COMMENTATOR (COMM.): Previously on Life . . .

PROFESSOR THUROW: If you don't have educated people, you don't have infrastructure, you don't have social organisation, nobody pays any attention to you.

JAMES WOLFENSOHN: The biggest thing that poor people say is that they don't have voice, they don't have representation, they don't feel they have any power. What they want is to be represented by their own people.

JUAN SOMAVIA: People's voice are going to be more and more important. Make your voice heard!

RASTA : Yeah, I've come to show my family, actually, the culture. How our forefathers used to look like and how they used to live. They were wiped out actually, they were wiped out.

TOUR GUIDE: The hunter gatherer and pastoralist communities didn't have armies, and because the black farming community had trained armies they were the superior power in the land at the time.

ROGER CHENNELS: In 1850 there was a census in South Africa and there were still a hundred thousand San - registered bushmen, or San - in South Africa. A hundred years later in 1950 there were known to be 30 or 40 inside the Kalahari Park. So something had happened; they had all disappeared. And people going to school learnt about the bushmen - I learnt about the bushmen as a group that had died out in South Africa.

ROGER CHENNELS: I am Roger Chennels. I am the lawyer for the San - the Khomani San. I have been involved with them for about seven years. I met the old man Regopstaan Kruiper in about 1992 and he was living down at a place called Kagga Kamma in the Cape, where he was carrying out some tourism operation together with a farmer there. And they were something of an oddity there - the last remaining bushmen. No one knew of any other bushmen in South Africa at the time. Shortly after meeting him I knew that they wanted one thing and that was to return to the Kalahari. Regopstaan Kruiper had a vision that his people would get their land back. Which was very unusual, I think, because the bushmen, over the years, had lost everything. This old man died five years ago and Dawid Kruiper is his son - not his oldest son - but he was the son who was anointed with the leadership of the clan and is generally accepted as being the San leader.

DAWID KRUIPER (TRANSLATION): There were bushmen everywhere from the Drakensberg to the Cape and further in from the Cape - everywhere. In the Karoo and the Cedarberge you can climb as high as you like and you will find traces of the bushman there. He was there. The rock paintings show it. We were driven from the South into the North, but I was not afraid to go back. I went to parliament and demanded it - not if you please sir - I demanded to know what had become of the land that belonged to the bushmen, as proved by the rock paintings.

ROGER CHENNELS: Regopstaan Kruiper and his extended family lived in the park in the 1920s. In 1931 the Kalahari Gemsbok National Park was formed, not to save the Gemsbok, but really to preserve the way of life of the San who were known to be living there. But game reserve legislation doesn't protect people - and within a very short time a clash started developing between rangers who were focused on saving animals and the people living inside the park who were now restricted. And the start of the eviction of the San began.

DAWID KRUIPER (TRANSLATION): I was born in the park and I love the park. I gained my skills there. I did courses there not like in school. If a man wants to learn he should come to me. I will give him knowledge of tracking, I learned everything in the park. I loved the park so much I can say, "It is my park".

We lost the freedoms we had before when we were caught up in the law which said the animals must be protected. That's when we lost our hunting rights. They also said, "The bushmen hunt too much, they are lazy and dirty and their dogs must be shot." And word got out that we were making trouble for the park. And they decided to make a plan, and the plan was the park was only for Westerners, we must leave and find work. I want the freedom to move around as I did before, on my own, to visit our graves nice and slowly, not in a rush in a car - here, there, one, two, three - we want to sleep overnight. We are only allowed to pay a quick visit by car.

OUMA (TRANSLATION): We lived here for years and years. I can't remember how many years. I was born at Twee Rivieren - under the big tree behind the office and I grew up here. We lived off the melons or what my father brought in from the veld. We lived off the melon and the tree berries - !xnau !xobo witgat tree berries - we called it bushman's juice. Oh my lord, how we wanted to go back! We were on the way back but we were not allowed. We would dearly love to live there again, like we used to. Look - we were afraid to speak our language! We couldn't speak it. We were warned that no one wanted to hear it. Our parents could teach us our language secretly at home, but we couldn't speak it freely when we liked. We would have been dead!

