By Kim Harrisberg
TSUMEB, Namibia, April 13 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Clouds of dust, barking dogs, bow and arrows snapped and thrown into a raging fire.
These are the earliest memories that 73-year-old Jan Tsumib has of being uprooted from what is now the Etosha National Park in Namibia by the apartheid-style government in the 1950s, which was under South African administration.
Now Tsumib, an elder of the indigenous Hai//om people – a minority group of about 18,000 people – is one of eight applicants in a pioneering court case that could see them granted the right to own land in Etosha and have a say in the park’s management.
About 3,000 Hai//om, considered some of the original inhabitants of southern Africa, have given signed support of the legal battle to have their ancestral land rights recognised, and compensated for their past displacement.
“We are a landless people,” said Tsumib, sitting on a chair outside his home in the rural Ondera settlement, some 30km (19 miles) east of Etosha.
Like Tsumib, thousands of Hai//om have been resettled several times since they were made to leave Etosha, according to legal documents seen by the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
“The wind just blows our voices away, no one hears it,” he lamented, adjusting his cap as dusk fell and children’s laughter was heard alongside the bleating goats.
This is the first time in Namibia that an indigenous group has taken on the government through a representative class-action lawsuit, according to legal experts.
