Central Kalahari Game Reserve
Central Kalahari Game Reserve (CKGR) located in the Kalahari Desert of Botswana.
According to UNESCO, the Central Kalahari Game Reserve is tentatively listed for inclusion as a World Heritage Site and currently fulfills criteria v, vii and x for mixed sites, noted as the following:
- Criteria (v): be an outstanding example of a traditional human settlement, land-use, or sea- use which is representative of a culture (or cultures), or human interaction with the environment especially when it has become vulnerable under the impact of irreversible change;
- Criteria (vii): contain superlative natural phenomena or areas of exceptional natural beauty and aesthetic importance;
Criteria (x): Contain the most important and significant natural habitats for in- situ conservation of biological diversity, including those containing threatened species of outstanding universal value from the point of view of science or conservation.
Not currently, but carbon credit schemes among local farmers is a growing issue in Botswana.
First Peoples of the Kalahari (FPK), founded by International Work Group of Indigenous Affairs (IWGIA):
P.O. Box 173, Ghanzi, Botswana
E-mail care of Jumanda Gakelabone, gakelebone@gmail.com
Tel: (267) 7183 0665
Botswana Khwedom Council (BKC)
Keikabile Mogodu Mogodu, Director, mkmogodu@gmail.com
Tel: (267) 310 5456, (267) 74507867
Kuru Family of Organizations (KFO)
P.O. Box 219, Ghanzi, Botswana
Training Center: http://www.kuru.co.bw
Art project: www.kuruart.com,
E-mail: art@kuruart.com
Tel: (267) 659 6102, FAX: (267) 596285,
Survival International
6 Charterhouse Buildings
London, EC1M 7ET
United Kingdom
T+44 (0)207 687 8700
info@survivalinternational.org
SAVE Wildlife Conservation Fund, SAVE is partnering with the Central Kalahari and Makgadikgadi Research Group (CKMRG) to create SAVE Botswana, a regional organization dedicated to “conserving the wildlife in Botswana through wildlife research, capacity development and working with children to bring them closer to nature and environmental conservation.[1]”
Kalahari Research and Conservation Botswana are undertaking wildlife projects in Central Kalahari Game Reserve learning more about the conservation of wild dogs, lions and wildebeest.
Kalahari Wildlands Trust is involved with scientific assessment work in wildlife habitats across protected areas in the Kalahari region, including Central Kalahari Game Reserve (CKGR).
Chief Tsholofelo, Senior Wildlife Officer based in Central Kalahari Game Reserve.
Ministry of Environment, Natural Resources Conservation and Tourism
Department of Wildlife and National Parks
Tel. (+267) 6860368/6861265
Fax. (+267) 6861264
Email: dwnp@gov.bw
As Central Kalahari Game Reserve falls under administrative authority of the Ministry of Environment, Wildlife and Tourism, and there is no website available for the reserve, direct funding links to the protected area itself are unclear. Most funding for conservation initiatives is received through government allocations (such as the Department of Environmental Affairs) but some are co-financed in cooperation with the UNDP. In 2020, UNDP announced their Community Management of Protected Areas for Conservation (COMPACT) project in collaboration with the Government of Botswana to increase the effectiveness of biodiversity conservation.[1]
In July 2015, the Chinese Embassy donated $1.7 million worth of goods to the Botswana Government for wildlife protection, which followed another sponsorship to Botswana that year for relocating 500 animals from Grassland Safari and SAVE including 400 wildebeest and 100 eland into Central Kalahari Game Reserve specifically.[2]
The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) helps finance Forest Conservation Botswana, a $8 million dollar conservation project across the entirety of Botswana that provides grants to NGOs to support forest conservation.[3]
In 2007, the European Commission co-founded a taxonomic survey across five protected areas in Botswana, including Central Kalahari, and was involved with other protected areas projects throughout Botswana throughout the 2000s.[4]
Wildlife Conservation Fund - Lion Recovery Fund has also provided grant money to Kalahari Research and Conservation, including $300,000 across 3 years to develop a project designed to prevent loss of critical habitat in protected areas, to increase wildlife management capacity and to address human-lion conflict.
[1] https://botswana.un.org/en/97666-community-management-protected-areas-conservation-compact-increase-effectiveness-biodiversity
[2] http://english.www.gov.cn/news/international_exchanges/2015/07/16/content_281475148132300.htm and https://www.facebook.com/BotswanaGovernment/photos/save-donates-500-animals-to-central-kalahari-game-reservethe-central-kalahari-ga/824068401009153/?paipv=0&eav=Afbuttb55gCAnou37-Vku1rHUCHHE0hHusb_O1kG3vzvDAbk-eJ11RhwenvQeKOGOKM&_rdr
The San/Bahkwe peoples are the Indigenous peoples of Botswana and are recognised as having lived on the lands of the Kalahari since time immemorial, maintaining strong traditions within a hunter and gatherer economy. Under British colonialism in Botswana, the lands were first designated a Game Reserve in 1961 without the consultation and consent of these Indigenous communities. This Reserve remains the second largest protected area in the world. Following Independence for Botswana in 1966, the government continued to maintain the reserve while allowing Indigenous communities to live within it. A policy switch towards the evictions of these communities first started in the mid 1980s, with the government reverting to propaganda about Indigenous peoples living incompatibly with the interests of conservation in justifying their policy switch. Forced relocations of the San officially began in 1997.