DAWID KRUIPER (TRANSLATION): Since 1960 the farmers have moved in and own the whole area. We don't own anything. The area where we are allowed to live is too small for hunting, so that's why we don't live traditionally.

PREACHER (TRANSLATION): From the dust of the earth, the wonderful crowning I am talking about this morning! Hallelujah! This Jesus that lesser men made into, which we hear in joyous worship. We crown him - that's why I want to encourage you! I greet you papa Dawid! We must keep going.

HENDRIK KRUIPER (TRANSLATION): I cannot say that this is the actual rain which they told me about, but the rain is definitely approaching. It is on the way. That is the rain which Regopstaan spoke about. It is coming from behind us.

DAWID KRUIPER (TRANSLATION): It was like this years ago but because life has changed now, the rain also went away, and at that time people performed the rain dance. And Old Makai , my granddad, said, "On the day I receive my land we can expect things to improve. The rivers will run and we will be able to see the waters coming down again. I can say. I am a prophet. I can see far. The day I get my land back the rain will fall and the rivers will flow."

PART TWO

ROGER CHENNELS: With the farsightedness of Regopstaan Kruiper and his son Dawid, we started looking into possibilities. And I must say luck was on our side in some respects, partially with finding research their existence inside the park. And partially through the entire progression of history in that Nelson Mandela was freed and we were given a constitution which smiled upon restitution of land to those who lost it. What we had to do though was to try and prove where the San had gone and who the San were and also try and prove the case. Because the Parks Board were saying the San never lived there and also were denying that they had a valid claim.

TOURISTS: Are the necklaces thirty-five rand?

SAN MAN: Thirty-five and fifty.

MARTIN ENGELBRECHT, Head Park Ranger: Visitors come to see a national park in a natural pristine state - not to see other people living inside the park. They are talking in terms of cultural village which will be a bit of a window dressing exercise because the bushman are such - the San people - they walk around in everyday clothes like we do, and they just use their traditional dress on special occasions. A cultural village on the periphery of a national park having pure traditional clothing - nothing Western - might work.

TOURIST: Shouldn't they just have the park - the bushmen - who were living here for so long?

GUIDE: The bushmen are not poachers, they're hunters - I mean, they take what they need, that's all. They live in small family groups. There's no way they're going to deplete the wildlife for what they need. That's my personal feeling in it!

ENGELBRECHT: Some of the bushmen, the San people, we are training to act as trackers. Some individuals have been operating in the park for quite a few years. They come and go. They don't see it - or some of them don't see it - as a career opportunity.

VETPIET KRUIPER, Park Ranger (TRANSLATION): No one can tell me what is what, because I know the lions, I know the leopard, the jaguar, as well as the other animals. You must know when the lion will attack.

ENGELBRECHT: The bushmen is renowned for having, for having trekking capabilities. Unfortunately most of the San people are unschooled, some of them can't even read and write and that unfortunately excludes them from formal training courses.

VETPIET (TRANSLATION): My story is not very nice. Because the men who come in now, they always want to come and tell you (who grew up in the park), what to do and how to do it. That is wrong. People told me that I can't obtain a senior post if you cannot read and write but I have to train them anyway. They don't know the park and they don't know the dunes.

CHENNELS: A national park in South Africa as in most other countries were formed back in the old days was to preserve pristine nature so that - wealthy people, usually - could go there with their cameras to experience untouched nature and take beautiful photographs and go back to the city. And the idea of having people living there in any form was just totally anathema. This is a class action - now, we didn't want to claim and put in a list of people and then find that others were excluded. The Kruiper family - the traditional San - who started the claim were obviously San. They dressed like San, they lived like San and they thought like San. Another group who now started coming in were much more modern people with different ideas about what their culture meant to them. We found San who were living in suits and who had been living as other. In South Africa one is very conscious of racial classification, and even though "coloured" was less advantageous than "white", people chose to register as "coloured" because it meant they could get pensions and land and that sort of thing and no one would ever mention their names as "bushmen".

