One from the migrants of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to be citizens of the new states have argued against the rights to any special recognition for those Africans who claim the same title of ‘indigenous people’ as Aboriginal Australians, Native Americans and others. Often nomadic and hunter-gatherer in terms of their economic base, these populations were displaced first by the settled African populations that arrived many centuries later, and then again by European colonization during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Although in Australasia and the Americas increasing mobilization has brought greater recognition of the rights of ‘indigenous peoples’ within the context of the international human rights movement, in Africa the concept of ‘indigenous peoples’ used in this way is highly contested. The Botswana government, for example, denies that the Bas­arwa or Bushmen, descendants of peoples who migrated to southern Africa many thousands of years before the ancestors of today’s dominant ethnic groups followed, should have any special recognition as a result. In particular, the government resists any suggestion that these ‘older’ natives may have rights that are not fulfilled by the democratic election to power of the ‘newer’ natives in place of the ‘newest’ (white) settlers and by the imposition of that group’s conception of appropriate lifestyles for Botswanan citizens. Yet, turned on its head in a different historical outcome, the Basarwa could make the same arguments against the ‘settler’ Tswana as the government of Zimbabwe today uses against its white citizens. The sensitivity over prior claims to being ‘indigenous’ that may be argued to give them rights over those regarded as ‘natives’ by the European colonizers is shared by sufficient African states for the African Union to be extremely nervous about efforts by the United Nations (UN) to adopt a Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. African heads of state adopted a resolution in January 2007 in response to this initiative, affirming that ‘the vast majority of the peoples of Africa are indigenous to the African continent’. 20