When I conducted my primary research at Kutse between 1986 and 1995, residents were, paradoxically, both sedentary and full-time hunter-gatherers; the proximity of the unfenced Khutse Game Reserve allowed them access to animals that strayed out of the protected area. At the time, no guns or horses were used: spears, poison tipped arrows and bows, clubs or digging sticks, and dogs were the main hunting tools. A wide variety of wild plants were collected, ranging from melons to truffles and tubers. Grass huts were used during the wet summer season, primarily when it rained, and windbreaks were occupied at all other times. Huts were used to store possessions not in use, although most material culture was kept within the windbreak walls.
Still-intact sharing networks determined the location of camps. These networks, consisting of relatives and friends, lasted for months or years. Everyone in a network shared not only food, but non-food items like tobacco and possessions (with the exception of clothing). During my first year at Kutse, some men wore only leather breechcloths, and a few women wore steenbok hide skirts, but within a year, the government had distributed used clothing to everyone and leather fell to disuse. The government also distributed sporadic “drought relief” rations (primarily maize meal, sorghum, and cooking oil). The sorghum was often fed to the dogs, while people consumed the maize meal as porridge. Some years, families received large bags of maize and sorghum every month, but in other years they went months without government-provided food. Food distribution impacted collecting—the number of wild plants gathered declined markedly—but hunting returns did not seem to be affected.
Most, though not all, families owned small herds of goats and/or sheep they sent out to forage during the day and corralled at night. The people loved beer produced from sugar and termite larva, but drinking didn’t become a social problem until the late 1990s when people started consuming it daily.
In 1997, the Botswana government “encouraged” the Basarwa—at gunpoint for the more reluctant—to relocate from the Central Kalahari Game Reserve (CKGR) region to a large government-developed Batswana-style village. Although the relocation itself was less traumatic for Kutse residents because the new settlement was located near their original community, the devastation brought by newly introduced Batswana and Bakgalagadi cattle soon destroyed the land around the settlement. By 2000, the cattle had out-competed game herds, which retreated northwest to the still verdant range within the Game Reserve. Wild plants near the large community were eaten by animals or trampled, and all nearby trees were cut down for firewood. No game or wild plants were left to hunt or gather, leaving people with nothing to do all day but drink and fight.
Monetary inducements to relocate were paid and went primarily to buy sugar for beer-making or to purchase beer sold from the tailgates of pickup trucks by Tswana entrepreneurs. Most Basarwa chose goats over cattle from the government relocation incentives, but their herds now had to compete with the cattle brought to the community by newly arrived Bakgalagadi. Few Basarwa frequented the government clinic because they claimed that the nurse was rude to them, did not speak their language, and handed out ineffective drugs (usually vitamins and aspirin). Few Basarwa children went to the government school because they found the teachers discriminatory and the materials uninteresting or irrelevant.
During 2000, the frequency of allergies and respiratory diseases increased, due possibly to the dust and pollen kicked up by the Bakgalagadi cattle herded through people’s villages. Sometimes the cattle would stop and eat the roof of a hut or the thatch wall of a windbreak on their way through camp. The Kutse Basarwa asked for the cattle trails to be moved, but to no avail.
People seemed discouraged, and some Basarwa were said to have returned—illegally—to their CKGR homes. The government’s threat to turn off the boreholes and shut down services inside the Game Reserve was not a problem for the Basarwa, who said, “we got along fine before the government [came with provisions, boreholes, etc.] and we can do fine now without them.” Whether or not the Botswana government will allow them to remain in their camps in the Reserve is very much in doubt.
Those who dated the death of hunter-gatherer culture and autonomy in southern Africa to the first millennium C.E.—when people supposedly were forced into servitude by dominant Bantu neighbors—were about 1,500 years premature. Only during the 21st century has the Botswana nation-state put an end to Basarwa hunting and gathering with an aggressive program of assimilation to the Batswana agropastoralist way of life. Only now, under an involuntary resettlement scheme, has the extinction of the Basarwa culture become imminent.
Reversing the trend is still possible. Basarwa still know how to hunt and gather and how to make the implements needed to do so using traditional methods. Their skills may be a bit rusty, but if allowed, they can return to a hunting-gathering lifestyle. History should teach us that forcing indigenous people to assimilate usually results in the destruction of a culture without providing satisfying alternatives. Governments and non-governmental organizations should support those Basarwa who want to forage to return to the Khutse and/or Central Kalahari Game Reserves. The past 100,000 years demonstrate that with the use of traditional weapons, and absent an extensive external trade in meat and fur, hunter-gatherers and wildlife can coexist. The world should allow Basarwa to choose which path they want to take—assimilation or a continuation of traditional lifeways.
