The four Kua women walked across the veld, their digging sticks laid across their shoulders and their red-dyed animal hide karosses hanging down their backs. Every so often they would stop and look at things on the ground or at leaves in a tree and then move on. Eventually one woman called to the others, pointing to a tiny inconspicuous stem poking out of the ground.

The women settled down on their haunches around the minute plant and one of them began to loosen the fine Kalahari sand with her digging stick as the others scooped the soil out with their hands.

Within minutes and about half a metre under the ground a large soccer ball-sized tuber was exposed and removed. The entire plant together with stem and leaves was placed in the kaross and carried over the back as the women continued their search for food.

At the end of the morning's foraging, the women settled down in the cool shade of a tree. As the youngest one took off her clothes, the oldest removed the tuber from her kaross, placed it between her feet and leant it against her digging stick, which had been thrust into the ground. Fresh green grass was laid in a mat in front of the tuber and the old woman began to scrape at it with a piece of split tree branch.

As the creamy-coloured scrapings fell onto the grass mat, the youngest woman picked up a handful. Holding her fist above her upturned face, with her thumb pointing down, she squeezed the shavings. A surprising amount of whitish liquid came running down her thumb into her open mouth. After quenching her thirst she began to wash her body down with the liquid.

When the women had finished refreshing themselves, the oldest re-buried the tuber which was now slightly more than half its original size. Carrying in the karosses the rest of the food they had foraged, the women returned to their village.

This was a wonderful illustration of the in-depth natural knowledge and conservation awareness of the Kua (bushmen) people. They have names for each of the many varieties of plants growing in the environment and they know the uses of each: Acacia twigs for toothbrushes; Bauhinias that produce sweet tubers and have seeds with the nutritive value of soya beans. These can be made into a porridge or roasted and salted like peanuts. Coccinia tubers are an important source of food and water and sweet fruits are obtained from Grewia flava. Albizias produce a gum which the children enjoy. The abundant tsama melon is an important source of water and the spiny gemsbok cucumber is eaten raw or toasted in ashes. All in all the Kua know of about 100 species of edible plants.

The tuber that these old women had dug up, Raphionacme burkei, is known to the bushmen as 'Bi'. It is a useful plant that is particularly important as a source of water in the dry late winter months. There had been abundant rains in the Kalahari, the grass was lush and green and there was a profusion of melons, fruits and other edible plants. Not needing to utilise the entire tuber, and knowing that times are not always so good, the women returned it to the soil, allowing it to continue its growth and propagation. This is hardly the behaviour of people who want to destroy their natural environment.

The bushmen living in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve (CKGR) in Central Botswana call themselves Kua, but are known by the Tswana people as Basarwa. There is a population of about 2,000 Kua in the CKGR. They live mainly in the south in small scattered communities.

At just over 50,000km2, the CKGR is one of the largest game reserves in the world. It was established in 1961 by the Botswana government to protect the environment and wildlife specifically to allow hunter-gatherer communities to continue their way of life.

Traditionally the Kua live in small bands made up of about 10 families, each group having exclusive territorial rights to an area of a few hundred square kilometres. They live in small semi-permanent villages of scattered, simple dome-shaped huts made from grass and dead trees and surrounded by stockades.

The group will live in these villages until the area's supplies of natural foods and water are depleted, whereupon they move on, returning either months or years later as the seasons change. The bands tend to split up and become more widely dispersed in the wet season when there is an abundance of food and water, but start concentrating in larger groups around more permanent water sources in the dry months.

The women provide about 75% of the community's food needs through their gathering of plant material while the men procure the remainder from hunting.

Hunting is traditionally carried out using bows and arrows and requires an impressive understanding of the behaviour of the animals which are being hunted. The poison which kills the animal is made up of a mixture of a powdered bean, fluid from a Sansevieria leaf and the toxic juice of a beetle grub called Diamphidia. This toxin has no known antidote and is very carefully spread onto the shaft of the arrow at the base of the arrowhead rather than onto the head itself where it could pose a threat to someone accidentally stabbing themselves whilst handing the arrow.

