The Tug of Deep Roots

When Dahame Belese left the land of his ancestors, his parents felt as if he had fallen off the edge of the universe. They had no idea of the world outside, never traveled by car or bicycle. They had not even climbed on a donkey’s back.

The day he went away, his father was so angry he wouldn’t say goodbye and his mother cried herself to sleep. All the long day’s drive on government trucks away from the desert where the Bushmen have lived for 30,000 years, Belese knew he was betraying his parents. His father told him not to go, but he did not listen.

After two terrible years, Belese came home, his heart beating quickly. As the sandy Kalahari Desert track uncoiled like a snake before him, he fretted about what his elderly parents would say.

But he met no bitterness.

“My eyes filled with tears,” whispered his father, Kexla Sanao, remembering that night. “I was crying because I was so happy to see my son come back. I had no angry words.” Like most Bushmen, he has no idea of his age, but his face is wizened.

Belese was one of 530 Bushmen the Botswana government forced out of the Central Kalahari Game Reserve in January 2002, citing the need to protect wildlife. In their zeal to make the harsh desert uninhabitable for humans, authorities sealed wells, emptied water tanks and, witnesses said, even overturned buckets of water as women tried to collect the precious liquid before it seeped into the sand.

A few dozen, including Sanao, refused to leave. They returned to the old ways, surviving on desert melons, digging for water and seeking out desert hollows that fill during the rains. Dozens more, feeling the pull of their homeland, have since defied the government and returned. Now a group of Bushmen moved from their land in 2002 is challenging the evictions in the Botswana high court, but presidential spokesman Sidney Pilane brushed off their chances.

The Bushmen are the oldest inhabitants of southern Africa. But Pilane argued that the government would be discriminating in favor of Bushmen if it let them stay, because other tribal groups were moved from their land in the past.

“Yes, they came here before the rest of us did, but we do not accept that they are more indigenous than the rest of us,” Pilane said. “We don’t think the time people arrived in a place should define their rights in society.”

There are about 45,000 Bushmen in Botswana, most of whom were swept off their ancestral land in earlier decades and centuries. Until 1997, about 2,000 remained in the game reserve, the last Bushmen in southern Africa living a traditional lifestyle. But after the government decided to evict them in the mid-1980s, there were two relocations, in 1997 and 2002.

The Bushmen have been marginalized and dispossessed by a long succession of invading tribes, white settlers and Botswana’s post-independence governments. As hunter-gatherers in a society where more dominant tribes measure prestige in cattle, they have been dismissed as backward and primitive.

“I think they have always had a pretty grim time, and I don’t think independence has made a huge amount of difference to them one way or another,” said British lawyer Gordon Bennett, who is representing the Bushmen in court. “They have been regarded as a subservient, serf-like race.”

But their extraordinary ability to survive on the fruits and game of the Kalahari Desert has intrigued anthropologists for centuries. Their almond-shaped eyes and high cheekbones are distinctive, as is their irresistibly melodic music. Each of several Bushmen tribes has its own, click-filled language.

They know the Kalahari more intimately than anybody and can sit around their campfires for hours discussing which desert plants can be found within walking distance. Once those left in the reserve are moved out or die, that knowledge will be lost.

When the moon rises, they often dance, mimicking the animals they share the desert with. Sometimes, in rituals that go all night, they dance to heal the sick, but sometimes they dance for the sheer joy of it.

The former British colonial government created the Central Kalahari Game Reserve in 1961 to preserve its wildlife as well as the lifestyle of the Bushmen, its residents. Pilane, the presidential spokesman, said Botswana’s government had to move the Bushmen to protect the animals.

Reciting the slogan “Separate can never be equal,” Pilane argued that the Bushmen, also known as the San people, must be integrated into Botswanan society like everyone else.

Pilane said the Bushmen were no longer nomadic hunter-gatherers because some kept goats and grew watermelons.

“Some people insist that they’re different and an ancient civilization which ought to be preserved, but we say, ‘No, they’re not,’ ” he said. “When I grew up, I lived very much the way they do.”

Bennett said the Bushmen’s case rests on the constitutional right of the people of Botswana to live where they choose and British common law, which held that native rights existed until specifically quashed by laws. Botswana became a British protectorate in 1885 and won independence in 1966. Diamonds were discovered a year later, and have made Botswana, a nation of 1.5 million people, one of the wealthiest in Africa. Lobby groups for the Bushmen claim the government hopes to open diamond mines in the preserve; the government has rejected the allegation.

Pilane denied that the government had forced people off their land, but many Bushmen said government officials had given them no choice, emptying the water and threatening to call in the army if they resisted.

“They forced us to do it,” said Molawe Belese, who, like her brother Dahame, was moved from Metsiamanong in 2002. “They threatened us that the soldiers would come with guns and shoot us.”

Sanao, their father, said officials had many times tried to make him leave, but he had refused. “They said they were moving us because they wanted to develop us,” he said. “I don’t know what development means.”

The idea of moving to a distant, alien place was shocking and frightening. “To me, it felt like dying. I just felt like that,” he said. “I felt that being moved from my land was the same as killing me. I refused to move.”

