Encroaching Dry Age

As vast swathes of planet Earth grapple with water crisis, comes a book from award winning US journalist turned water expert James G. Workman on how the Kalahari Bushmen fight the menace in Botswana, pitted against natural odds and an unkind government that backs the diamond mafia. The writer argues in his book how the last Busmen can help the world endure the coming age of permanent drought. Sujoy Dhar reports

"There is a water crisis today. But the crisis is not about having too little water to satisfy our needs. It is a crisis of managing water so badly that billions of people - and the environment - suffer badly." World Water Vision Report

According to World Water Council, while the world's population tripled in the 20th century, the use of renewable water resources has grown six-fold. It says within the next fifty years, the world population will increase by another 40 to 50 percent along with urbanization and industrialization and will result in an increasing demand for water and will have serious consequences on the environment.

Amid the global concerns, arrives a book by James G. Workman, an award winning US journalist and former speech writer of Bill Clinton.

Workman's nonfiction narrative- Heart of Dryness- is set in the Kalahari region of Botswana. It dramatizes the timeless struggle over water, the fulcrum of political power. Facing drought, scarcity and climate change the besieged indigenous Bushmen use voluntary survival strategies while Botswana's government enforces regulatory rule and tried to evict them from their ancestral land.

Bushmen of the Kalahari are remnants of one of the oldest civilizations. They are the indigenous people of southern Africa, now an epicenter of drought, and have lived there for tens of thousands of years. They now fight the government of Botswana which wants to evict them after a find of diamonds in their region. Workman's book focuses on how the story of the Bushmen is the story of one of the biggest cause of today's conflict: the supply of water.

"Their rivalry foreshadows our world, where two in three thirsty humans will soon endure shortages and a global fight for water as a human right," says Workman.

To locate water, the Bushmen would feed salt to animals to induce thirst. Then they would follow the animals to a water source, thus utilizing the animal's intuitive ability to locate water.

The United Nations has condemned the Botswana's treatment of its Bushmen and demanded urgent action by government over water in a new report.

Prof. James Anaya, UN Special Rapporteur for indigenous peoples, highlighted the government's harassment of the Bushmen and Bakgalagadi tribes in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, who, despite winning a 2006 High Court ruling that their eviction from the reserve was unlawful, continue to face ill-treatment.

In the report Prof Anaya states that, 'Indigenous people who have remained or returned to the reserve face harsh and dangerous conditions due to a lack of access to water, a situation that could be easily remedied by reactivating the boreholes in the reserve. The Government should reactive the boreholes or otherwise secure access to water for inhabitants of the reserve as a matter of urgent priority.'

He also notes that, 'the Government's position that habitation of the reserve by the Basarwa [Bushmen] and Bakgalagadi communities is incompatible with the reserve's conservation objectives and status appears to be inconsistent with its decision to permit Gem Diamonds/Gope Exploration Company (Pty) Ltd. to conduct mining activities within the reserve, an operation that is planned to last several decades and could involve an influx of 500-1200 people to the site, according to the mining company.'
Workman's book narrates how the Kalahari Bushmen were deliberately starved of water by the Botswana Government as a tactic to get them to leave their land.
"Bushmen are the first people to have inhabited planet earth, let alone the Kalahari. That land is their birthright. What the Government of Botswana has done to these gentle, extra ordinary people is appalling and all people of Botswana should feel no less than ashamed," says Workman.
"Water is a fundamental human right! Nobody can survive with out it and the government has taken advantage of this fact in the worst possible way. Nothing makes us happier than the outcome of this rediculous court battle, however the abuses against the Bushmen sadly continue."
According to Survival International, before the evictions, the Bushmen got water from a borehole in the community of Mothomelo.

"A tanker carried water to the other communities once a month. During the evictions the government stopped this service, removed all the water storage tanks and took the borehole's pump, without which it is useless," the NGO said.

Many Bushmen have returned to the reserve, both before and after their landmark court victory. They get water from 'pans' - rain-filled depressions in the sand, and from melons and roots.

In the dry season, life is extremely difficult, and at least one woman has already died of starvation and thirst. The government has banned the Bushmen from re-opening and using the borehole, even though the Bushmen have offered to pay the costs. It has given no explanation for its ban.

Says Workman: "I won't glamorize Bushmen, or urge us to imitate them. But their code of conduct works so well, as ours falters, that I question who is really backward."

"Our so-called more developed societies still irrigate deserts, collapse atop depleted aquifers, amputate currents, blend urine and feces with tap water, kill salmon runs with dams, and evaporate more water than we consume," he says.

