Depositions and Dilemmas

An important focus of recent concern with regard to Indigenous peoples’ legal cases, especially in Africa, has been the collaboration among lawyers, anthropologists, and local Indigenous communities. These collaborative efforts have facilitated the planning, data collection, formulation, and compilation of information that is then used by the lawyers before the court. This chapter draws on the experiences of a lawyer and an anthropologist in legal cases involving Indigenous peoples’ rights in the Republic of Botswana. One of these cases involved the removals of San and Bakgalagadi residents from the Central Kalahari Game Reserve (CKGR) in the late 1990s and the early part of the new millennium by the government of Botswana. ¹ The second case revolved around the right to water of people in the CKGR, which was won on appeal in January 2011. ² The lawyer involved in these cases, Gordon Bennett, is a barrister who has had extensive involvement in Indigenous peoples’ rights cases in various parts of the world since the 1970s. ³ The anthropologist, Robert Hitchcock, has been working on Indigenous peoples’ land and resource rights issues in Botswana since the mid-1970s. ⁴ This article discusses the experiences of the lawyer and anthropologist who were involved in these cases and assesses critically the strengths and weaknesses of lawyer–anthropologist collaborations. In order to do so, however, in this introduction we first provide some background information to contextualize the collaboration.