In 1997, the government built New Xade to house 1,000 Bushmen it moved that year from Xade, another settlement camp about 35 miles away on the edge of the game reserve.

Bushmen call it the “Place of Death.” To Molawe Belese, living in New Xade feels “just like being sick.”

Dreams are important in Bushman culture, and Molawe Belese has a recurring dream that leaves her lying awake, her heart jumping rapidly.

“On this land, I always dream that people are killing me. They are coming in a lot of vehicles and I am running away and they’re saying: ‘There she is! Hold her so we can kill her!’ ” The dream killers are “official types.”

Sometimes she has the dream every night for a week. Several other Bushmen recounted similar recurring dreams of being killed while in New Xade, and they believe this is a sign from ancestors angry that a spiritual connection with the land has been broken.

Molawe Belese yearns to go home to Metsiamanong but, like many others in New Xade, has no money to pay a driver to take her about 125 miles back home.

When she and her brother Dahame got to New Xade, the government gave them compensation. He received 30,000 pulas, or about $4,600 at the time, but like most Bushmen, he had no concept of the amount.

“They said it was money to wipe away the tears. But it didn’t dry my tears,” said Dahame, who joined his wife and six children in New Xade. “The money just ran out of my hands.”

He arrived in New Xade and felt lost. It was like being trapped in a closed hut, he said, not knowing which way to get out.

A small village in an arid, sandy wasteland, it’s so desolate that the stop signs in the street look ridiculously self-important. There are no wild desert melons and roots to be gathered anywhere nearby, no work, nothing to do. At night, young people slouch around as tinny distorted music blares out at the Cool Way Bar. Back home, there are no bars or shops with cigarettes, flour and sugar; no littered bottles of alcoholic beverages.

New Xade is a place where drinking can leave scars: Dahame Belese’s younger brother Mosadane drank to excess for more than two years, lost all his money and drunkenly fell in the fire one night, burning his legs before he realized it was time to go home to Metsiamanong.

Unlike his younger brother, Dahame Belese stopped drinking in time. In Metsiamanong, he was a hunter who tipped his arrows with deadly poison extracted from worms. In New Xade, “I used to wake up and just sit in my yard. I just spent my whole day in the yard.”

He and his brother managed to return home with their families. “Here, I have meaning in my life,” he said back in Metsiamanong. “I go and hunt and gather. I am enjoying being here, happy, every day.”

On a street corner in New Xade, an elderly man named Molathwe waited recently for a lift home to his settlement of Molapo. He had lived in the settlement for three months, from April to June, and said it was “like being asleep.” He gazed at the brick clinic and the school and said he despised the word “development,” the word the government used to lure people away to New Xade.

“I just heard that word: development, development. I don’t think that those buildings can give us a good life. They are just standing there,” he said. “The place I am from, Molapo, is much more important.”

Part of the trauma for the Bushmen in New Xade is their separation from the graves of their ancestors. Any time they dream of someone who died, they must perform a cleansing ritual at the grave -- but they cannot. Many believe the misery they feel in New Xade is proof of their ancestors’ anger.

Within two months of arriving in New Xade in 2002 from the settlement of Kakao in the game reserve, Lesolebe Moketse watched his father die. Both father and son thought leaving the land killed him, although he had heart problems. But because of the distance from home, Moketse could not bury his father on his ancestral land, as the old man had begged him to.

Moketse is praying that the Bushmen will win their case against the government, but if they fail, he said, “don’t think we are going to surrender.”

Now he is learning to read because he believes the Bushmen were cheated by the government “because we don’t know how to read and write.” When he gets home to Kakao, he plans to keep a record of everything that happens so that next time they don’t get cheated.

Children go to school in New Xade to learn to read and write, but not in their own languages. Like many others, Molawe Belese’s teenage sons dropped out and took to drinking.

In New Xade, “we don’t dance,” said Belese, her eyes suddenly wet. “We only have the noise from the bar. The bar has killed us.”

The night before, she had dreamed of being killed again. That same night, back at Metsiamanong, the sound of hand-clapping and melodic singing drifted over the silver moonlit sand. The people were dancing.

Everyone was delighted when her father, Sanao, began dancing, shaking his body, puffing rhythmically. His ears might be failing him, but his body was strong and he danced on and on.

“Sing louder! Sing louder!” he urged women and children, who were already singing volubly. “If you sing louder, I’ll dance until sunrise.”

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Long time on the land

Bushmen, or San people, have inhabited southern Africa for around 30,000 years. Many were forced to leave the Central Kalahari Game Reserve three years ago. Some want to return to their traditional way of life and are challenging the eviction in Botswana’s high court.

Who are the Bushmen?

* Oldest inhabitants of southern Africa

* Populated all of southern Africa until being displaced by other Africans and white settlers

* Speak several Khoisan languages, which use clicking sounds

* Generally of short stature with yellowish-brown skin

* Believe in one supreme god with lesser gods

* Nomadic, traditionally live in groups of about 25 to 60

* Hunter-gatherers, hunting various types of antelopes

Sources: University of Iowa; Encyclopedia Britannica; World Book Encyclopedia