According to Workman, because of such profligate waste, as the World Economic Forum or Goldman Sachs says, "we are now hitting a wall, a limit to growth; well, Bushmen have lived with that wall for 30,000 years.

"Their proven strategies point us toward a softer, alternative approach, and they (Bushmen) do so with laughter and dance."

So what is the best option to connect the dots between climate change, water scarcity, and the survival of our civilization?

Says Worksman: "Even if we stop all carbon and greenhouse gas emissions, the world will keep warming. As it does, sudden deluge will alternate with longer, hotter, droughts. Floods let us store less; droughts leave us less to store."

"These extremes affect irrigation, depleting food supply. The lack of water also cuts energy production, depleting power supply. So climate adaptation literally boils down to water adaptation. And there is no civilization better adapted to doing more, with less water, than Kalahari Bushmen."


Excerpts from Heart of Dryness

The vultures descended to the earth at a vanishing point on the horizon. Sa'ama raced ahead over the sands to see what he could scavenge but, drawing near, he noticed no cloying smell of blood and putrefaction. In clearing, doubt turned to ecstasy. The vultures huddled in a circle there were not eating; they were drinking. A small puddle the size of a grass hut had miraculously pooled on the sand. Knowing its worth, Sa'ama hurried back to the clan and told one of the elders, Mozampo, and the band decided to converge on that area, thereafter known as Qxhaetsha, or "vulture pan." Qoroxloo (matriarch of a clan) had inherited it from her ancestors, and through intricate informal arrangements more binding than any contract the members of her band shared in the task of guarding and organizing their lives and activities around it.

A pan was but one water resource that defined Bushmen territories, for its primary water utility lay during the brief, sudden rainy season when they gathered and filled quickly. But they could dry up even faster. It is no surprise that Bushmen stories rank water and land among the 'life things' that give, while the sun, like the hyena, is a 'death thing' that takes away. Against that ancient and ruthless enemy the Kalahari Bushmen were locked in a constant struggle, forever struggling to keep water away from the sun.

BOX: (Source: Survival International)

The Bushmen : Chronology
There are 100,000 Bushmen in Botswana, Namibia, South Africa and Angola. They are the indigenous people of southern Africa, and have lived there for tens of thousands of years.

In the middle of Botswana lies the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, a reserve created to protect the traditional territory of the 5,000 Gana, Gwi and Tsila Bushmen (and their neighbours the Bakgalagadi), and the game they depend on.

In the early 1980s diamonds were found in the reserve. Soon after, government ministers went into the reserve to tell the Bushmen living there that they would have to leave because of the diamond finds.

In three big clearances, in 1997, 2002 and 2005, virtually all the Bushmen were forced out. Their homes were dismantled, their school and health post were closed, their water supply was destroyed and the people were threatened and trucked away. They now live in resettlement camps outside the reserve. Rarely able to hunt, and arrested and beaten when they do, they are dependent on government handouts. They are now gripped by alcoholism, boredom, depression, and illnesses such as TB and HIV/AIDS. Unless they can return to their ancestral lands, their unique societies and way of life will be destroyed, and many of them will die.

Although the Bushmen won the right in the court to go back to their lands in 2006, the government has done everything it can to make their return impossible.

It has banned them from using their water borehole, refused to issue a single permit to hunt on their land (despite Botswana's High Court ruling in December that its refusal to issue permits was unlawful), arrested more than 50 Bushmen for hunting to feed their families, banned them from taking their small herds of goats back to the reserve. Its policy is clearly to intimidate and frighten the Bushmen into staying in the resettlement camps, and making the lives of those who have gone back to their ancestral land impossible.


One of the ways the Botswana government is stopping more Bushmen returning to the Central Kalahari Game Reserve is cutting off their water supply. Before the evictions, the Bushmen got water from a borehole in the community of othomelo. A tanker carried water to the other communities once a month. During the evictions the government stopped this service, removed all the water storage tanks and took the borehole's pump, without which it is useless.

Many Bushmen have returned to the reserve, both before and after their court victory. They get water from 'pans' - rain-filled depressions in the sand, and from melons and roots. In the dry season, life is extremely difficult, and at least one woman has already died of starvation and thirst.

The government has banned the Bushmen from re-opening and using the borehole, even though the Bushmen have offered to pay the costs. It has given no explanation for its ban.

It has, however, allowed the diamond company in the reserve to use all the water it needs, and has even indicated that safari companies can sink new boreholes to make waterholes for wildlife.