The Central Kalahari Game Reserve Then and Now

Maria Sapignoli

Since Fredrik Barth, at least, anthropology has been concerned with the issues of boundaries and borders, not simply at an abstract, academic level, but also the political and practical. In November, 1996 the American Anthropological Association was the first disciplinary association to take a stance on the issue of the Central Kalahari Game Reserve in Botswana (CKGR)­­­—a place where the government of Botswana in southern Africa was attempting to convince the residents of the reserve, various groups who were described in the media as “Bushmen”—to move out of the reserve into settlements. Boundaries that had been set up to protect the Bushmen were now meant to exclude them.

At stake here was the status of the boundaries of the CKGR: what were they to contain, what (and who) were they to exclude? The controversy pushed local people to transcend their national borders and engage globally, not only with sympathetic NGOs and international fora, but with new concepts such as indigeneity. The region’s inhabitants, the San and Bakgalagadi, long considered ethnically distinct, erased that ethnic boundary as they represented themselves together as the indigenous people of the Kalahari.

The CKGR, created in 1961 to protect the region’s inhabitants and the resources on which they depended, had by the 1990s become a highly political place. Not only did it attract large numbers of tourists every year but it is also a place rich in minerals. At the same time it is also a place where peoples’ human rights were violated.

The Central Kalahari has been recently the subject of two legal cases, pitting the region’s inhabitants, against the government of Botswana. These cases drew international attention and demonstrated that small groups of powerless and marginalized people can successfully take on a government in an effort to regain their land and resource rights.

Central Kalahari Borders and the Changing Meanings

Map of the Central Kalahari Game Preserve. Image courtesy Maria Sapignoli

The boundaries of the reserve were a product in part of extensive ethnographic fieldwork by anthropologist and Bushman Survey Office George Silberbauer and were drawn up in such a way as to accommodate the needs of local people and incorporated physical features on the landscape that supported extensive and diverse wildlife populations.

From the standpoint of local people, it is important to note that in many cases, borders are not fixed, but are open to negotiation. This was not the case for the borders of the CKGR, gazetted in 1961 national legislation and that after 1963 CKGR Regulations separated areas where there were cattle posts and freehold farms from open spaces where people could hunt, gather, and move about the landscape. These boundaries, however, did not necessarily conform to local people’s understanding of the extent of territories or, indeed, their traditional use of the land.

Part of the CKGR was divided into a number of subsistence and residential territories, known as g!u or gu, which were also used for social and ritual activities such as burials. Some of territories of local people—who call themselves Kua—extended beyond the reserve’s borders into neighboring districts.

The land in the reserve has substantial social, cultural, and symbolic significance for the people who call it their home and who use it. It is part of their individual and community history, memory, and identity.

In the 1970s and early 1980s, the government provided services for people at one of the communities, Xade, including water, a school, and a clinic. People from various parts of the reserve settled there. In the 1980s, however, the government opted to make the reserve a “people-free zone” meaning that people would not be allowed to continue to reside there (although tourists, government officials, and mining companies were allowed).

In 1997 and 2002, large-scale relocations were undertaken by the government, with over 2,000 people being moved to resettlement sites. All services inside of the reserve were suspended. Since then the people of the Central Kalahari have sought to return to the reserve, in part by lobbying the international community for support.

The struggle to return to the reserve was carried on within complex transnational networks and alliances that traverse the boundaries between the state, markets and civil society. The relocation, combined with deep dissatisfaction over centuries of mistreatment, dispossession, marginalisation and non-recognition, led the San to ally themselves with the Bakgalagadi as indigenous peoples of the Central Kalahari, crossing and redefining their ethnic boundaries under a common sense of indigeneity and positioning themselves on the borders between them, the state and the international community.

They took legal action against the government of Botswana in a two-year High Court case that ended in 2006, seeking a judgment on their rights to return to the reserve, to land, resources, and services. In 2010 a second legal case was filed in the High Court to get water rights, denied by the government, on the reserve.

The court cases were partly successful: the rulings recognized the rights of the people of the CKGR to go back to their ancestral territories, to hunt and gatherer, and to have access to water services at their own expense. But all the other services present before the relocation were denied. The verdicts nevertheless represent, as Roy Sesana, the principal plaintiff told me, “a hope for the future.”

Borders Today: Identities, Development and Relationships

Between 2006 and 2011 more than 600 people from the different resettlements have returned to their places in the reserve, although living under conditions of severe uncertainty. They did not have access to water until a borehole was drilled and equipped in September, 2011. The government remains ambiguous about who has the right to return and it differentiates between the people relocated in 1997 and the one in 2002. The government is also unclear about its objectives for the people in the reserve. Will they be allowed to continue to hunt? Will the government services come back in the Reserve? Could they participate in development activities or have community use zones? Some government officials have told people in the reserve that they will be relocated again, because “the CKGR is a game reserve.”

One of the issues that the people inside the reserve are concerned about most is government efforts to privatize the Central Kalahari and to exclude them from any decisions. New mining prospecting licenses and tourism concessions are being given out. People in the resettlement sites are being promised tourism areas in the reserve, whereas the residents of the CKGR, who have been mapping their community areas, are being excluded from access to tourism concessions.

Today, as a result of the two court cases and of the government policies, the CKGR marks and builds new boundaries and relationships among groups, identities and practices. Government decisions, to give different rights to people who live inside the reserve and those who are outside it in the resettlements, are generating conflicts between those people who less than twenty years ago were neighbors. The physical borders of the reserve now separate relatives and friends and they have created an exclusionary way of life. Now there are those who have services and those who do not, those who can keep cattle and those who cannot, and those who cannot hunt and gather and those who can.

Borders and boundaries are constructed and negotiated by nation-states, communities, and kinship groups. The borders can be observed carefully, or they can be used flexibly. In the case of the CKGR, the borders of the reserve and of the communities living inside and outside of the reserve have begun to assume new meanings. If the rights of the people of the Central Kalahari Game Reserve are to be promoted, then new, more flexible, fairer and more participatory approaches to boundaries, land use, and development are necessary.

Maria Sapignoli is an Italian anthropologist who recently completed a doctoral dissertation at Essex University on indigenous peoples, identity, and the politics of indigenous organizations, with particular reference to the San and Bakgalagadi of the Central Kalahari, Botswana. Her doctoral dissertation was entitled “Local Power through Globalised Indigenous Identities: The San, the State, and the International Community.” She has carried out ethnographic work in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve (CKGR), in the resettlement sites of New Xade and Kaudwane and did anthropological analyses of the CKGR Botswana High Court legal cases of 2004­–06, and 2010–11. She has worked in the Secretariat of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues in New York and at the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), Rome, Italy and for various non-government organizations in Africa and Central America.