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Location of New Xade
New Xade is a village located in the central part of the Ghanzi District of Botswana. The population was 1,690 in 2021 census.
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New Xade is a village located in the central part of the Ghanzi District of Botswana. The population was 1,690 in 2021 census.
In 1997, 1739 San (Bushmen) and other residents of the CKGR (including the Bakgalagadi) were relocated from the Central Kalahari Game Reserve by the Botswana government as part of the largest resettlement program ever undertaken in the country. 1239 of these relocated to Kg’oesakene (New Xade) and 500 to Kaudwane, outside the southern border of the CKGR in the Kwaneng district. The former settlement, intended to be named Kg'oesakene, meaning “looking for life”, by the residents, has come to be known by its administrative name, New Xade. A further resettlement of Central Kalahari residents took place in 2002. The government justified the relocation in order to conserve natural resources, provide services such as healthcare and education in a more practical manner, and to promote community development amongst the San. New Xade is located about 100 km from Ghanzi, the district capital, and 70 km from Xade, the former settlement in the CKGR for most of the residents. Although the residents were compensated for material possessions such as their huts, livestock and any other infrastructure they left behind, former Xade residents received no monetary remuneration or entitlement to the land they left behind. They did, however, receive plots in the newly created New Xade.
As mentioned previously, there are a variety of ethnic groups present in New Xade. The three primary groups for which the settlement was created, all of whom were relocated from the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, are the G/ui (Dcuikhoe), G//ana (Dxanakhoe), and the Bakgalagadi. The indigenous languages spoken by these groups are G/ui (Dcui), G//ana (Dxana), and Sekgalagadi, respectively. With the growing presence of extension workers and nationalized education, Setswana is spoken widely and English fluency is increasing. Literacy, however is low in Setswana and English and nonexistent in G/ui and G//ana as these languages do not yet have an institutionalized orthography. With the presence of government extension workers and entrepreneurs, there are also a considerable number of Tswana residents, each with their own dialects, as well as a growing number of Naro residents who have come from neighboring settlements and Ghanzi farms. Most of the children residing in New Xade's primary school hostel speak the Naro language as they belong to the Naro ethnic group which occupies the areas around Ghanzi township and the Ghanzi farming block. Many of the hostel boarders were removed from situations of child labor on the Tswana cattle posts and Boer-owned farms in Ghanzi through the work of Thuto Isago Trust, a child labor and education project based in Ghanzi. It should also be noted that a large number of the Bakgalagadi residents came from Kweneng district to take advantage of entrepreneurial opportunities in the newly created settlement and to live closer to relatives involved in the relocation.
From 2000 to 2001, an anthropological study was undertaken in New Xade by a Japanese anthropologist named Junko Maruyama to determine the impacts of the resettlement on the livelihood and social relationships of the relocates and to demonstrate how the residents have coped with the new situation and environment. At the time of the study, the population of the settlement was estimated to be 1100, consisting mainly of the San from the G/ui and G//ana language groups. The total populations of these two groups in Botswana are about 2350 and 1550, respectively (Cassiday, 2001). Therefore, the settlement contained approximately a quarter of the total G/ui and G//ana population in Botswana in the early 2000s, though that fraction has most likely increased in the past 6 years. It is difficult to know the exact number of people belonging to each ethnic group in the area, because the identity is flexible and inter-ethnic marriage occurs frequently among the G/ui, G//ana, Kgalagadi, and Naro.
According to Maruyama (2003), the lifestyle and residential pattern in New Xade changed drastically. New Xade currently has numerous facilities more typical of a large village in Botswana than a settlement: in the center, there is a large modern clinic and maternity ward (no longer used), primary school, tribal administration and police office, workshop, hostel, adult education center, local craft store, and mini-RAC with offices for Social & Community Development, Culture & Youth, Agriculture, and Rural Area Development Program. The Social and Community Development office currently has a bakery project in New Xade, which sells bread to the primary school once a week. A trailer run by Be-mobile offering internet and computing services was installed in 2012.
According to the research conducted by J. Maruyama, there are two main things that have been changed due to the 1997 resettlement program. First, although the residents’ access to social and economic welfare program improved, their access to natural resources declined significantly. Consequently, people were forced to shift their principal means of livelihood from hunting and gathering to wage labor and agropastoralism. Second, San families ceased to form the camps that had functioned as a production-consumption unit. Furthermore, the residential mobility decreased; they were no longer allowed to move anywhere they liked, as was the custom.
