Bushmen seeking support for their effort to retain their ancestral lands in Botswana arrived in southern California on Thursday, beginning a journey taking them from a glitzy Hollywood fund-raiser to Capitol Hill and the UN.
The Bushmen, also known as the San people, gained fame worldwide with the 1980 film The Gods Must Be Crazy, a comedy about the discord that erupts with the discovery of a Coke bottle.
A small group is now venturing across the US to raise public awareness of and financial support for their dispute with the government of Botswana. They accuse officials of forcing them off a long-preserved stretch of land to make way for diamond mines.
The group of four Bushmen was getting a boost from Hollywood yesterday with a Beverly Hills benefit at which movie stars like Minnie Driver and Mira Sorvino were to be entertained by Jackson Browne and the Dave Matthews Band. A "diamond drop" was to accept jewelry from celebrities as a donation to a legal fund protecting Bushmen lands.
The Bushmen live in a hunter-gathering society dating back thousands of years. They have been forced by the government to get hunting permits and have been denied water rights on their ancestral lands in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve.
"For us, to stay in our land is to keep our culture," said Jumanda Gakelebone. "I'm born a Bushman. I don't have to change."
Gakelebone, who speaks English, translated for the elder Roy Sesana.
"We want to go back to the land because it's our land, our cultural land, our ancestral land," said Sesana. "I'm angry."
Sesana, who now spends most of his time in the Botswana town of Ghanzi, said relocation is tantamount to cultural murder: "[To move Bushmen] is to end up having no Bushmen at all. Bushmen, wherever they are, they're not poor people, they're rich people. ... Land can make you rich."
Sesana and Gakelebone, along with two Bushmen from South Africa and other supporters accompanying them, plan to meet with Congressional leaders and visit the UN next month.
Hearings on the Bushmen's claim to the reserve, which is about the size of Switzerland, began in July before Botswana's high court but were postponed after the Bushmen ran out of money for attorneys. Hearings are to resume in November.
The government has devoted a section of its Web site to the issue of the Bushmen. It says that many Bushmen wanted to settle down and become farmers and that agricultural use of the land is not compatible with preserving wildlife on the reserve.
In 2002, the Bushmen say about 1,800 of them were forcibly evicted from the reserve and those who resisted were beaten and tortured and now live in makeshift camps outside the reserve.
Botswana, a nation of 1.5 million people, has been viewed as a model democracy for other African nations and has been ranked among the continent's least corrupt countries by the World Economic Forum.
It has established a publicity campaign to distinguish its diamonds from those of Angola and Congo, called conflict diamonds, used to fuel bloody civil wars.
Since diamonds were discovered in the country in 1967, Botswana has prospered. Diamonds account for half of the government revenues and three-fourths of all export earnings. Sesana said that if diamond mines are planned for the reserve, the Bushmen should get a share of the profits.
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