Hunting in this manner requires a lot of time and energy as it can sometimes take a few days of intensive tracking before a large animal such as an eland finally succumbs to the poison. The men also set traps for smaller animals such as steenbok which are abundant in the Kalahari. These traps are made from natural material: a branch of the Kalahari appleleaf to act as a spring, and rope made from Sansevieria, which forms a noose. This is carefully placed over a hole covered with tree bark and soil. Branches are stuck into the ground to guide the animal into the trap.

Springhares are also a source of protein. They are hunted using a three-to four metre-long pole with a backward pointing steenbok horn attached to the end. This pole is pushed down the springhare's deep burrow systems and twisted around until the springhare is hooked. The position of the springhare under the ground is then estimated and, while one man holds onto the pole, another will dig with his digging stick and his bare hands until he exposes the springhare at the bottom of the burrow.

When one visits a Kua village one is immediately struck by the warmth and closeness of the community: an old man and his wife sit in the shade of a tree talking quietly to each other as he works away at a steenbok skin which he will use as a carry bag; three or four children surround a little girl as they tie knots in her hair; a young mother hugs her baby close and plants a loving kiss on its lips, and in the surrounding bush older children dance from one raisin bush to the next picking the fruits and laughing and chatting as they go.

Sharing is an important part of Kua life. The hunting efforts of three or four men and the food plants gathered by a few women are shared by the entire community. The Kua have no formal system of chiefs, so that all decisions affecting the community are made by consensus. Even small decisions are mutual. At one village I asked an old man if I could take photographs of their huts and he immediately called everyone together, women and children included, to discuss my request.

The traditional way of life of the Kua is a hard one, centred mainly on the basic need for water and food. These they have to find in a semi-arid environment, which has an erratic average annual rainfall of about 300mm and temperatures varying from 44oC in summer down to freezing point in winter. Food plants become scarce in the winter months and they find that they have to keep moving to new areas in order to sustain themselves. But 30,000 years of experience in this environment means that the Kalahari bushmen feel comfortable and at home here.

But there are storm clouds on the Kalahari Kua horizon.

The Kua live their lives intertwined with the Bakgalakgadi people, a tribe that moved into the area of the southern Kalahari in the 1600's. Although most of the bushmen territories are controlled by Bakgalakgadi chieftains - and the Kua are somewhat subservient to them - the relationship between the two groups is largely happy. Villages in the CKGR are usually a mixture of Bakgalakgadi and Kua, with the Bakgalakgadi staying permanently and the Kua coming and going according to the seasons. Intermarriage between the two groups is fairly common. Like the Kua, the Bakgalakgadi have an in-depth knowledge of the natural environment, but they also have livestock in the form of goats and a few cattle and practice crop farming.

In the 1960's and '70's, diamond prospectors came into the CKGR. They graded long, straight, unattractive roads, called cutlines, through the bush and they sank a few boreholes, which provided the Kua with permanent sources of water. The various Kua bands gravitated towards these boreholes and began to settle there on a more or less permanent basis. This was the beginning of a move away from their semi-nomadic way of life.

In addition, the roads made the area more accessible and this greater contact with the outside world led to more intermarriage between the Kua and the Bakgalagadi.

The lure of the easier way of life of the Bakgalagadi intruded even further into the Kua's traditions, with many turning tosmall-scale crop farming as an additional source of food. A number of the Kua were happy to accept a few goats or the odd cow for work that they carried out for the Bakgalakgadi and gradually some of them became stock holders. This resulted in over-utilisation of the resources surrounding the boreholes.

This change in land-use from traditional hunting and gathering to farming went against the original stated reason for the establishment of the CKGR. Ecologists argued that any form of land-use that led to destruction of the pristine wilderness of the Kalahari should not be tolerated, with some even suggesting that the reserve was no place for people at all. In the 1980's the government began to restrict hunting by the Kua by issuing them with permits stating which animals they were allowed to hunt and how many.

The Kua found themselves unable to hunt animals posing a threat to their livelihood, such as predators that killed their livestock or threatened their children. Many of the illiterate hunters had no understanding of these permits and soon Kua men were being arrested for hunting violations. They suffered beatings and torture at the hands of government officials before being thrown into jail.

Then, in 1996, the government began trying to move the Kua out of the CKGR by promising them new houses, cattle and cash payments sufficient to buy two cars. They said they needed to do this in order to conserve the wildlife, to develop tourism and mining and to rescue the Kua from their unhappy life amongst the animals. However, these offers were inconsistent, with cash varying from US$85 to US$5,500 and no known amounts being anywhere near enough to buy two cars.

