The Bushmen are the original people of southern Africa. They can uniquely claim to be the ‘most indigenous’ peoples in the world, having lived on their lands longer than anyone else has lived anywhere.

In the 1980s, it was discovered that the Central Kalahari Game Reserve lies in the middle of the richest diamond fields in the world. Between 1997 and 2002 almost all Bushmen were taken away from their homes and driven to eviction camps outside the reserve, where they were not only deprived of their basic human rights – home, food and water – but also of the ways of life which had shaped, over millennia, their identity as a people.

With the campaigning help of Survival International, the Bushmen took their case to the High Court. They won. The court ruled that the Botswana government’s eviction of the Bushmen was ‘unlawful and unconstitutional’, and that they had the right to live on their ancestral lands.

In this photograph, Bushmen celebrate their 2006 victory.

‘Today is the happiest day for us Bushmen,’ said Bushman Roy Sesana at the time. ’We have been crying for so long, but today we are crying with happiness.

‘Finally we have been set free. The evictions have been very, very painful for my people. I hope that now we can go home to our land.’

For the Bushmen, land is life.

‘I grew up a hunter. All our boys and men were hunters.

Hunting is going and talking to the animals. You don’t steal. You go and ask.’

Roy Sesana, Gana Bushman, Botswana.

’We were made the same as the sand, we were born here.

This place is my father’s father’s father’s land.’

Bushman, Botswana.

’I cannot read, but I do know how to read the land and the animals. All our children could. If they couldn’t, they would have died long ago.

You have to read the plants and the sand. You have to dig the roots and become fit.

You put some of the root back for tomorrow, so one day your grandchildren can find it and eat it.

You learn what the land tells you.’

Roy Sesana, Gana Bushman, Botswana.

‘My land is very important. I look for wild roots, wild fruits and wild animals. I know all the techniques to survive in this area because I was taught by my great grandfathers.

My father took me into the bush and taught me to survive.’

Xawa Gaima, Gana Bushman, Botswana.

‘If I went to a minster and said move from your home, he’d think I was mad.’

Bushman, Botswana.

’Those resettlement camps have turned our people into thieves and beggars and drunkards.

I do not want this life. First they make us destitute by taking away our land, our hunting and our way of life.

Then they say we are nothing because we are destitute.’

Jumanda Gakelebone, Gana Bushman, Botswana

‘Let them call us primitive. Let them call us Stone Age people.

Our way of life suits us. We have seen their development, and we don’t like it.’

Bushman woman, Botswana.

Despite the Bushmen winning the right to go back to their land in 2006, the Botswana government has since done everything it can to make their return impossible, including banning them from accessing a water borehole which they capped during the evictions.

The High Court judges described the Bushmen’s plight as ‘a harrowing story of human suffering and despair.’

In January 2011, the Bushmen celebrated another victory when the High Court recognized the right to sink water boreholes on their ancestral land. They ruled that denying Bushmen access to their well amounted to ‘degrading’ treatment, and contrary to the country’s Constitution.

Their struggle is still not over, however. The Bushmen of southern Africa still face racism, subjugation and repression by the state. Their need is for others around the world to join them in their fight to be seen as equals, and to uphold their fundamental right to live the life of their choice.

‘The day we die a soft breeze will wipe out our footprints in the sand.
When the wind dies down, who will tell in the timelessness
That once we walked this way in the dawn of time?’

Bushman poem, Botswana.

’Don’t hold us back, we want to move forward.

We have our own talk.’

Dicao Oma, Bushman woman.