Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

James G. Workman began his career as a journalist in Washington, D.C., for the New Republic, Washington Monthly, Utne Reader, Orion, and other publications. H e was a speechwriter in the Clinton administration, working closely with Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, and steering the "dambuster" campaign to tear down river-killing dams. He helped edit and launch the report of the World Commission on Dams, and spent two years filing monthly dispatches on water scarcity in Africa, work which formed the basis of a National Public Radio show and documentary. He is now a water consultant to politicians, businesses, aid agencies, development institutions, and conservation organizations on four continents. He lives with his wife and children in San Francisco.

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Heart of Dryness

Walker & Company

Contents

Introduction: To the Heart of the Matter..............................11. Kalahari Rivals....................................................152. Crossing the Threshold.............................................243. Intransigent Eve...................................................324. The Desiccation of Eden............................................395. Besieged and Besieger..............................................466. The Rule of Water..................................................557. Dispersal..........................................................648. Forage or Farm?....................................................689. Quest for Meat.....................................................7610. Survival of the Driest............................................9011. Water for Elephants Only..........................................10312. The Paradox of Bling..............................................11113. Oriented Against the Sun..........................................12514. Cradling Every Drop...............................................13315. The Reckoning.....................................................13916. Haggling over the Source of All Life..............................14517. Human Rights, Water Wrongs........................................15718. Primal Instincts and the Realpolitik of Water.....................17119. Intimations of Genocide...........................................17920. Escalation of Terrorist Activity..................................18621. An Open Heart.....................................................20122. Release...........................................................21723. The Verdict.......................................................22524. The End of the Beginning..........................................234Epilogue: What Would Bushmen Do?......................................239Notes.................................................................249Bibliography..........................................................287Acknowledgments.......................................................303Index.................................................................309

Introduction

One stinking hot day during the austral summer of 2002, the sovereign Republic of Botswana dispatched twenty-nine heavy trucks and seven smaller vehicles to converge on southern Africa's arid core. To reach their designated target, the drivers had to traverse one of the most kidney-jarring, axle-snapping, sand-blasted, and sun-burned landscapes on Earth. The destination lay at the heart of what local languages translate as "the Always Dry." Others call it "the Great Thirstland." On maps it is labeled the Kalahari Desert.

The convoy ground through flat savanna as drab bunchgrass and thorn trees rolled past the windows. Only the rare sight of springbok or ostrich broke the monotony. Eventually the vehicles crossed an invisible threshold and entered a territorial reserve inhabited by bands of indigenous people known as the Gana and Gwi Bushmen.

For tens of thousands of years Bushmen and their ancestors had thrived in this unforgiving landscape. According to geneticists, linguists, and ecological scientists, these people constituted the remnants of the world's oldest and most successful civilization. But over recent centuries almost all were violently uprooted and displaced by better armed settlers: white farmers and ranchers encroaching from the south, black Bantu herders moving in from the north. Where half a million Bushmen once proudly strode the subcontinent as its sole inhabitants, barely a fifth of that number now lingered as an abject underclass. Many had intermarried or assimilated into the margins of the region's cattle posts or economies of Windhoek, Gaborone, Bulawayo, Johannesburg, and Cape Town. Scattered from their Kalahari homeland, Bushmen were typically relegated to a serflike existence, exchanging humility for charity. If the world largely wrote off Africa as a hopeless case, and if urban Africans dismissed rural tribes as ignorant and crude, even the poorest African looked down on chronically "destitute and miserable" Bushmen.

For hour upon hour, the top-heavy vehicles jerked and careened forward as their fat wheels churned through the sand. That sand could reach 162 degrees on the surface, and in the peak of the day the heat expanded air pockets between the coarse grains, making the sand so soft and loose that even 4 x 4s bogged down. Drivers who let enough air out to increase rubber-to-sand traction increased their risk of a punctured tire. The maddening route grated on nerves already exposed by the unpleasant task they had to perform. And yet "it was not all gloom and sadness." Indeed, "the camaraderie lifted their spirits and brought playfulness to their character." Since "no one wanted to be a failure," the convoy made a game out of their assignment, and it became a "marvel to watch them display their prowess in attempting to outdo each other" as the jocular drivers raced each other toward the center of the Kalahari, unable or unwilling to turn back.

Their assignment had been carefully mapped out in advance. Execution of orders was intended to be swift and unemotional. Sources would later differ about the degree of intimidation or physical violence involved, but some officers carried loaded weapons, for there could be no further negotiation with any of the remaining inhabitants.

Those still-intact bands of a thousand or so Gwi and Gana living at the center of the Kalahari felt confident in the ancient desert home from which they, unlike so many Bushmen, had never been driven. But even they owed their political asylum to international mercy. In the decade after the Second World War, upon learning how Israel was founded as a refuge for European Jews, Bushmen sought from England an equivalent for Africa's genocidal victims. "Listen to the weeping of a race which is very tired of running away," they pleaded. "Give us a piece of land, too. Give us a piece of land where our women will not be taken from us."

In 1961 several British colonial officials leaned over a crude map of Botswana's sand-filled heartland, scratched straight lines into a twenty-thousand-square-mile trapezoid, and proclaimed the Central Kalahari Game Reserve. In doing so they drew upon the precedent of America's protected parks, refuges, and forests—wilderness areas set off-limits from development and kept uninhabited by people. But on this particular landscape, rather than seek a pristine virgin ecosystem, British officials planned to "reserve sufficient land for traditional land use by hunter-gatherer communities of the Central Kgalagadi" where the last surviving bands could develop on their own terms, free from relentless persecution to near extinction. Inside that hunter-gatherer haven, a thousand Bushmen clung fast to their autonomy in places with names translated as "Vulture Water," "Fossil Creek," "Kneel to Drink," and "Nowhere." Within their sanctuary Bushmen maintained a cultural identity unto themselves; they enjoyed a proud political autonomy that for various reasons annoyed and even threatened the more powerful surrounding Botswana republic. Outsiders referred to these central Kalahari Bushmen as the Last of the First—a distinction the approaching convoy planned...