The Botswana Government's relocation program has contributed to an international controversy fueled by a London-based NGO called Survival International. The protest raised by Survival International (SI) and other international organizations is based on the claim that indigenous peoples worldwide have a right to their ancestral land. These organizations have compared the dispossession of the San in the Kalahari to that of other indigenous peoples by colonial governments in other parts of the world. However, the Botswana government does not accept the concept of “indigenous peoples” and has not ratified international treaties that identify the rights of indigenous and tribal peoples, such as Convention No. 169 of the International Labour Organization. According to SI, even if the San have no legal right to live in the CKGR (which SI does not accept), the San were undoubtedly in possession of their settlements at the date of the relocations. SI argues that the San were deprived of that possession against their free will, and that they are therefore entitled to be restored to their possessions under the doctrine of "spoliation", which formed the basis of SI and First People of the Kalahari’s claims against the Government of Botswana in a landmark court case. Though the court case was decided in December 2006 in favor of the San applicants, it has been argued that the Botswana Government has not followed through with the ruling and is unlawfully preventing the former CKGR residents from returning to their home villages in the CKGR by preventing access to hunting licenses and boreholes for water.
The Botswana Government justified its conduct on various grounds. It has invoked the need to protect the viability of the wildlife population in the Reserve; the prohibitive cost of the provision of basic services to the settlements; and its desire to introduce the San to the mainstream of Botswana society and development.
Survival International has also launched an extensive campaign against the government and the DeBeers Diamond Company claiming that diamond prospecting was one of the primary reasons for the relocation. Though the government denies any such allegations, the campaign has threatened both the tourism and diamond industries of Botswana, its two biggest assets. In May 2007, DeBeers sold its shares in a diamond deposit at Gope (in southeastern CKGR) to Gem Diamonds. In 2008, initial plans were announced to open a mine at Gope through Gem Diamonds Ltd. and tenders were awarded for tourist lodges within the CKGR. One such tender for a planned lodge development at Molapo, a Bushmen community in the CKGR from which many New Xade residents were relocated, was put out by the government and awarded to the Safari Adventure Company, a subsidiary of Wilderness Safaris, a South African business.
The Botswana government has openly and harshly criticized the claims and tactics of SI calling them “a cheap, calculated and malicious use of the San of the Central Kgalagadi as a fundraising gimmick.” Furthermore, the Government has sponsored numerous “fact-finding” missions into the CKGR and resettlement sites for foreign diplomats in an effort to dispel SI's claims.
Roy Sesana: Human rights activist (co-founder of First People of the Kalahari) and winner of the Right Livelihood Award for his work defending the land rights of CKGR residents.
Kuela Kiema: Human rights activist (board member of First Peoples Worldwide) and producer of indigenous music album "Bilo Bilo Heri".
Jumanda Gakelebone: Human rights activist. Spokesperson for First People of the Kalahari.
Kgosi Lobatse Beslag: Current Chief of New Xade. Member of the House of Chiefs. Participated in numerous international tours to defend government relocation policy. Advocates for sustainable income-generation projects in rural settlements.
Councilor Paepae Raseme: Current Councilor of New Xade.
Botswana, officially the Republic of Botswana, is a landlocked country in Southern Africa. Botswana is topographically flat, with approximately 70 per cent of its territory being the Kalahari Desert. It is bordered by South Africa to the south and southeast, Namibia to the west and north, and Zimbabwe to the northeast. It is connected by the Kazungula Bridge to Zambia, across the world's shortest border between two countries.
The Kalahari Desert is a large semi-arid sandy savanna in Southern Africa extending for 900,000 square kilometres (350,000 sq mi), covering much of Botswana, as well as parts of Namibia and South Africa.
KhoisanKOY-sahn, or Khoe-Sān, is a catch-all term for those indigenous peoples of Southern Africa who do not speak one of the Bantu languages, combining the Khoekhoen and the Sān peoples. Khoisan populations speak click languages and are considered to be the historical (pre-Bantu) communities throughout Southern Africa, remaining predominant until European colonisation in areas climatically unfavorable to Bantu (sorghum-based) agriculture, such as the Cape region, through to Namibia, where Khoekhoe populations of Nama and Damara people are prevalent groups, and Botswana. Considerable mingling with Bantu-speaking groups is evidenced by prevalence of click phonemes in many Southern African Bantu languages.
The San peoples, or Bushmen, are the members of the indigenous hunter-gatherer cultures of southern Africa, and the oldest surviving cultures of the region. Their ancestral territories span Botswana, Namibia, Angola, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Lesotho and South Africa. They speak, or their ancestors spoke, languages of the Khoe, Tuu and Kxʼa language families, and are only a 'people' in contrast to pastoralists such as the Khoekhoe and descendants of more recent waves of immigration such as the Bantu, Europeans and Asians.
