E/CN.4/2006/78/Add.2 page 15 the Bill, the formal legal recognition of the practice of traditional medicine has a number of benefits for practitioners and their patients, and affirms the dignity and respect of this segment on of the health sector. A Traditional Health Practitioners Council will be established. F. Living conditions, poverty and basic social services for indigenous peoples 58. Inadequate access to clean water is a serious concern for a number of communities. In one San community outside Upington people have to walk eight kilometres to the river to collect water. People have been forced into barely sustainable levels of the cash economy where they work for minimal wages watching sheep or doing domestic work on farms where they have no tenure rights or job security. Some rely on poorly paid seasonal work, such as grape harvesting. Under apartheid, the State enforced a policy whereby all Khoi and San people who had not already been assimilated into other populations were forcibly registered as Coloured. Failure to register was illegal and unavoidable. Most Khoi and San people describe this period as extraordinarily humiliating. 59. Twentieth-century sedentarization has been closely associated with a collapse in nutrition and disintegration of fragile natural resources. Indigenous peoples lost their land to farmers, then to State-sponsored activities such as mining, military activities and the creation of national parks. The Riemvasmaak Nama community, for example, lost its land base to the military and spent more than 20 years in exile in Namibia before the opportunity for restitution after 1994. 60. In terms of poverty, the Nama and the San people likely constitute some of the poorest sectors in the South African society and the reason for this situation results from living in rural areas but also from a stigmatization of their status as a rural underclass, fit only for menial labour. However, the Black and Coloured populations of these districts also find themselves in situations of crisis poverty. The indigenous experience is compounded by the stigma against their identity by neighbouring peoples, the lack of government awareness in some cases, and the intergenerational crisis of knowledge loss, language loss and skill loss. 61. As a result of their forced incorporation by the apartheid regime into the wars in Angola in Namibia during earlier years, a number of !Xun and Kwe (part of the San people) were resettled in South Africa as refugees and are now established in Platfontein, a new township near Kimberley, where they have access to social services provided by the Government. But like so many other poor people in South Africa, they show high rates of unemployment and low human development indicators. A particularly serious situation for this township is the absence of a medical clinic, which compels people to travel several kilometres on foot when in need of medical attention. Similar conditions were reported by the Namaqua people in the Northern Cape. 62. Vulnerable indigenous communities represent only a small fraction of the poverty-ridden population in South Africa, estimated to make up almost half of the country’s total population. The government’s poverty-reduction strategies and social services delivery systems focus rightly on the needs of the people in the lowest poverty ranks, who are found in the vast urban townships but also in many rural areas. The Special Rapporteur was told by government officials that no specific poverty reduction programmes apply to vulnerable indigenous communities, because they are counted among the generally poor population. This approach,