Bushmen and the progress of capitalism (2005)

From the November 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

It has been estimated that the so-called Bushmen of the Kalahari have lived in southern Africa for at least 20,000 years, but that cuts no ice with the zealots hell-bent on the development of capitalism in that part of the world.

“The Bushmen of the Kalahari – among Africa’s last indigenous peoples – are on the verge of losing their ancestral homeland after the Government of Botswana stepped up a campaign to force them into squalid resettlement camps” (Times, 12 September). The government has sent heavily armed wildlife guards into the Central Kalahari Game reserve – an area that had been promised to the Bushmen “in perpetuity”. Their aim is to remove some 200 to 250 Gana and Gwi who have returned there from the resettlement camps. The Times report continues: “Stephen Corry, director of Survival International, which has been highlighting the Bushmen’s plight, said: ‘The Government seems hell-bent on finishing them off this time. The situation is very urgent. Unless circumstances change through outside intervention, this could very well be the end of these particular people’”.

The plight of the Gana and Gwi people is by no means unique. The development of capitalism crushes all the tribal societies it comes into contact with. In the past we have had the slaughter of the native Americans in the USA, the butchery of the Australian aborigines and more recently of the Yanomami in Northern Brazil. The concept of a tribal society that lives by gathering and hunting with no recourse to capitalism’s markets is anathema to a property-based social system.

The Botswana government has destroyed the tribal wells and banned hunting in its efforts to restrict tribal groups. The growth of farming and diamond mining probably lie behind the government’s recent actions. Some government ministers have hinted that the evictions are needed because deposits of diamonds have been found in the area, although the state diamond company, which is an offshoot of De Beers claim they are uneconomic to mine. “However, De Beers does not rule out mining them at a later date.”

The development of capitalism in Africa must crush tribal communities just as it did in Europe and America . The only hope for a communal life-style is not a return to primitive tribal society, but the transformation of present day private property, profit-producing society into the new social system of world socialism.

Born Lazy (1961)

From the May 1961 issue of the Socialist Standard

"What will you do with the lazy (or greedy, or selfish) people, who will want to take everything and give nothing?”

We often hear this objection to Socialism, from opponents who think that a social system in which wealth would be freely available to everybody must collapse, because it is somehow contrary to “human nature”. To these objectors, we are all, because of “human nature”, basically lazy (or greedy, or selfish).

In fact, the term “human nature”—the need for food, air, water and so on, and some biological peculiarities—can only apply to those characteristics which are unalterably human. Laziness, greediness and the like are only aspects of human behaviour. These are not unalterable—they are often fostered in us by the acquisitive and competitive nature of property society: some of them, indeed, are taught to us from our earliest days. There is a lot of evidence to show that, when the conditions are right, human beings do not behave in an anti-social manner.

For example, there has recently been published the translation of Jens Bjerre’s most interesting account of the latest Danish Kalahari Expedition, when he spent several months living with the Kung Bushmen at Samangeigei. This is what Mr. Bjerre says about the Bushmen's way of life:

   “During the time we lived with the Bushmen, we never once witnessed a quarrel among them, which is surprising considering how close they live to each other and that they have to share everything together. The very fact that they live so intimately appears to give them a feeling of mutual dependence and confidence. . . . This natural feeling of solidarity within the clan begins in their childhood. Children are a kind of common possession. Even though mothers for preference look after their own children, they are just as often to be seen looking after other children—even suckling them if the child is hungry and its own mother is not on the spot. The older children eat sometimes with one, sometimes with another family—according to where they happen to be when they are hungry and when food is ready. The whole settlement is their home. The children help to collect firewood and food for the older people who cannot travel far, and sometimes they even sleep alongside them to keep them warm at night.
   From the example of their elders they learn the code of behaviour which is the foundation of the clan's unity; to share food and to assist each other in every way.”

Mr. Bjerre concludes this paragraph by saying:

  “We white people, surely, have now reached the stage—with our hydrogen bombs and rockets—when we also must choose between living at peace with each other or obliterating ourselyes."

These Bushmen are primitive people —they are, in fact, probably the oldest surviving human race. But they know that, were they to adopt the very forms of behaviour which so many in our “civilised” society call unchangeable “ human nature ”, they would destroy themselves. Humanity, also, will not willingly commit social suicide. The people of the world will establish Socialism because they want to live cooperatively, in a free and abundant society. They will, in fact, practice the “virtues” which the Kung Bushmen have kept up for so long.

