Last week we received news of the sad loss of Ururú Akuntsu. She was one of the last remaining members of the Akuntsu tribe who live in a small reserve in Rondônia state, western Brazil. There are now just five of them.

They have suffered as their forest home, friends and families were massacred over many years by ruthless ranchers in pursuit of land. Today they live in a territory recognised by the government and protected by FUNAI (government indigenous affairs department).

Altair Algayer, head of the nearby FUNAI outpost, remembers Ururú.

His brief recollections conjure the image of an astounding woman who had endured the worst that humanity can give, whilst retaining a gentle, warming spirit.

We know little of what Ururú’s life was like. We know that in the last 14 years that we have been with her that she was a happy, spontaneous person, a friend who was always attentive and receptive to our presence. She was a person admired by the whole group.

From what Konibú, Ururú’s brother has told us, she recounts that she had four children who were all shot dead during the massacre. We don’t know who her husband was or how he died. Afterwards when they were spotted in the forest they were persecuted like animals.

Their gardens were constantly destroyed and they had to move place every year. Their gardens were located by the ranchers in their airplanes and afterwards people went there on foot to destroy them. The Akuntsu lived by hiding; even so they resisted and didn’t leave their territory.

Their reaction at first contact with us (FUNAI) was to make signs that we should go away, and very slowly Ururú walked away from us, off into the forest. She didn’t react by running away, probably because of her physical condition. She was already of a certain age and not like a young person. But that was only in the first moment of contact.

Contact in some ways brought various problems for the Akuntsu and they will still face many in the future. But today they have more tranquility and fewer worries. No longer do they have to hide.

They can grow their gardens where they like without worrying about the ‘parabia’ or white man. Whenever they have a health problem they always come to our post for treatment. They show little interest for the material goods of the whiteman beyond our post or their indigenous territory.

Survival campaigner Fiona Watson has shared her thoughts in The Independent.

A South African woman recently sparked a minor international incident when she accused Botswana’s president, Ian Khama, of looking ‘like a Bushman’ (according to South African newspaper Sowetan).

Botswana President Ian Khama whose government has been criticised for human rights abuses.

An official at a Botswana border gate overheard the woman’s comments, and arrested her for ‘insulting the president’ and tried to charge her for ‘insults relating to Botswana’. After a few hours in a police cell, the woman was released and free to return to South Africa.

It’s hardly surprising that the official considered ‘Bushman’ to be such a grave insult. After all, successive Botswana governments (and President Khama himself) have been trying to rid their country of the Bushmen, its original inhabitants, for years.

Botswana’s last president, Festus Mogae, asked the world ‘how can you have a stone-age creature continue to exist in the age of computers?’ adding ‘if the bushmen want to survive, they must change, otherwise, like the dodo, they will perish.’

The minister for local government during this period said of the Bushman ‘sometimes I equate it to the elephants. We once had the same problem when we wanted to cull the elephants and people said no.’

Botswana’s current President is no better, calling the Bushmen’s way of life an ‘archaic fantasy.’

But just as the Dodo only disappeared after sailors hunted them to extinction, the Bushmen have no desire to abandon their way of life, so the government has been taking steps to force a change. In 1997, and again in 2002 and in 2005, Bushmen living in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve were rounded up and taken from their homes, dumped in ‘resettlement camps’ that they call ‘places of death.’ The government banned them from hunting, and destroyed a water borehole that they had been using for drinking water for years.

A Botswanan Bushman.
© Survival

Before these evictions, there were no known cases of HIV/AIDS amongst Botswana Bushmen. In 2002, more than 40% of deaths in one of the resettlement camps were attributable to AIDS.

The Bushmen eventually won a landmark legal victory against the government, for the right to go home and live as they choose. But still, the government bans hunting and forbids Bushmen from using their water borehole (although a tourist lodge in the area is allowed to use all the water it needs).

Hundreds have gone home anyway, somehow surviving without access to regular water. But many hundreds more are stuck in their ‘places of death’, too scared to go home until they know they can hunt and get water without prosecution.

Botswana’s treatment of the Bushmen has been internally and internationally condemned, but President Khama doesn’t seem interested in changing it.