Dispossessed, unrecognised and facing a ‘cultural genocide’, South Africa’s Khoikhoi and San community are petitioning the government for full recognition of their rights as indigenous people.

They claim that their history of oppression and dispossession has long been overlooked, with government preferring to focus on rectifying the evils of apartheid’s land policies.

Indeed, South Africa’s indigenous population have lived in the region of the Cape for thousands of years, but lost their and land and water to the first settlers who arrived in 1652. The current Land Restitution Act however, only considers claims for land that was dispossessed after the 1913 Native Land Act came into effect.

Zenzile Khoisan, a spokesman for the Khoi and Boesman National Assembly argues “In 1913 most of our land had already been usurped by various entities including the colonial authorities. Under the Land Restitution Act it is impossible for us to claim because we were the first in opposition of colonialism.”

Their grievances came to the fore in a march on Cape Town’s Parliament Buildings on Saturday 4th September, as reported by the U.K Guardian. They have issued a memorandum to President Jacob Zuma outlining their demands for recognition as the original inhabitants of South Africa.

The San and Khoi are demanding that their rights be recognised. Photo: Le Grand Portage via Flickr

This memorandum goes hand in hand with the case lodged in the Equality Court by the Khoi and Boesman National Assembly against the government of South Africa, which is centered around their desire for “proper and suitable constitutional accommodation” and “a recognition of the damage caused by colonialism, apartheid and the current government for the continued assault on our rights to cultural identity”.

A key issue in their case is the lack of recognition of their languages; as Zenzile Khoisan states:  “In South Africa at the present time we are not recognised as a people. There are 11 official languages and none of them is ours.”

Further demands in the memorandum include:

• a full review of all land-rights claims submitted by our people and the proper and sustainable implementation of all agreements relating to settled claims

• recognition of all indigenous knowledge systems and the protection of all our intellectual property including medicinal remedies derived from plants such as hoodia

• the full and official recognition of the Khoi and Boesman National Assembly as our organ of self-determination … We demand recognition and control of our heritage

Steven Robins deals with the identity and social mobilisation of the San people in his book From Revolution to Rights in South Africa: Social movements, NGOs and Popular Politics after Apartheid. Creative Consulting & Development Works reviewed the book in a previous newsletter.

He looks specifically at the NGO called the South African San Institute (SASI) and its land claim. According to Ronbins the NGO stressed the cultural rights of the San as this helped them to gain more support from the media and donors.

But he also mentions that although they won the case, the San are still extremely poor. They keep to the hunter-gatherer lifestyles that has gained them support from those who want to protect these “remnants from the Late Stone Age”.

Read the review here and contact us if you would like to subscribe to our newsletter.

Susannah, Christian and Ashley put up flags in the Development Works office.

With just one day to go to the official opening of the 2010 FIFA Soccer World Cup in South Africa, Development Works is definitely feeling the spirit building in this beautiful country of ours.

We have put up flags in our offices, we are wearing our soccer t-shirts on Fridays and yesterday we were very excited to hear people blowing their vuvuzelas and honking their car horns at midday.

To get you in the spirit, Development Works has decided to publish World Cup videos on our blog, twitter and facebook pages during the course of the event.

We will also share stories on how the 2010 FIFA Soccer World Cup is being used to support development in South Africa. There are many inspiring initiatives that are taking off.

This event is fueling a sense of nationhood in South Africa that is reminiscent of the first democratic election in 1994 and the Rugby World Cup of 1995 that was won by South Africa.

So keep your eyes on this blog in the coming month!

Our next newsletter will also focus on the FIFA World Cup and will feature more in-depth articles on this event in South Africa. If you would like to receive the newsletter, please send us your email address. Take a look at our previous newsletters by clicking here.

Now for the first video to get you in the 2010 World Cup mood:

Ordinary South Africans can be trained to collect research data using cellpones. Photo by: Kiwanja.net

A new study has identified how more ordinary people from rural and peri-urban areas can become involved in research, simply by using their mobile phones.

Currently there are a couple of organisations in South Africa that train people at grassroots level to collect data for research projects. This is an excellent way to uplift these people and create job opportunities.

All over Africa, health research done with the help of mobile phones is increasing. Creative Consulting & Development Works recently wrote a newsletter article about this phenomenon, referred to as mhealth. To read the article, click here.

The most recent study on mhealth in South Africa (published December 2009) entitled The use of mobile phones as a data collection tool: A report from a household survey in South Africa, set out to “investigate the extent to which community health workers with little experience of data collection could be trained and successfully supervised to collect data using mobile phones in a large baseline survey”.

Local women from Umlazi, close to Durban, hired as community health workers, were contracted by the researchers to collect data. None of the 24 women had any previous experience of data collection, but all had mobile phones and could SMS. They received 2 days of training using the software installed on their phones.

Researchers can check the quality of data collected more easily using mobile phones. Photo by: Rachel Strohm

Over the course of four months, 39,665 households were surveyed by these women. There were no hardware or software failures using the mobile phones.

The researchers found that the benefits of using mobile phones for data collection are as follows:

• Quality checks could be performed in real-time, and inconsistencies could be detected and rectified in a timely manner.
• The automated graphs and reports allowed the project manager to see how many surveys were completed on an hourly or daily basis.
• Data falsification could also be detected. If an unrealistic number of surveys were completed in a specific time, the project manager would be alerted that something is not right.

And of course, the income it generates for unskilled workers used to collect this data, is very valuable.

The researchers came to the conclusion that this is a “feasible method of data collection that needs to be further explored”.

Read more about the study here.