A couple days ago, Survival International released a report comparing the arguments used to justify the assimilation and dispossession of the Kalahari Bushmen with those used to defend the transatlantic slave trade. A great deal of the rhetoric used by the government is profoundly similar.

This comparison may come as a shock to some, but I want to make sure you realize this is just a drop in the bucket of the historical and contemporary experiences of indigenous People throughout the world…. The same logic and reasoning used to justify rape, genocide, and slavery then is that used to justify development, encroachment, assimilation, the usurpation of land, and the criminalization of innocence and self-defense today.

There is just no difference. Still it’s ‘enlightened society’ carrying on as if they’re “next to god..” Heroes that stand so strong and tall whom take it upon themselves to pity all the poor little pathetic people—to take them by their frightened frail hands and elevate them, so they may one day live almost as good, almost as healthy, almost as equal as the civilized and superior, wise and beautiful, so-called rich and powerful.

What’s even more disturbing is the depth to which this sort of logic is used today. How many NGO’s in the world have in their mandate “an interest to save and protect” indigenous People? If you read the report, you’ll see that sentiment appear a couple times. And how many activists conduct themselves as missionaries, doing only what they think is best and giving no consideration towards what the people need, or if the people even want any help? Again, this is noted in the report. And how many individuals endlessly talk about how they know whats best, and how they just can’t take NO for an answer? They’re always right, everyone else not.

Finally, what was most disturbing to me is the point about the governments need to “elevate” the People…

In 2001, Botswana’s Foreign Minister said in a talk with Survival International, “Our treatment of the Basarwa [Bushmen] dictates that they should be elevated from a status where they find themselves. We all came from there. We became civilized and drive expensive vehicles. They should be empowered to join the mainstream.”

The comparing quote in the report comes from a letter written by the Acting Committee of West India Planters and Merchants in 1883, where it was written, “[Slavery] is not only of vital importance to the interests of the Mother Country, but indispensably necessary to the desired object of raising the Negro in the scale of society.”

How many indigenous people (ie leadership) today find themselves saying the exact same thing? How their people must be raised up, able to enjoy the rights and freedoms and niceties of so-called civil-society… you know, 2.367 kids, a fifteen foot fence, and a television in every bathroom.

Well this discussion could go on forever, because what we speak of here is not simply an eerie coincidence in some far away place — but is rather the basis of so-called civil society, the type of thinking and beliefs used to justify every atrocity, every genocide, every act of encroachment and rape and effort to assimilate, undermine, destroy, and exploit the land and the people.

It is colonial Doctrine. Something that we all inherit in some way, thanks no less to multiple generations of systemic abuse

An Excerpt from the Report go here to download it

Like the advocates of slavery, Botswana’s leaders completely dismiss the societies they refer to, and assume they are static and ‘stuck’ in an anachronistic state.

Defenders of the slave trade in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries claimed that the Africans whom the trade exploited were fundamentally inferior to white people, or even of a different species; that they were backward and incapable of ‘progress’; and that slavery was beneficial to them and would help to ‘civilise’ them. White people, it was argued, were bound by duty to ‘elevate’ the status of Africans by enslaving them.

‘In general they [Africans] are void of genius, and seem almost incapable of making any progress in civility or science,’ wrote pro-slaver Edward Long in 1774.1

Another pro-slaver, Michael Renwick Sergent, wrote in 1788 that Africans were, ‘indolent and little inclined to labour or industry and almost in want of every convenience of life, but what indulgent nature of her own accord supplies them with, and at the same time being subject to such an increase of population, that it is impossible for the uncultivated soil to maintain them.’2

Similarly, Botswana’s minister for local government, lands and housing, Margaret Nasha, said at the time of the evictions, ‘Who amongst us is living a life that he led over 100 years ago? We have all lived like hunter-gatherers in Europe and Africa a hundred years ago but we are no longer doing that.’3

Eric Molale, permanent secretary in the same ministry, told the BBC that the Bushmen’s ‘attempt to perpetuate a nomadic prehistoric way of living’ was ‘outrageous’.4

Even the president of Botswana himself said, ‘How can you have a Stone Age creature continue to exist in the age of computers? If the Bushmen want to survive, they must change or otherwise, like the dodo, they will perish.’5