Pan African Network Trust - The Return of the San

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RETURN OF THE SAN

There is an estimated 350 million acres of Jungle and rain forest in the continent of Africa, which is relatively a small portion of the land - only about six percent, mostly along the west coast and in the Congo basin.
The Forest thins out turning into the most typical of African landscapes, the Savannah, rolling grasslands dotted with individual and occasional groves, quite tranquil almost like a great open park.
This in turn shades off into sparser country with scrubby bushes and trees mottled by patches of bare earth and then into desert lands speckled only with thorn bushes and other tough growths scarred by gullies and dry sand river and at the final extreme, rocky sandy, barren desert.
This true desert is found only in a few places and accounts for only two and a half percent of the area.

But desert and semi-desert, land whose agricultural usefulness is limited mostly to light grazing account for about a quarter of all Tropical Africa.
In these semi-desert areas of the Southern part of the Continent of Africa thrives the SAN People derogatorily referred to by Colonialists as "Bushmen" yet there is hardly any Bush to speak of in their environment of desert plains they live nomadically and etch a living from their Hunting skills. The San Hunters can rub themselves with herbs and plant juices so that when the stock animals they cannot be sniffed out and using poisoned arrows to kill their prey.

Getting Land Back
Sitting on the dusty floor of a dilapidated shack, the elderly headman of South Africa's San voices his dream: to return to his ancestors' land.
"I have lived in darkness, " Dawid Kruiper says. "Getting the land will allow me to stand up and say to the world: `Here is Dawid Kruiper and here are my people.'"
Kruiper's dream came true.
After the end of white rule in 1994's all-race elections, the South African government passed legislation to return land to those from whom it was taken under colonialism and apartheid.
The 500-member Khomani tribe that Kruiper heads filed a claim for a huge swath of the Kalahari Desert.
The San people, roamed the Kalahari for thousands of years.
Though much of the land redistribution process has been slow and dogged by legal fights, the Khomani claim has been settled. A slice of land was handed over after the government completed negotiations to buy it from private owners.

A San family in Botswana

Covering 62,000 acres to the south of the Kalahari Gemsbok National Park, the area is a harsh land of rolling red sand dunes and stunted bushes.
Baked by the midday sun and frozen by cold, clear nights, it might seem scant compensation for centuries of oppression that nearly wiped out all of South Africa's San.
But for Kruiper the land is heaven on earth.
His father is buried there amid other ancestral graves, and he has had to get permission from a white farmer to pay his respects.
"We just want the right of living, hunting and walking on our ancestral lands without having to ask for permits or go through any organisation," Kruiper said, his wrinkled face scrunching into a frown.
The modern world has not treated the San well.
They once inhabited most of South Africa. But European settlers and migrating black tribes from the north forced them into a few scattered strongholds. In some areas they were hunted and killed as unwanted pests.
In the Kalahari, about 620 miles west of Johannesburg, the Khomani are the sole survivors in South Africa. Other groups of the San are in Botswana, Angola and Namibia.
In Botswana a number of them have been integrated into the Tswana Society most of them working at Cattle Posts and taking up the function of Cow hands for Rich Tswanas who maintain life in the city and only occasionally visit their ranches..
In 1973 Kruiper's tribe was moved from the national park after officials decided they had adopted Western ways. They were reclassified "coloured," as mixed race people are known in South Africa, and moved to a squatter camp.
They remained there, on a soccer field-size square of land in the middle of a "Colored" township 6 miles south of the park's entrance at Tweerivieren.
Wearing tattered Western-style clothes and living in huts and tin shacks, they eke out a living selling trinkets and craftwork to passing tourists on the road to their former home.
"They have nothing. They have been forced to live as squatters.
Alcoholism and family violence are rife in the community, but the prospect of a return to their land is having a positive effect in a region where unemployment is a way of life and the nearest big town is 155 miles away.
"Some people have stopped drinking completely; others have cut down to just occasional binges. They feel a bit of self worth now," said Geoff Perrott, co-ordinator of the South African San Institute

San Youngster Welcoming the cool drenching rain

Lawyers for the tribe are also negotiating a deal to give the San access to a second parcel of land inside the park itself.
Under the planned deal, the tribe would be given the concession to run 136,000 acres of the park. Plans include developing four-wheel-drive safaris and guiding tourists on walking trails using the San's unique knowledge of plants, animals and tracks.
In the dry semi desert conditions, the San are known to trap a baboon , feed it for hours ion with salt to make it thirsty then releasing the baboon. The Baboon then immediately bolts away, stops at a spot and start digging. The baboon would have identified a water well for the San.
"That is the part that will really change the matter. Running a piece of the park will give them a part in a modern economy," said lawyer Roger Chennels.
As the remnants of a Stone Age culture that goes back untold generations, fears have been raised of creating a "human zoo" by using the San as a park attraction.
Perrott rejects such suggestions. The San will run their land and their part of the park as they please, with the same rights as any other South African citizen.
"The idea is not to save them as they are. It is to give them a choice that if they want to carry their traditions on, they can," he said.
For Kruiper, the choice is clear. Donning animal skin clothes, he ducks under a barbed wire fence and leads a band of 30 men, women and children to visit his father's grave beneath a towering ridge of rust-coloured sand.
While the curious clicks of their Nama language drift across the dunes, the group stops to examine tiny tracks made by deadly scorpions.
Gazing into the distance, across land that will soon be returned to him, Kruiper now believes his culture will live on long after he is gone.
"I cannot see very well, but my mind can see and my heart can feel," he says. "On the land the children will feel at home. Then my spirit will know that our tradition is living."

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