Botswana has honoured its own Kalahari rights hero. The University of Botswana awarded an honorary doctorate this month to Roy Sesana, a 97-year-old San rights campaigner who spent decades fighting the eviction of Indigenous communities from the Central Kalahari Game Reserve.
Sesana, who goes by the name Tobe among his own community, helped found the First People of the Kalahari in the 1990s. The advocacy group resisted the government’s removal of San and Bakgalagadi residents from their ancestral land inside the reserve. Sesana became the lead applicant in a case that reached Botswana’s High Court and reshaped the country’s approach to customary land claims.
A ruling that changed the law, not the practice
In 2006, the High Court ruled in Sesana and Others v Attorney General that the government’s eviction of residents from the Central Kalahari was unlawful. It found the applicants had a right to return to their ancestral land. The judgment is still cited as one of the most significant Indigenous rights rulings in southern African legal history. It established that customary land rights could not be extinguished by administrative decree alone.
Implementation has lagged behind the law, however. Rights groups including Survival International have documented continued restrictions on San communities’ access to water boreholes, hunting rights and grazing land inside the reserve since the ruling. Sesana himself has described the right to return as only partially realised. Many families still live in resettlement camps outside the reserve rather than on the land the court recognised as theirs.
The San are considered one of the oldest continuous cultures in southern Africa. Communities have historically spread across Botswana, Namibia, South Africa and Angola. Their forced removal from the Central Kalahari drew international criticism for decades. The government has previously defended the removals as necessary for conservation and development, including diamond prospecting interests.
Recognition arrives alongside unfinished business
University officials said the honorary doctorate recognised Sesana’s sustained advocacy. They credited his role in advancing Indigenous legal recognition across the region, describing his case as a reference point now taught in law faculties beyond Botswana’s borders.
The honour lands in the same month that delegates at the COP17 biodiversity summit in Yerevan have debated how far conservation commitments respect the land rights of Indigenous and local communities. That tension has shadowed protected-area policy across Africa for years. Conservation bodies increasingly acknowledge that effective protection of biodiverse land depends on the communities who have managed it for generations, rather than on excluding them.
For Sesana, now in his late nineties, supporters say the recognition is overdue. It acknowledges a fight that reshaped how Botswana’s courts treat customary land claims. The practical struggle over access to the Central Kalahari continues for the communities he represented, even as the legal principle he established stands secure.
Legal scholars say the Sesana ruling continues to influence land rights litigation well beyond Botswana. Courts in neighbouring Namibia and South Africa have cited the case when weighing disputes over customary tenure and conservation-linked evictions. Advocacy groups say that influence is part of why they view Sesana as more than a national figure. They describe him as a Kalahari rights hero whose case set a regional benchmark for how courts should balance conservation goals against Indigenous land claims.
The University of Botswana said the honorary doctorate ceremony drew representatives from regional human rights bodies alongside Sesana’s own community members, some of whom travelled from settlements bordering the Central Kalahari to attend. Organisers described the moment as an acknowledgement long sought by a generation of campaigners who began the legal fight decades ago, several of whom did not live to see it recognised in this way.
