The past couple days, I’ve been going through Richard Lee’s cultural evolutionary/cultural ecological arguments in The !Kung San: Men, Women, and Work in a Foraging Society, trying to prepare a halfway intelligent explanation of just why the events threatening indigenous cultures in Botswana’s Kalahari over the past month are of importance to the non-Botswanan reader: Foremost is the issue of any people’s right to self-determination on land that they’ve inhabited for a generation or more. There’s the belief held by ethnographers like Richard B. Lee and Marjorie Shostak that the cultures of modern-day hunter-gatherer societies may shed some light on the cultures that preceded our own agricultural-industrial societies. And, for me and I hope for other anarchists, there’s another semi-evolutionary issue — the need for cultural diversity among the human population. Non-industrial, non-centralised societies may be the only humans to thrive should the world’s more technologically advanced societies burn themselves out. The threats of genetic uniformity in agriculture are no less real in cultural analogy. More immediately, those of us seeking less hierarchical ways of living in our own society might learn something from these societies which has remained acephalous for thousands of years.

But since then, things have become weirder in the Kalahari case:

An odd piece on allAfrica.com indicates that the European Union no longer supports Kalahari indigenes due to their ’settled agricultural activities’ which are ‘incompatible with the regulations on national parks and game reserves.’ However, this information is taken from a 2003 letter. It is unclear if there has been any more recent action from the EU. Given the dearth of information in the article, the headline ‘Important Players Change Sides in Bushmen Saga’ seems a little sensationalist. I have found no other news of EU involvement in or reaction to the recent expulsion.

More interestingly, an asinine editorial from the Capitalist rotors over at Mineweb, in the midst of some fairly insincere ranting, mentions in apposition to Survival International (from whom many of us in the Anthropologosphere have been, thus far, getting most of our expulsion-related news) an organisation I’d not yet heard of:

The Khoi San, few though they might be and far though they might be from Hampstead or Darien, Connecticut, are not without their voice. One such organisation is WIMSA (Working Group of Indigenous Minorities of Southern Africa), which has bluntly told Survival International to butt out. WIMSA claims reasonably that it reflects the opinions of the Khoi San and that they do not want or need the intervention of a bunch of interfering foreign do-gooders.

This seems to be a reference to a July statement by WIMSA cited in this and this news article (the one probably a rough edit of the other):

We object strongly to the fact that Survival International seeks to give the impression that they speak on behalf of all the Kalahari Bushmen when they handpick quotes from a few San only… We, the San from Botswana, Namibia, South Africa and Angola request SI to understand that the CKGR [Central Kalahari Game Reserve] San [collective term for Kalahari indigenous peoples] do not want to close the door for negotiations with the Botswana government…

WIMSA has very little Web presence, and it’s difficult to figure out who they are and to whom they’re aligned. It is true that SI represents only the G/wi and the G//ana, and as these people have not traditionally been organised in any unified fashion, it is difficult to maintain that this representation is in any way official.

Lastly, a quite probably valid, but somewhat cold-blooded article critiquing Survival International from the BBC.

I’ve been able to find very little news from or about the local organisation that most interests me: First People of the Kalahari.

I’m really scrounging for information on what’s going on in the CKGR and Botswana. A number of living anthropologists have worked with the Zhun/twasi, the G/wi, the G//ana and other Khoisan peoples. Given the improbability of any on-the-ground, English-language, Khoisan bushblogs starting up in the near future, one wishes we could hear something from the Westerners who know the field best. If anyone out there has better info, I, for one, would love to know what’s going on.

This entry was posted on Sunday, 6 November 2005 at 07:58 and is filed under News Commentary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.