The Struggle to "be San" : Indigenous peoples and access to land and resources in Southern Africa

Indigenous peoples, including the San of southern Africa who I will discuss here, live in places that contain valuable resources, both natural and cultural. All too often, indig- enous peoples have been forced off their land, and have had to cope with efforts by other groups, governments, settlers, or transnational corporations to take away their lands and resources and assimilate them into contemporary nation-states. This process of disposses- sion is one of the sources of common experience and serve as a reference point for collective identity in the international movement of indigenous peoples. In this paper, I discuss the history of this land dispossession since Botswana’s independence in 1966. Two contem- porary examples of land dispossession in different contexts can be seen in 1) the forced removals and denial of services affecting the San of the Central Kalahari Game Reserve; and 2) the government mandated privatization of land use and benefits which has led to the dispossession of the Xai/Xai Community-Based Natural Resource Management (CBNRM) program. These two examples reveal the widely varying processes by which centralized programs of poverty eradication and commercial development produce results that can more accurately be described as land dispossession.