Hunting the Basarwa in the Kalahari
Rent a jeep in Swaziland to get you due west to Botswana and the Central Kalahari Game reserve. (It's over 600 miles (967 kilometers), so take extra gas and water).
The Kalahari Game reserve is one of Africa's most famous, and celebrated. Its rolling swathes of grasses and brightly colored wild flowers are home to herds of antelope preyed on by jackals and hyenas. Tourists come here to stay in the lodges and have carefully sanitized hunts for rare animals. So far, so conventional. Our holiday, however, is a bit different. It involves hunting for the rare Basarwa people. They are a small but resilient race, skilled at surviving in near desert conditions. For 40,000 years, the “Bushmen” have roamed the Kalahari, living off the animals, as well as harvesting the rich supply of berries and plant roots that grow there. But in recent years they have become increasingly hard to find. In Molapo, for instance, at the heart of the Kalahari, where once over 1,000 of them lived; by 2004 less than sixty remained. It seemed that a new kind of predator had been active in the park. And indeed, it turns out to be the case. It is the Botswana government that has been around and busy, systematically shutting schools and health clinics, cutting off water supplies and terminating social security payments. According to one observer from the BBC, concrete has been poured down the Bushmen's desert wells, and expulsions have been accompanied by beatings and torture. All In an effort to clear the area of the stubborn Basarwa.
The Kalahari Game reserve was made a national park in 1961, in part to protect the Basarwa or “San” people's traditional way of life. Of Botswana's 1.6 million people, there are about 60,000 Basarwa, who have a distinct appearance, with lighter skins, high cheekbones and their own musical language, involving complicated clicking sounds. But President Festus Mogae considers them a “stone-age people” with no place in modern Botswana. And if you say different, he'll have you thrown out of the country or put in prison.
Now almost all of the Basarwa live outside the National Park, in shanty towns dominated by beer halls. The government says they were persuaded to move out in order to take part in “modern economic activities.” It thought that their hunting was a threat to the game in the park, which is there to be hunted by fee-paying tourists instead. And then there are the diamonds...
Low, although a white hunter might shoot you. Or a De Beers security guard...