Monday, March 29, 2021

ReconAfrica and the San

 An insightful essay upon the persecution of the San people so that the extractive industries can loot, pillage and plunder. 

ReconAfrica has been given permission to drill for fossil fuels in the Kavango basin between Namibia and Botswana and the Kalahari Desert extending to the south eastern banks of the Okavango River and Delta. ReconAfrica is a Canadian-US corporation whose headquarters are based in Vancouver, Canada. ReconAfrica is an extension of the colonial project that began in Europe 500 years ago and has morphed today into local and global extractivism.

The area includes numerous areas of international ecological significance, but for the San indigenous people who live there this is their sacred and ancestral ‘homeland’. The San people are the rightful current inhabitants and have been the custodians of this land for thousands of years. They have never been consulted, nor have they given their consent to any entities to prospect for oil and gas in their lands. By pursuing oil and gas development in the are the governments of Botswana and Namibia. It contravene their commitments to various international declarations an agreements as well as their own national laws. The oil and gas drilling operations will ruin roads, damage Indigenous livelihoods, deplete water resources and negatively impact biodiversity.

Recon and economic elites have so dehumanized and othered the San people and their land that they do not count and therefore they can be removed or poisoned, or pillaged or destroyed. Who cares if the groundwater is contaminated through the drilling and mining operations? Who cares if this impacts the health and food security of the San people? Economic development and profit matter more than Indigenous peoples’ lives.

Full article can be read here

The Windigo Disease of Resource Capitalism and Global Dispossession of Indigenous Peoples | Dissident Voice

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