Eric Coffey

Material World: Bashing the Bushmen (2014)

The Material World Column from the July 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon recently warned ‘Preventing people’s access to safe water is a denial of a fundamental human right...deliberate targeting of civilians and depriving them of essential supplies is a clear breach of international humanitarian and human-rights law.’

Botswana uses water as a weapon against the Kalahari bushmen in an attempt to force them from their land. The government smashed their only major water borehole, a terrible act that was only overturned in court years later. It has continued to forbid them access to wild-life water-holes and mining water supplies.

The indigenous Bushmen people (or the San or Baswara, all names having pejorative roots) have been in conflict with the Botswana government for several years. Many live in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve where they have continued to be persecuted to drive them from their land. Banned from hunting, and forced to apply for permits to enter the reserve, they are now being pushed to the brink of extinction. The government policy is clearly to intimidate and frighten the Bushmen into staying in the resettlement camps, and making the lives of those who have gone back to their ancestral land impossible. The government boasts that all San in Botswana get free schooling, free medical help and if they register they receive free food. Despite government promises of a better life outside the Reserve many are now gripped by alcoholism and HIV/AIDS, previously unknown.

‘We are used to feeding ourselves – now dependant on government hand-outs, we are being made lazy and stupid,’ says Sesana. ‘Now we are being treated like dogs. The dog is the only thing that can't bring its own food home. It has to wait for its owner to give it some food.’

Goiotseone Lobelo speaks fondly of life in the reserve, where she would wake up every morning and join the women in the village in collecting berries, nuts and roots to eat. ‘I miss my home and the way we lived. Life was easy, there were lots of fruits, animals and there were no bars and no beer. Now we are lost,’ says Goiotseone. She remembers the day they were forced to leave ‘The police came, destroyed our homes and dumped us in the back of trucks with our belongings and brought us here. They dumped us here like we are nothing.’

In the early 1980s, diamonds were discovered in the reserve. Soon after, government ministers went into the reserve to tell the Bushmen living there that they would have to leave because of the diamond finds. Gem Diamonds has stated publicly that its Gope mine contains a diamond deposit worth an estimated $3.3 billion.

At the same time as preventing the Bushmen from accessing water, the government allows a safari company to operate a tourist camp in the reserve that made no provisions for the rights of the Bushmen on whose ancestral lands the camp sits. While Bushmen  struggle to find enough water to survive on their lands, tourists sip iced cocktails by the swimming pool.

Desmond Tutu has condemned the eviction of the Kalahari Bushmen. ‘The San Bushmen represent a 100,000 year-old culture that we should consider one of the world’s treasures. And while progress is necessary, it cannot be that the only way to achieve progress is to remove the San from their ancestral lands and drive their traditions away. We’ve already seen this with the American Indians, the Aborigines, and it is also happening with the Tibetans. When a culture is destroyed in the name of progress, it is not progress, it is a loss for our world. Hundreds of thousands of years of wisdom, knowledge of nature, medicines, and ways of living together, go with them’ (a plant used by the San was patented and licensed by a pharmaceutical company to produce an appetite suppressant drug for dieting).

In February this year Botswana’s President Khama was a guest at a conservationist conference, alongside Prince Charles and Prince William. Khama has banned all hunting nationwide under the pretext of clamping down on poaching. However, it emerged that trophy hunters who pay up to $8,000 to hunt giraffes and zebras are still being allowed to hunt on private ranches that have been exempted from the ban. Yet Bushmen who hunt with spears, bows and arrows are being arrested, beaten and jailed for subsistence hunting.

Survival International’s director, Stephen Corry, said ‘Banning hunting in order to feed your family, but allowing the wealthy to hunt for trophies, plays to a lobby still rooted in racist beliefs about tribal peoples’ inferiority. The national park movement entailed the enforced eviction, often the complete destruction, of the tribes who lived off the land. Satellite imagery now proves that many tribal peoples are the world’s best conservationists, yet they’re still being destroyed. It’s not ‘conservation’; it’s just an old colonial crime, and it’s time the responsible organizations opposed it. Instead, they hide behind hollow policies, while continuing to support governments guilty of such inhuman behaviour.’

ALJO