As a contribution to an Indigenous Affairs issue focused on the social suffering of indigenous people around the world, Renée Sylvain describes the reality of the approximately 100,000 San people that live in southern Africa. They suffer from deprivation of land, autonomy, dignity and social cohesion, which has created economic and psychological insecurity. Symptoms of this condition that manifest in San culture today are alcoholism, high risk behavior, intergenerational alienation and violence.

In Botswana, the dominant Tswana ethnic group disregards the indigenous ethnicity of the San. After the government legally dispossessed them of their territories, they were classified as Remote Area Dwellers, a generic term for rural poor people. This classification subjects them to aggressive development programs that overlook issues of ethnicity at the root of their social suffering. The case of the Central Kalahari Game Reserve is cited and described as a process that has highly victimized the San, resettling them to new villages characterized by poverty, alcoholism and despair.

The story of the San in Angola revolves around militarization and relocation. San were recruited or coercively conscripted to fight in the Angolan war for independence in the 1960s, then soldiers were co-opted in 1970s liberation movements in Namibia and later relocated to a South African army base in the 1990s. Nearly three decades of civil war in Angola have led to severe food insecurity, discrimination, and health problems for the San living there. Since ceasefire in 2002, Angolan society has had to absorb the return of 400,000 refugees and the demobilization of 80,000 soldiers. Former San soldiers are heavily impacted by the experience of war, resulting in alcoholism and domestic and intra-community violence.

During colonial rule in Namibia, San were dispossessed of their native territories. Today they live and work on white-owned cattle ranches, in government resettlement camps or in urban squatter settlements. San men and women suffer ethnic discrimination such as drastically unfair wage rates that tie them to their employers in systems of debt-bondage. Often the only nutritional item they can buy is beer brewed on the cattle posts. There are reports of child slavery and sexual abuse by the dominant ethnicities there. San have assimilated some of the cultural norms of these ethnic groups, such as sexism; domestic violence and alcoholism are now rife in San communities. Sylvain describes the social situation surrounding illicit brewing and cuca-shops that sell beer on credit to San in an urban zone of Namibia. It has led to gangs and sex work for young San, increased incidence of rape among San women by San and non-San men and raised the risk of HIV infection. Furthermore, when San seek health care at medical centers, they are confronted by discrimination by non-San medical workers.

Sylvain notes that damage suffered in intra-community and family relationships among the San is severely debilitating to their culture because strong kin networks are a fundamental constitutive element of their ethnic identity.

Prepared by Megan Glore

“The ideology of modernist top-down development prevails in Botswana, and across much of Southern Africa, although it is masked by participatory, empowering and community-oriented language and images. Coercive conservation efforts are undermining the rural populations' individual and collective actions to manage resources” (p. 767).

Using material from her PhD fieldwork conducted from 1995 to 1997 in the Ghanzi District of western Botswana, Twyman questions the integrity of stated motivations and objectives that guide community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) projects. Twyman's research analyzes the power dynamics manifest between local inhabitants and government authorities during the initial phases of a CBNRM project in the recently delineated Wildlife Management Area (WMA) of Okwa. While the concept of CBNRM adheres to a principle of building local people's capacity for decision making, this case study shows that in practice, locals are not presented with true choices or options, that official policies pose fundamental obstacles to the decentralization of power, and that the language of authorities serves to manipulate and subordinate locals to the wishes of the policy implementers. Quotations, images, and a table that summarizes expectations and outcomes from CBNRM consultation meetings illustrate the detriment that these circumstances cause to achieving community empowerment. Discussions of land rights and the basic concept of 'community' further substantiate the criticism levelled at such projects.

In Okwa, a sustainable wildlife management regime was sought through a government-sponsored partnership between WMA inhabitants and a safari company interested in the WMA land. At consultation meetings held between the Department of Wildlife and National Parks (DWNP) and WMA dwellers, Twyman identified a framework of 'functional participation' that underlay the DWNP's approach, evident insofar as the group meetings did not facilitate locals to come to decisions in an open and informed manner, but instead simply promoted the policy implementers' preferences and agenda for how the conservation effort should proceed.

