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 Periodical article |
 Leiden University catalogue |
 WorldCat |
| Title: | Putting the Bushmen on the map of Botswana |
| Author: | Vanderpost, Cornelis |
| Year: | 2000 |
| Periodical: | Botswana Notes and Records (ISSN 0525-5090) |
| Volume: | 32 |
| Pages: | 107-115 |
| Language: | English |
| Notes: | biblio. refs., maps |
| Geographic terms: | Botswana Southern Africa |
| Subjects: | San land law land use agricultural land Peoples of Africa (Ethnic Groups) Law, Human Rights and Violence Agriculture, Natural Resources and the Environment Politics and Government Anthropology, Folklore, Culture anthropology San (African people) indigenous peoples Right of property land tenure water supply Political reform |
| External link: | https://www.jstor.org/stable/40980269 |
| Abstract: | Under the law of Botswana, the Bushmen's traditional resource use practices, based on subsistence hunting and gathering, are not recognized as a formal category of land use and are consequently easily overruled by the rights of cultivators and cattle herders. This leaves the Bushmen in practical terms without secure rights to land and its resources. Because of the lack of official recognition of land and resource use rights, the subsistence way of life of the Bushmen is under constant threat. The idea of the randomly wandering nomadic Bushmen, however, has long been discarded in the relevant anthropological literature. Moreover, there are many examples of maps drawn by anthropologists, demarcating Bushmen resource systems with a clear land base that can be defined quite accurately within the limits of a necessary degree of flexibility. This paper shows that the presence of Bushmen people in Botswana has been mapped at the level of the territories of individual bands (family groups), multi-band groupings as well as language groups by anthropologists and others over a period of decades. The paper argues that such historical maps together with other evidence from oral testimonies may be sufficient proof for the Bushmen people to lay claim to certain land resource use rights such as those increasingly enjoyed by other indigenous peoples worldwide. Bibliogr., sum. [ASC Leiden abstract] |