ǂKxʼaoǁʼae, or Gobabi ǃKung (Gobabis-ǃXû), is an eastern dialect of the Southern ǃKung language, spoken in Botswana and in Namibia by about 7,000 people. In Botswana, most speakers are bilingual in Naro or Tswana.
Ghanzi is a district in western Botswana, bordering Namibia in the west and extending east into much of the interior of the country. The district's administrative centre is the town of Ghanzi. Most of the eastern half of Ghanzi makes up the Central Kalahari Game Reserve. The human population at the 2001 census was 43,370, less populous than that of any other district in Botswana. Ghanzi's area is 117,910 km².
Ghanzi is a town in the middle of the Kalahari Desert the western part of the Republic of Botswana in southern Africa. The region is the country's pride in contributing a large portion towards the beef industry. In fact, Ghanzi farmers provide about 75% percent of beef exports, according to the Botswana Meat Commission, primarily to the United Kingdom and the European Union.
Roy Sesana is a San activist who worked together with the First People of the Kalahari for the rights of his people.
First People of the Kalahari (FPK) was a local advocacy organisation in Botswana that worked for the rights of the indigenous San who had been forced by the Government of Botswana to resettle to the new built town of New Xade. The organization was founded in 1991, registered in 1992 and officially recognised in 1993. Roy Sesana became chairman in 1995 and had a leading role in the organisation. Sesana and FPK were awarded the Right Livelihood Award in 2005. FPK had dissolved as an organisation by 2013.
Central Kalahari Game Reserve is an extensive national park in the Kalahari Desert of Botswana. Established in 1961 it covers an area of 52,800 square kilometres (20,400 sq mi), making it the second largest game reserve in the world.
John Qace Hardbattle (1945–1996) was one of the best-known Bushman activists in Botswana. "Son of a half-Bushman mother, Khwa, and an English father, Tom Hardbattle". His father was a retired policeman who traveled to South Africa and then Botswana. There he married "Kawi", John's mother. John Hardbattle co-founded and became leader of the First People of Kalahari (FPK).
Charles Hill is a village in Ghanzi District of Botswana. It is located close to the Namibian border. Charles Hill is the second-largest village in Ghanzi District, with a population of 3,591 in 2011 census.
Dekar, alternatively D'kar, is a village in Ghanzi District of Botswana. It is located 40 km to the east of the district capital, Ghanzi. The population was 943 in the 2001 census. It was a farm of the Gereformeerde Church, but later evolved into a rural village after being donated to the Naro. The village is governed by the Dutch Reformed Church, which is made up of San leaders in Dekar. A tar road runs 1 km from it, but there is no tar road in the village itself, only a gravel road. This small village also houses Kuru, a San initiative. It has a shop where handcrafted San articles can be bought. The money is then used to help the Kalahari people. Dekar also houses a school and a clinic. About 15 to 20 km outside Dekar there is a game farm on the road to Ghanzi.
East Hanahai is a village in Ghanzi District of Botswana. It is located in the central part of the district, close to the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, roughly 50 km south-east of Ghanzi. East Hanahai has a primary school and a health clinic. The building of the Trans-Kalahari Highway along its new route, rather than using the path of the old Gaborone - Ghanzi road has had a negative effect on East and West Hanahai due to the dramatic reduction in through traffic. The lack of jobs means that many members of the community rely on irregular government piece jobs and/or government food baskets. The population was 532 in 2011 census and is made up of a mixture of Basarwa (Bushmen) and Batswana.
The official language of Botswana is English, while Setswana is considered to be a national language. English, which was inherited from colonial rule, is the language of official business and most written communication. Most of the population speak Setswana, but over 20 smaller languages are also spoken. Some of the country's languages are in danger of becoming extinct.
The lands inhabited by indigenous peoples receive different treatments around the world. Many countries have specific legislation, definitions, nomenclature, objectives, etc., for such lands. To protect indigenous land rights, special rules are sometimes created to protect the areas they live in. In other cases, governments establish "reserves" with the intention of segregation. Some indigenous peoples live in places where their right to land is not recognised, or not effectively protected.
White people in Botswana are Batswana whose ancestry lies historically within the continent of Europe, most notably the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and, more recently, directly from Serbia and other southern African nations.
Ancestral land conflict over the Central Kalahari Game Reserve (CKGR) arose in the 1970s between the government of Botswana and the San people (Bushmen), and is ongoing, resulting in one of the most expensive court cases in the history of Botswana.
Cgʼose Ntcoxʼo, known as Cgoise was an artist from Botswana.
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