The San

2/22 Farm Workers: This Bushmen family works on a farm near Ghanzi, the frontier town in the western Kalahari. They dry Kudu meat, biltong. The San are regarded, by the mainstream Tswana ruling, tribe, as 'people without cattle' in a country where stealing a cow brings a mandatory 10 year prison sentence and where labour laws to protect farm workers are non-existent. Land owners, diamond miners, and politicians are frequently the same people in Botswana.

3/22 Faces of Fences: Their dislocation and disdain by mainstream society have made the San sick and separated. President Festus Mogae, has asked: 'How can we continue to have stone age creatures in an age of computers'? Fear, superstition, and stigma further segregate Bushmen between those who test 'positive' for AIDS, and those who do not.

4/22 Nanke's cousins: Bushmen are the oldest culture on the planet. Today cattle ranching, diamond mining, cultural genocide, AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria have driven them to the edge of extinction. Thousands have been forcibly removed (water wells and homes destroyed) from their land and animals, to languish in what the Botswana government calls, in the name of modern services and education, 'New Settlements.' Many San call them 'Places of Death.'
Nanke's cousin pauses from her washing to pose. They live in a mud house with a sand floor. They are grandparents and responsible for the care of two small children who were both infected at birth with AIDS by their daughter, who died a year ago.

5/22 Nanke's mother's house: No work, no money for school, no dreams. For many young San women, like Nanke's 20 year old sister, Ester, staying close to the relative comforts of her mother's home, minding children, cooking and cleaning is the alternative to frequenting the home grown bars, called shabeens.

6/22 Nanke's home: Lennah Nanke Mothimit, 38, visits with her sister, Nana. Nanke contracted AIDS in 1999 from a rapist. She is one of the few women in D'Kar who is open about her HIV status. She is currently estranged from her mother, ostracized by the church, and abandoned by the fathers of her children. "My mother is embarrassed and doesn't want to face thinking about the time when I lay down." Nanke makes money by selling home made beer, and cleaning a foreign aid workers house once a week. She has two grown daughters, and two babies who live with her in her one room tin shack. She laughs when I ask her where the fathers are. The government food ration of meali meal and oil she receives once a month is never enough.

7/22 Nanke's kids: On the sand, in the shade of Nanke's tin shack children gather around a bowl of boiled sorghum meal, called 'pap'. For many days this is all there is to eat. There are never leftovers.

8/22 School: When I ask children, in an 'AIDS awareness class' what they know about AIDS, they quote in classical rote fashion, the teacher's manual word for word, then laugh and joke and ask me to take their picture.

9/22 Girl at blackboard: By 2010 over half of the children in Botswana will be orphaned.

10/22 Ghanzi ghetto: For over a decade Bushmen have been squatting on the outskirts of Ghanzi. They live in tin shacks constructed of recycled and garbage material. They come with nothing from the villages and farms hoping for something that never comes. Children raise children because both parents and grandparents have died of AIDS.

11/22 Nanke's house, D'Kar: Nanke's son Glen watches a man who comes to buy Nanke's home made beer, called Cady. When she needs money she mixes the sorghum based brew in the morning for sale in the afternoon.

12/22 Ghanzi, shabeen: The outskirts of Ghanzi is a ghetto of hundreds of plastic, tin and cardboard shelters sitting on the sand. There are no water or sewage services. Local shabeens supply the only entertainment.

13/22 Ghanzi ghetto: The highest risk groups in Botswana, or anywhere for that matter, are disempowered women, marginalized youth, street, sex, and migrant workers, the displaced, and refugees. The Bushmen fit into all these categories. Desperation lures young San women/girls to men with money. Girls charge 50 pula ($10) for sex with a condom and 200 pula ($40) without a condom.

14/22 Ghanzi ghetto: Depression, desperation, vulnerability, alcohol, AIDS, and poverty dance together on the hot unforgiving desert sand. There is nothing to lose, so taking chances is easy.

15/22 Shabeen, Ghanzi ghetto: In the 1980s the South African military hired Bushmen out of the Kalahari as trackers in their war with Angola. Those that survived returned to the desert with money, and then bottle (liquor) stores sprouted in the desert. Before 1998, the Trans Kalahari Highway was a rough sand track to Ghanzi, which was a remote and forgotten cattle post and a very difficult place to travel to.

16/22 Ghanzi girl: A young mother, passes around her X-ray films at a local Shabeen in the Ghanzi ghetto, where homemade beer is brewed in the morning for pennies and sold for nickels in the afternoon.

17/22 Town Bushmen: This family lives in a one room concrete house on a dusty corner of the ghetto on Ghanzi's outskirts. The grandfather has tuberculosis. A local missionary, Bebbie, who regularly brings him sour milk, suspects that he also has AIDS. Mostly the San live, squat, and sleep on the ground outside their houses, which are used mainly for storage.

18/22 Homecare: Kgomotso Majova, 36, is dying but is ineligible for ARV (Antiretroviral) treatment because she has no ID card. Nearly 40% of everyone between 16 and 49 years old in Botswana is HIV positive. In 10 years the average life expectancy will have fallen from 47 to 27.

19/22 D'kar child: Koleba Caman is 4 years old. She was born with AIDS. Her antiretroviral medications make her sick. Her mother died last year, and her father was never around. Her grandparents care for her and her 10 year old brother, who is also HIV positive.

20/22 Blind Man: This 'old man' is 62 years old. He requires medication for tuberculosis, and his blindness is likely from untreated trachoma. His family fears that they will be forced to move him to Ghanzi, off the farm where they all work, away from his family, because he is old and sick and a liability to the farmer.

21/22 Ghanzi health post: There is no shortage of AIDS awareness signs, and condom distribution boxes in Botswana. The message is clear. What is not clear is who is listening. 'Changing behaviour is the challenge,' says Cheryl Arnison, an AIDS nurse with 7 years experience in Botswana, who works in ARV (antiretroviral) clinics. She estimates that 40,000 people are being treated with ARVs, and that another 600,000 people require treatment.

22/22 D'kar funeral: The burial near K'Kar of a young women and her boyfriend. They were living together. He went to a party, got drunk, and slept with another women, who is HIV positive. When he returned his girlfriend refused to sleep with him until he got tested. He broke her neck and then hung himself. People in D'Kar call it a crime of passion. At the funeral, the missionary preacher blames alcohol for the tragedy, and proclaims abstention as the solution to the AIDS pandemic.