Since the Game Reserve was first created in 1961, the Government of Botswana has undertaken three major forced evictions of the San peoples in 1997, 2002 and 2005. On the same day that the CKGR High Court case regarding evictions was adjourned, in September 2005 armed police and park officers told Bushmen within the reserve to leave, leading to conflict where dozens of people were reportedly loaded onto trucks and violently removed from their ancestral lands.
Paramilitary groups, police, and park rangers would have destroyed Bushmen homes. water sources, denying Indigenous communities (who have since been placed in resettlement camps across the boundaries of the reserve) continued access to their ancestral lands and livelihoods. When the San won recognition of their land rights in 2006, the Government reportedly cemented their water borehole as punishment, making access to water for returning Indigenous communities impossible.
A 2014 report by Survival International titled ‘They have killed me: the persecution of Botswana’s Bushmen 1992-2004” recorded over 200 cases of violent abuse against Bushmen at the hands of police and park rangers, including the shooting of a child in 2005 after his father refused police entry to his home without a warrant. Paramilitary groups, police, and park rangers would have committed grave human rights violations including torture of Bushmen detainees. In September 2005 A group of 28 San Bushmen were reportedly fired at by government officials using rubber bullets and tear gas and multiple people were injured and arrested for unlawful assembly.[1] In 2012, CKGR guards allegedly tortured two San men accused of killing an antelope, including suffocating and burying alive one of them. In 2016, a group of Bushmen hunting antelope were reportedly shot at from a police helicopter under the enforcement of the hunting ban proclaimed in 2014 (in breach of the 2006 ruling that recognised the hunting and land rights of Bushmen) and nine Bushmen were allegedly subsequently arrested, stripped naked, and beaten in custody.[2]
The situation of discrimination against Bushmen has been compared to apartheid by African National Congress activist Michael Dingake and multiple UN bodies have reported their concerns regarding human rights abuses against them.[3]
The lands in Central Kalahari have long been subject to the encroaching interests of extractive industry; the first evictions of Indigenous communities in 1997 are believed to have been due to the interests of diamond mining as discovered within the reserve in the 1980s. Multiple licenses for diamond mining in CKGR have been granted in recent years, in 2011 a $3 billion dollar diamond mine was signed off by the Government of Botswana and in 2014 another billion dollar diamond mine opened within the protected area.[1] Similarly, approximately half the lands within the Central Kalahari Game Reserve have been allotted into blocks for the exploration of natural energy reserves.[2] The 2013 documentary ‘The High Cost of Cheap Gas’ reported that the Government of Botswana had signed off on concessions for fracking across half of the Game Reserve lands.
In 2006, in Roy Sesana and Others v. The Attorney General decision, the Botswana High Court ruled that the 2002 eviction of more than 1000 San Bushmen from their ancestral home within the Central Kalahari Game Reserve was unlawful. Judge Mpaphi Phumaphi stated that “the simultaneous stoppage of the supply of food rations and the stoppage of hunting licenses is tantamount to condemning the remaining residents of the Central Kalahari Game Reserve to death by starvation.” The court also recognised the right of the Bushmen to return to their ancestral lands following these evictions, an order which the Government of Botswana has continued to violate in punishing Bushmen through targeted destruction of their sources of livelihood.[1]
On 21 July 2010 a decision was adopted by the Botswana High Court preventing San’s access to a well within the Central Kalahari Game Reserve. On 27 January 2011, the judgment of the Botswana Court of Appeal ruled in favor of the Bushmen, recognizing not only the right to use their old borehole (as prevented by the Government) but the right to sink new boreholes, a declaration that the government’s conduct towards the Bushmen amounted to ‘degrading treatment’ and ordered them to pay the Bushmen’s legal costs for making the appeal.[2]
Most recently, in 2022 the Botswana’s Court of Appeal denied a Bushman family the right to bury their elder Pitseng Gaoberekwe in accordance with custom on his ancestral land within the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, also ordering that the son bury his father outside of the reserve within 30 days or face prison time.[3] As noted in 2022, the family planned to take their grievances to the African Commission on Human and Peoples Rights, and to other United Nations procedures but no updates on this process has been made publicly available.[4]
Along with the recent 2022 Court of Appeal decision ruling against Bushman burial rights and subsequent backlash, the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination on the situation against San peoples in Botswana highlighted enduring concerns regarding the Government of Botswana’s continued violation of their own national court rulings, that “the restrictive execution of the High Court’s decision and particularly the removal of the children from the Park at the age of 18 would aim for there to be no more inhabitants after the death of the Elders.” The Committee also urged Botswana “to fully implement the High Court’s decision by allowing all ethnic groups originating from this reserve to return and settle there unconditionally. … and “to provide them with effective access to basic social services and enable them to resume their traditional activities without hindrance."[1]
https://www.jstor.org/stable/26775090?seq=7
https://www.fairplanet.org/story/the-forced-eviction-of-botswanas-indigenous-people/
https://www-jstor-org.ezproxy3.library.arizona.edu/stable/90024374?seq=2
https://www.protectedplanet.net/7510
https://www2.ohchr.org/english/issues/indigenous/rapporteur/docs/Report…