Gift of land seals new peace with San

KIMBERLEY -- President Nelson Mandela yesterday handed over the title deeds of a large parcel of South African land to a Namibian Bushmen community who once battled the ANC in Angola.

Mandela, at a colourful ceremony at Platfontein, a 12800 hectare-farm 22 kilometres from here, presented the deeds to leaders of the !Xu and Khwe people, who fled with the South African military at Namibia's independence in 1990.

The handover marks the first time the ANC-led government has dona-ted scarce land to its former foreign enemies.

Mandela, in a short speech delivered in Afrikaans -- the language most understood by the 4500 people gathered on the farm for the ceremony -- said while the government was able to donate the land, it was up to the community itself and the private sector to help develop it.

"The community have an important role to help themselves," Mandela said. "These title deeds show you now have a place of your own."

He also announced that private businesses in Kimberley had undertaken to foot the bill for building a school on the farm.

The !Xhu and Khwe community, he added, had, like their counterparts in South Africa, also been victims of apartheid.

Highly skilled trackers, the Bushmen, or San, adult males were used by the South African military to trail ANC and South West African People's Organisation (Swapo) guerrillas to their bases in Angola during the fight against the former white South African government.

Land Affairs Minister Derek Hanekom told the community South Africa was "proud" of the diversity they had brought to the country.

"You were victims of an unjust system and brought into an army of oppression" he said.

Speaking to journalists earlier, Hanekom said the !Xhu and Khwe had been "brought into a war that was not their own making".

Poverty, intimidation and violence against their community had forced many to join the South African military, he added. "They were victimised and later dumped in a camp. They had to re-establish themselves in a new environment."

He was referring to Schmidtsdrift military base about 80 kilometres from Kimberley, where 894 !Xhu and Khwe families have been living in tents since they were moved from Namibia by the apartheid military.

"They didn't come out of choice," Hanekom said. "They were brought here as part of a military machine and it is up to us to assist them."

General Makabongwe Ntshinga, the officer commanding Northern Cape military command, said around 360 Bushmen soldiers had been integrated into the post-apartheid South African National Defence Force but were being deployed as ordinary soldiers, not as trackers.

"We no longer have need of trackers," the general told AFP.

Community workers said the Schmidtsdrift community was entirely reliant on the salaries of the soldiers to survive, leaving them in a perpetual state of poverty and prone to alcohol abuse.

!Xhu leader Mario Mahongo, who was born in Angola but who reloca-ted to Namibia before ending up at Schmidtsdrift, told AFP he felt that, finally, he and his community had a place to call their own.

"We have come home," he said, adding that he had been forced at gunpoint to join the apartheid army.

"I have travelled a long way but now I am home," Mahongo said, adding that historic San paintings had been discovered at Platfontein.

"Our people used to live on this land. This is our place." -- Sapa-AFP