| Visitors to the Wilderness Safaris Lodge bathe in this pool – while the Bushmen on whose land it sits have no water. © Survival |
The congress, to be attended by Academy Award Winners, Mira Sorvino and Louie Psihoyos, will present an award to Wilderness Safaris, despite the company having erected a luxury tourist lodge with bar and swimming pool on the land of the Kalahari Bushmen who are struggling for water.
Wilderness Safaris opened the Kalahari Plains Camp inside the Central Kalahari Game Reserve in 2009, having failed to consult the Bushmen on whose ancestral lands the lodge sits. The lodge sports a bar and swimming pool for tourists, while Bushmen in the reserve are banned from accessing a well which they rely on for water.
The CEO of Wilderness Safaris, Andy Payne, responded to criticism of the lodge by saying, ‘Any Bushman who wants a glass of water can have one’.
The Botswana government has banned the Bushmen from accessing a well, which it sealed and capped when it evicted them from the reserve in 2002. With Survival’s support, the Bushmen won a High Court ruling that said they have the right to live in the reserve. However, the government refuses to allow them to re-commission the well, forcing them to make arduous journeys to fetch water from outside the reserve.
Both the President of Botswana’s nephew, and his personal lawyer, sit on Wilderness Safaris’ board of directors.
Survival International’s director, Stephen Corry, said today, ‘Giving a World Savers award to a profit-making company working hand-in-hand with a government bent on destroying the Bushmen would be laughable if it wasn't so tragic. If this passes as 'ethical tourism', then the expression is just empty PR, devoid of any real meaning’.
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