They may not have gone public with their private thoughts the way Advocate Sidney Pilane has but some civil servants also believe that Basarwa are being “spoiled.” This belief certainly affects the way they interact with Basarwa communities in their line of duty.
Some 16 years ago, Pilane was Special Advisor to President Festus Mogae and got to represent the state in a court case in which Bushmen communities challenged their removal from the Central Kgalagadi Game Reserve. Judgement handed down by a three-judge panel permitted only those who had been party to this lawsuit to return to the Reserve. In November last year, a man who had not been party to the lawsuit died and his family is fighting tooth and nail to have him buried in the Reserve. Once more, Pilane represented the state, which has won the case. According to Mmegi, upon learning that the lawyer representing family of the deceased was providing his services free of charge, Pilane equated such generosity to “spoiling Basarwa.”
The choice of words was obviously ill-advised and naturally, has excited considerable uproar, especially from Basarwa activists. Interestingly, Pilane is not the only person who holds that view. Some civil servants, including those who work directly with Basarwa, strongly feel that the government is “spoiling” members of this cultural community. This view is expressed within the context of the social assistance programmes that the government provides to Basarwa through the Remote Area Development Programme. The latter, which was set up in the early 1970s, was originally called the Bushmen Development Programme, then the Basarwa Development Programme before becoming RADP.
The programme was designed to provide support to marginalised and excluded indigenous groups and used to have a component that provided grants to individuals. It has since been reconfigured by linking beneficiaries to standard national programmes that give out benefits like destitute rations, allowances and old-age pension. Major RADP components include agriculture, education, culture, health, transport, communication and technology, water, social and economic empowerment.
As the most economically marginalised cultural community in Botswana, Basarwa are the main beneficiaries of RADP. If “generous” is the right word, those who were hounded out of the CKGR – and their children, get the most generous packages. They are given a crop field, residential plot and have a choice between a herd of five cows and 15 goats. The Gantsi District Council sinks and maintains boreholes for the beneficiaries.
A civil servant with knowledge of how the agriculture component works says that some of the beneficiaries don’t exercise proper stewardship over the animals that the government gives them free of charge. By way of example, he tells the story of a reluctant female farmer who went to a social worker’s office and told the officer to “come get your things –they are a burden to me.” By “things” she meant the goats that had been given to her by the government. This civil servant says that the government “does everything” for these reluctant farmers and like Pilane, takes the view that they are being spoilt.
The government provides for all material needs of Basarwa children placed at boarding schools: it pays for their school uniform and hand-picked clothing, pays their school fees and transports them to and from their family homes at the beginning and end of the school term. A schoolteacher who teaches Basarwa children uses the same language as Pilane to describe this preferential treatment. A student who went to Gantsi Senior Secondary School says that some students, especially those who came from poor families, believed that the government was spoiling Basarwa students.
Basarwa are also beneficiaries of a labour placement programme in terms of which they shoot to the top of a job waiting list. Jumanda Gakelebone, a Mosarwa who represents New Xade in the Gantsi District Council, is quick to point out that this programme only caters for manual and not skilled work that pays good wages.
Gakelebone, who cut his teeth in activism as a programme officer in the First Peoples of the Kalahari, a Basarwa rights pressure group, disagrees with Pilane’s assertion about his people being spoiled. Years ago, Pilane practised law in South Africa and information that has been placed in the public domain is that at the time that he worked in South Africa, he had renounced his Botswana citizenship. Down the road, he would have had a change of mind because he returned to Botswana and reclaimed his citizenship. Former Lobatse MP, Nehemiah Modubule, actually asked a parliamentary question about this issue, quoting the number of the national identity card that Pilane had used in South Africa. Pilane himself doesn’t seem keen on discussing this issue because when a fellow lawyer raised it in 2010 via a letter to the Mmegi editor, he would only dismiss it as a “distraction.”
In countering Pilane’s assertion, Gakelebone says that the dead Mosarwa has a right to choose where he wants to be buried – “just like Pilane has a right to choose whether he wants to be a Botswana citizen today and a South African citizen the next day.” He redirects Pilane’s words at him, saying that the lawyer is one being “spoiled” because the government pays him to represent it in cases that should never have gone to court in the first place.
Another person who contends that the Basarwa are not being spoiled is a civil servant who has actually worked very closely with both current and former CKGR residents.
“These people have been marginalised for a very long time and are finding it extremely difficult to adapt to an alien lifestyle,” says this source. “The government is responsible for their condition and has an obligation to provide for them.”
Indeed Basarwa’s dependence on the government has everything to do with mistaken decisions that the government (and Bantu tribes before it) made. Some of those mistakes are a result of failure to understand Basarwa culture before trying to solve their problems. In Tears for My Land, Kuela Kiema, a Kua who was born and bred in the CKGR, demonstrates how self-help projects that the government implemented in the resettlement villages of New Xade and Kaudwane failed. (“Kua” is a generic name for “Mosarwa” and is used by the Dcui and Dxana in the CKGR.) Kiema, who is the first CKGR resident to obtain a university degree, argues that this venture was an abject failure largely because the government’s extension officers did not have relevant business training and the irrelevance of the projects “to our local culture and customs.” The only customers for the candle-making project at New Xade were teachers, nurses and a few members of the community because “as per our tradition, [the Kua] use fire as a source of light.” The poultry project “failed dismally because of lack of demand for chickens and eggs. Chicken is not one of our favourite foods.” While some people have started to show an interest in growing crops for subsistence purposes, “[m]ost Dcui and Dxana people prefer wild vegetables to spinach and carrots.”