ANDRIES STEENKAMP, San Association (TRANSLATION): We as the San clan are one community. There are differences, but these are not insurmountable. The differences are within the community. There are people in the San who are strong farmers and they badly want to farm and then there are people who want to live in the traditional way. Well, there is conflict between the farmers and the traditional group. Because the traditional group does not like the idea of cattle farming on their land.

They are slightly autocratic because when they decide on something today, tomorrow they will have forgotten and then they do something else. The bushmen will never fight with you. You can forget it. If you can speak stronger and louder than he - he would rather not speak to you. He would rather flee from you.

DAWID KRUIPER (TRANSLATION): Look - our Kruiper family: my father started the thing and then I took over. And when I got on the bus to drive it I just took everyone. Then I found out something: I wasn't the driver anymore, I was at the back of the bus. But I am not like others think I am. So I decided from now on I'll be in charge and I will cut the cake as I see fit.

CHENNELS: We initially had claimed rights in the park and a residential area outside. As the numbers grew - and as we recognised the government was not blocking us, but in fact was supporting this as symbolically the most important return of heritage in the African continent! The San were granted six huge farms of forty thousand hectares in extent. Of which this is the first one that the San received: a portion of the south of the park - twenty thousand hectares in the park of which ownership has been granted and the rights in the park still have to be negotiated.

KRUGER DU TOIT, Farmer (TRANSLATION): All of a sudden we heard the rumour that the bushmen wanted land - specifically this farm. They could wait no longer because they said the bushmen are the oldest clan in the country, or whatever. They were here first and they want their land. We saw we'd have to move or we would be surrounded by bushmen who are always on the move. They are not territorially. They are nomads - bushman will not stay in one place, he will move around - over your land and everywhere.

SIMON KOOPER (TRANSLATION): There was a little problem. Half of the farmers were not happy about having to part with the land, but then they were forced to. Now half of us will stay on the farms and the other half will probably live in the park - Dawid Kruiper's group. They are seeking a stake in the park because they are not farmers. They are actually men of the wild and that is why they will return to the park.

CHENNELS: So where we stand now in March 2000, the land is safely in the San's control , and the negotiations for the park, which is really the heart of the claim , still remain to be done. What we are facing now, we are facing the difficulty of just managing the entire process of a community of perhaps over one thousand people coming together - and they have been apart for fifty to one hundred years - making sense of what it needs to bring their language back and deciding what to do with this land. How to incorporate their culture, a dying language. And how to utilise the huge skill which many of them have of tracking and plant knowledge. How to incorporate that with modern tourism demands. So there are now millionaire land-owners in the Kalahari faced with huge management problems and challenges. So that's part of the dilemma we are dealing with now.

DEREK HANEKOM, Former Lands Minister (TRANSLATION): Do you remember the story where he was lying in, and he said that you will get the land back? The big challenge was to offer them something which would give them land of their own and which would allow them to derive an income from that land. The first challenge is to not exclude people - in all areas, in all conservation areas. Is to ensure that local communities, adjacent communities, have real participation in some way or another in the management of the resources. And that they enjoy real benefits from the resources - real ownership if you like and real bargaining power.

DAWID KRUIPER (TRANSLATION): I have come today to talk to big boss about the land in the park

MSUVO MSIMANG, Director, South African National Parks: Hm. I think my question would be to Dawid: what was he expecting to happen inside the park?

DAWID (TRANSLATION): My sorrow has not gone away. I need your help. We had good negotiations but my heart lies in the park. I went away and my heart was broken. I want to go back to the park.

MSIMANG: Er, live inside the park?

DAWID (TRANSLATION): I want to live with nature, I don't want to live with sheep and goats and cattle whose tracks don't belong there.

MSIMANG: Hm. You know, there are no people living in - within national parks. You know, the national parks in South Africa are fenced off, generally speaking, either because there are predators and things like that.

DAWID (TRANSLATION); Old Regopstaan had a vision and said that the land will come back. And I also believed that the day would come and the land would come back to us. He told me I must persist. I mustn't fight or use violence. I must just negotiate for the rights of our children to continue with their tradition in the park.

END

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