Diamonds Displace Bushmen

26 April 2005 - 12:00pm

The Bushmen of the Kalahari face eviction after the discovery of diamonds under their land.

"The Central Kalahari Game Reserve (CKGR) in Botswana is a vast, arid, yet immensely rich area, which for tens of thousands of years has been one of the chief hunting-grounds in southern Africa for the Bushmen...

But there are diamonds under the CKGR - potentially an important source, controlled by an offshoot of the gigantic De Beers organisation.

[In 1997] the Botswana government decreed that the Bushmen should be moved out of the reserve...Their villages were pulled down, and they were expelled....A group of 240 Bushmen have taken the Botswana government to court, demanding the right to return to their ancestral lands."

Source: BBC News, April 25, 2005
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At a much larger economic scale, however, one mustn’t avoid calculating the tremendous and exceptional externalities of automobile dependency.