Denying locals the ability to make truly free and informed choices, the authorities only presented the inhabitants with two options: continue subsistence hunting or lease their hunting quota to a safari company. The implementers ignored research identifying local practices already in place for sustainable resource use, and disregarded numerous studies that suggested alternative wildlife management schemes. It is noted that 'tacit compliance' was imposed upon constituents, as the DWNP let it be known to locals that success was only likely to come if they followed recommended conservation strategies.

Apart from rhetorical forms of manipulation by authorities, Botswana has official policies that fundamentally handicap the achievement of CBNRM objectives. Formal proprietary rights to land are only devolved to stewards that utilize it for an approved commercial activity and the government withholds the rights to lands that are used for subsistence purposes. Although stated as an alternative to a joint venture with the safari company, the option for people to continue traditional livelihoods is neither sustainable nor viable without land rights.

The concept of 'community' itself poses another fundamental problem for CBNRM projects in the Kalahari. The author's research has shown that extensive community structures have historically been absent amongst the people that have settled the Okwa WMA. Thus, official plans to re-introduce ‘community management’ to the settlements are impractical and dismissive of the actual social make-up of its constituents.

Referring to cases from Zimbabwe, Zambia, Canada, and Australia, Twyman suggests that the decentralization of environmental management will continue to be problematic and CBNRM projects will not succeed until the political power dynamics of the process are confronted and counterbalanced. She cites further marginalization of local people and continued detriment to their natural environments as evidence that weakens the viability of CBNRM approaches currently in use. She calls for a new approach to integrated conservation-development projects that will designate appropriate local managerial structures and administer an appropriate distribution of rights in order to build the capacity of and empower local land and wildlife stewards.

Prepared by Megan Glore

“Despite the mainstreaming of livelihood studies, such studies have tended to focus on the material aspects of securing a reasonable subsistence, and have often failed to make explicit the symbolic importance of how different aspects of livelihoods are constituted, and how these semiotic aspects affect material strategies” (p.469-70).

Taylor bases this paper on research he conducted in three small villages of Botswana's sandveld, located on the northern periphery of the prized wildlife conservation area of the Okavanga Delta. The villages, Khwai, Mababe and Gudigwa, are inhabited by the San, the first peoples of southern Africa, more commonly known as Basarwa in Botswana. A national context of unequal distribution of wealth, restrictive conservation policies, and ethnic stigmatization underpins the social and economic marginalization of the Basarwa. Taylor explores the ways in which conservation, tourism and restrictive legislation associated with Botswana’s Community Based Natural Resource Management (CBNRM) Program have affected Basarwa livelihoods. The article emphasizes the material foundations of these livelihood strategies while drawing attention to the cultural meaning and symbolism these strategies are laden with and the way in which ethnicity influences access to and management of natural resources.

Though their traditional mode of subsistence - hunting and gathering - is still an integral aspect of their cultural identity and survival, the Basarwa today rely on a diverse and interdependent mix of subsistence strategies. The author focuses on three significant constituents of their livelihood portfolio: money, livestock, and hunting. Two of the research sites are located in Wildlife Management Areas (WMA), where new and highly contentious restrictions on wild game hunting and livestock rearing have been imposed. Possibilities to work in businesses associated with the safari operations of the protected Delta exist, but lack of formal education or training, geographic remoteness, and ethnic stigmatization greatly hinder the Basarwa’s access to paid employment. Historical trends of adherence to hunting, cattle rearing and employment, and the legislative and social forces dictating their legitimacy are explored. Each of the three livelihoods are shown to be meaningful ways of “looking for life” (p.469), yet the Basarwa remain severely disadvantaged in regard to each one. Taylor stresses that while the material importance of each livelihood strategy is widely acknowledged by policy makers, the interdependence of these three strategies and their associated cultural meanings have been largely ignored. It is suggested that consideration of the semiotics and interconnectedness of each livelihood strategy would better inform legislation implemented in the name of pro-community wildlife conservation.

Taylor critiques Botswana's conservation policy by stating that, “the erosion of collective control over wildlife is ironic with the move to a community quota under the CBNRM Programme, which is ostensibly meant to facilitate greater community control of wildlife” (p.485). He builds on this observation by suggesting that the converse legal approach to wildlife conservation, - increasing the possibilities for subsistence hunting by the Basarwa, might foster more sustainable wildlife management. Each separate livelihood is so interconnected and tenuous that the author warns interventionists of the pitfall of trying to replace one with another.

Prepared by Megan Glore