The Return of El Negro

In the thought provoking novel, The Return of El Negro, former Botswana journalist and human rights campaigner, Caitlin Davies tells a story of an Africa "Bushman" whose body was exhumed 200 years ago by French naturalists, stuffed and exhibited in Europe.

In this well-researched book, Caitlin links El Negro's return for a State burial in Botswana with a desire to deflect interest on the plight of present-day San Bushmen, and then asks the question, whether this man actually came from Botswana?

After years of procrastination by Spanish museum officials and the Spanish government, the remains were finally brought back to Botswana in 2001.

It was a moment when the past history of this country and the present came together in the interest of Africa and the African peoples.

The Botswana government is currently locked in controversy with human rights organisation following the relocation of the San Bushman from the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, the
country's biggest game sanctuary. Human rights groups say the government has done so in order to mine for diamonds, Botswana's bloodline that is said to be abundant in the game reserve.

It is also being argued that the game reserve is the San Bushmen's ancestral land, as they are naturally hunters and gathering, and by moving them the Bushmen would be extinct as they wont cope with conventional life.

Davies came to Botswana from Britain as a teacher in 1990. She later became a journalist, kick starting her new career as the editor and publisher of the now defunct Okavango Observer, a small publication based in Maun, a small resort town in northwestern Botswana.

The book traces in extraordinary detail how El Negro was taken to France.

Davies writes that in all probabilities El Negro was a member of the Batlhaping tribe, a breakaway faction of the Barolong, inhabiting southern Bechuanaland in what is now Botswana that migrated and settled in northwestern Cape of today's South Africa.

The two guilty naturalists, Jules and Eduard Verreaux, were however among the first whites to travel into the interior of southern Africa in the early 1800s.

Davies says that the time in which El Negro's body was stolen and exhibited was a period of what she calls scientific racism which may as well be called racist science which emerged in 19th Century Europe and which boldly classified people into racial categories. She says it was the discovery of DNA in the 1950s that knocked scientific racism on its heads.

The book also traces many other examples of how Africans, Australian aboriginals, Papua New Guineans, New Zealand Maoris, Inuits (Eskimos) and American Indians were paraded as freaks or scientific specimens in the great cities of Europe and North America.

One such exhibit was a Khoi Khoi (known in those days as a Hottentot) woman named Sarah
Baartman, whose body was returned to South Africa in 2000 in a similar manner to the return to Botswana of El Negro.

The author says that the return of El Negro and the burial highlighted the position of the San (Bushmen) people in Botswana and gave new emphasis to the controversy over whether or not these people were being forcibly moved by the government from the Central Kalahari Game Reserve in the interests of diamond mining.

Some observers believed that Botswana s reputation was at stake. The government wanted to show the international community that despite claims about the oppression of the Bushmen, things were not like this after all, Davies says.

This is a book bound to cause controversy, not least in government circles but also in the scientific and laymen worlds, where sections still to this day retain a view that whites are superior to blacks.