Although the majority of people were reluctant to leave, a few were swayed by these promises. Others were persuaded to move by being told that "everyone else has agreed" and by threats that boreholes would be closed down, that social services would be cut off and that the army would be sent in to deal with them.

Whilst it may be true that the government isn't physically forcing the Kua to move, these threats, bribes and harrassments have been enough to tear the Kua community apart. Those that accepted the offers often found that they received nothing or less than they had been promised. Many of these people complain that they are now a long way from where their ancestors are buried.

In November 1997, De Beers, the South African diamond mining company, announced that they had discovered a diamond pipe in the CKGR and were starting to move diamond mining equipment into the reserve. It had been suggested that the government wanted to move people out of the reserve because they were incompatible with the pristine nature of the area and that they posed a threat to the wildlife. However it would be hard for them to argue that a diamond mine is more compatible. One also has to ask if the veterinary fences that have been constructed across animal migration routes haven't been more detrimental to the wildlife than the bushmen.

It is interesting to compare the CKGR to one of Africa's other great game reserves, the Kruger National Park. The CKGR,with ace area of 60,000km2, if you include the adjacent Khutse Game Reserve, is nearly three times larger than Kruger. The latter has a permanent management staff of about 2,000 people and accommodation facilities for 4,000 tourists. These visitors have huge demands for energy, water, food, refrigeration and airconditioning. Their cars pump emissions into the atmosphere. Then there are all the attendant developments such as sophisticated camps and tarred roads. What has more impact: 4,000 western tourists or the largely hunter-gatherer lifestyle of 2,000 bushmen in an area nearly three times larger?

Survival International have stated that there could be a hidden agenda in the government's desire to move people out. Roy Sesana, chairman of Kgeikani Kweni (The First People of the Kalahari, an organisation that acts as a voice for the Kua), thinks that the government wants to prevent people from making claims to the mineral wealth beneath the sands. It has also been suggested that the Botswana government is genuine about wanting to improve the lives of the Kua people.

However, until the government realises that the real problem isn't poverty, but discrimination against the Kua culture, their lives will not improve. For example, the Kua are not listed as one of the eight official tribes in Botswana and as such they do not have any land rights.

Here is a population of hunter-gatherer people caught between their roots in prehistory and the modern lifestyle of the 21st century. If you ask the Kua people themselves what they want, they'll tell you that they would like to own cars and radios, wear western-style clothes, sleep on a comfortable bed, live in a western-style house and send their children to school. But they would like all of these things in the place that they have always lived. When asked if they wouldn't lose their culture by exposing themselves to this modern way of life, they answered that their culture would never be lost.

Eco-tourism has often been cited as one of the solutions to problems such as this. The Kua could lease tracts of land within CKGR to tour operators who could then set up luxury safari camps catering to upmarket foreign visitors. These tourists would be prepared to spend a lot of money to fly into the Central Kalahari to view the wildlife and scenery and then to spend a few nights with the legendary Bushmen people, to observe and photograph their way of life.

This is one way that the Kua would be able to retain their culture and at the same time derive income from their incredible knowledge of the environment. If eco-tourism developments were carried out in the correct manner, then tour operators would be paying large sums of money to the Kua communities for the right to bring small numbers of tourists into the region. This money could then be used constructively in the bushmen settlements to improve their standard of living.

So what is the solution? A starting point should be recognition of the Kua's rights to the land on which they have lived for 30,000 years, so that they can have a say in their own future. However, it must always be kept in mind that the Bakgalakgadi are very much part of the community living within the CKGR and their rights should also be taken into account.

The conflicts of mining, tourism, nature conservation and the needs of the human communities should then be addressed by means of honest negotiations between the parties involved. Miners will want to exploit the mineral resources; tour operators will want to bring more tourists into the area; nature conservationists will want to see the area protected and the communities will want to have a better standard of living without sacrificing their social and cultural roots.

To reconcile these different and often conflicting needs will be a difficult task, but for the future of the region and for the sake of the people, it surely must be done.

Published in Travel Africa Edition Five: Autumn 1998. Text is subject to Worldwide Copyright (c)