in any way with the CKGR.
However, this is not really an open-and-shut case as might appear from SI’s assessment. The president of the Umbrella for Democratic Change, Duma Boko, was part of a legal team that represented the Basarwa in the relocation case. In a hypothetical scenario where the UDC is in power, the government might be more sympathetic.
