I just ran across this article from past December while looking for human rights issues regarding Original or Native peoples being referred to as subhuman.
Come on now Festus, it seems that it is you who are stuck in stone age thinking. These Bushman are beautiful human beings and have every right to live/dwell on their native land in peace.
Prairyearth
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Thu 14 Dec 2006
Bushmen win right to return to their ancestral homeland
FRED BRIDGLAND
THE bushmen of the Kalahari won an extraordinary, and largely unexpected, court victory yesterday for the right to return to a vast wildlife wilderness granted to them for all time by British colonial rulers.
Three judges at the court in Lobatse ruled two to one that the bushmen - also known as the San people - were wrongly evicted by the Botswana government from their ancestral homeland in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve (CKGR) from the early 1990s.
Crowds of bushmen had trekked to the court, on Botswana's southern border with South Africa, to wait for the verdict. Their spokesman, Roy Sesana, said: "Today is the happiest day for us Bushmen. We have been crying for so long, but today we are crying with happiness. Finally, we have been set free.
"The evictions have been very, very painful for my people. I hope that now we can go home to our land."
The CKGR was given to the bushmen in 1961 by the British colonial rulers of what was then Bechuanaland as a place where they could pursue their hunter-gatherer way of life in perpetuity, and the first president of Botswana, Sir Seretse Khama, reaffirmed the commitment at independence in 1966. But the promise was betrayed after his death in 1980.
The bushmen and their supporters argued that they were being expelled from the CKGR because the Botswana government, already rich from the mining of diamonds in the east of the country, wanted to mine new diamond finds there. The government denied this, saying the bushmen's expulsion to squalid settlements around the edge of the reserve - where there are neither animals to hunt nor traditional wild food plants to harvest - was for their own good and to bring them into the modern world.
The camps are places of despair, marked by unemployment, alcoholism and disease, including AIDS and TB.
Botswana's current president, Festus Moga, described the bushmen as "stone-age creatures... who must change; otherwise, like the dodo, they will perish".
His spokesman has constantly repeated: "There is no mining activity going on anywhere inside the CKGR." But a fortnight ago it was revealed that a British mining company, Petra Diamonds, has sent rigs into the reserve to test-drill for diamonds at 15 sites.
The Botswana government has said it will appeal against the high court verdict.
This article: http://news.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=1854412006
Come on now Festus, it seems that it is you who are stuck in stone age thinking. These Bushman are beautiful human beings and have every right to live/dwell on their native land in peace.
Prairyearth
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Thu 14 Dec 2006
Bushmen win right to return to their ancestral homeland
FRED BRIDGLAND
THE bushmen of the Kalahari won an extraordinary, and largely unexpected, court victory yesterday for the right to return to a vast wildlife wilderness granted to them for all time by British colonial rulers.
Three judges at the court in Lobatse ruled two to one that the bushmen - also known as the San people - were wrongly evicted by the Botswana government from their ancestral homeland in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve (CKGR) from the early 1990s.
Crowds of bushmen had trekked to the court, on Botswana's southern border with South Africa, to wait for the verdict. Their spokesman, Roy Sesana, said: "Today is the happiest day for us Bushmen. We have been crying for so long, but today we are crying with happiness. Finally, we have been set free.
"The evictions have been very, very painful for my people. I hope that now we can go home to our land."
The CKGR was given to the bushmen in 1961 by the British colonial rulers of what was then Bechuanaland as a place where they could pursue their hunter-gatherer way of life in perpetuity, and the first president of Botswana, Sir Seretse Khama, reaffirmed the commitment at independence in 1966. But the promise was betrayed after his death in 1980.
The bushmen and their supporters argued that they were being expelled from the CKGR because the Botswana government, already rich from the mining of diamonds in the east of the country, wanted to mine new diamond finds there. The government denied this, saying the bushmen's expulsion to squalid settlements around the edge of the reserve - where there are neither animals to hunt nor traditional wild food plants to harvest - was for their own good and to bring them into the modern world.
The camps are places of despair, marked by unemployment, alcoholism and disease, including AIDS and TB.
Botswana's current president, Festus Moga, described the bushmen as "stone-age creatures... who must change; otherwise, like the dodo, they will perish".
His spokesman has constantly repeated: "There is no mining activity going on anywhere inside the CKGR." But a fortnight ago it was revealed that a British mining company, Petra Diamonds, has sent rigs into the reserve to test-drill for diamonds at 15 sites.
The Botswana government has said it will appeal against the high court verdict.
This article: http://news.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=1854412006