Circle of Blue presents the second installment (read Climate Change Coping Strategies) of excerpts from James G. Workman's Heart of Dryness. This time around, Workman draws parallels between energy consumption in the developed world and how it intersects in remote areas like the Central Kalahari Game Reserve; the Bushmen's home.


Qoroxloo's people had evolved in autonomous face-to-face groups of 30-50 and even the larger, relatively isolated bands seldom grew beyond 150 members. Each found its own equilibrium and order through small-scale, non-hierarchical self-regulation. Their human nature was the same as ours. Yet internal strife, lust, avarice, jealousy and tensions were relieved and tempered from within, avoiding lawyers, courts or police enforcement. For millennia they had enjoyed the Kalahari core all to themselves without competition. But as Botswana split up their families and terminated services, Qoroxloo and others sought, for the first time, political representatives to speak and act on their behalf.

Initially Bushmen tried the legal route, as 243 Bushmen signed a paper in which human rights attorneys would represent them collectively in a class action suit against Botswana's government. Both sides anticipated the case would be quickly dispatched; resolved in time for Bushmen to return home "before the next rainy season." No one knew a four year and ten month mega-drought would pass before any final judgment.

In the meantime, possession remained 9/10 of the law. If Bushmen like Qoroxloo could endure the pressures and isolation to vote with their intransigent feet in the Kalahari heartland, their examples would carry immeasurable political weight in the wider world.

About that time I wandered into Botswana's capital city, seeking interviews with the Bushmen representatives and their legal team. In desperation they saw my Land Rover, read my sympathy, and asked me to smuggle reinforcements to Qoroxloo's band.

I hesitated, partly from journalistic detachment but mostly out of cowardice. The President's cabinet had threatened reprisals, resenting "undue foreign intervention" and explicitly "rejected any and all outside assistance," for Bushmen. I feared the real and not imaginary risks I might face. I was by nature an observer, and by crossing the line from note-taker to participant to join some futile resistance, I would not only lose a reporter's impartiality, but could also be arrested, deported, or jailed and forgotten.

For decades I'd avoided getting entangled in hundreds of other worthy causes, yet this ordeal seemed different, it had a "last stand" feel to it. In the course of my interviews of evicted Bushmen outside the Reserve, more than one Bushman told me, through translators, "I only want to go back to my home in the Kalahari, live there until I die, and be buried in my ancestral land where my father was born and is buried."

The next morning Bushmen transferred their illicit "contraband"–sacks of corn meal, sugar, stew, dried fruit, tea, tobacco, medicine, news and water–into my vehicle. We hid it beneath two weeks of dirty laundry, the stench of which should discourage any inspector.

Read More on: Circle of Blue