Exile in Ancestral Lands: A Genealogical and Theological Analysis of Displacement, Gender and Cosmology Among Basarwa Communities in Botswana’s Central Kalahari Game Reserve

This article asks how Basarwa communities of Botswana’s Central Kalahari Game Reserve (CKGR) came to be represented as populations requiring protection, development, conservation management and relocation, and what those shifts meant for land, gender and cosmological life. It presents a critical genealogical review of a purposively assembled corpus of 45 legal, policy, ethnographic, historical and theological sources. The analysis traces four formations: colonial protection, post-independence development and sedentarisation, conservation-led relocation, and rights-based recognition accompanied by administrative restriction. CKGR-specific evidence documents the loss of access to land, water, hunting and services even after important court victories. Evidence on gender is narrower. Studies of New Xade and other Botswana San communities suggest that relocation could devalue women’s foraging knowledge and reduce autonomy, but comparative research also shows that sedentarisation alone does not determine gender inequality. Missionary discourse is therefore treated as part of a longer representational archive, not as a proven direct cause of contemporary relocation policy. The article argues that “exile in ancestral lands” is best understood as an interpretive description of material and relational estrangement. A decolonial theological reading makes visible the moral and spiritual significance of land while avoiding claims that all Basarwa communities share a single cosmology.