Botswana is persecuting its Kalahari bushmen — and we had a role in it

For 17 years I have been reporting on one of the most haunting tragedies of our modern world — the ruthless persecution of the last survivors of the original inhabitants of southern Africa, the bushmen, by a policy seemingly designed to wipe them from the earth. Those responsible are not wicked white colonialists but the government of Botswana, which, thanks to its vast diamond reserves, is per capita the richest country in Africa. We in Britain, however, should take a special interest in this story because through most of that time our Foreign Office has given full support to the policy which created this tragedy, in breach of a solemn pledge we gave to the bushmen in the 1960s. And now there has been yet another disgraceful twist to the story. The outside world was first made dramatically aware of the little bands of bushmen living in the Kalahari nearly 60 years ago, through a series of documentaries made for the BBC by Laurens van der Post. Those films, and his book The Lost World of the Kalahari, gave an unforgettable picture of a way of life which could not have seemed more remote from the modern world. Although these bushman hunter-gatherers were still in effect living in the Stone Age, van der Post showed how their stories, dances and spiritual beliefs gave them a sense of living at one with the natural world and the universe. His book became a major bestseller because it conveyed a spiritual message which struck a deep chord with countless readers.

Bushman of the Kalahari Photo: Getty

In 1961, thanks not least to van der Post, the British rulers of Bechuanaland, as it was known, designated an area twice the size of Wales as the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, designed to protect the last refuge of a people who had lived across southern Africa for tens of thousands of years until they were gradually exterminated by all the races who came after them.