Botswana is in 22nd place, South Africa is 40th and Kenya 44th.Oxfam says nearly 900 million people - one in four adults in the developing world - are illiterate and that 125 million children never attend school."Today a child in Mozambique can expect to go to school for two to three years of his or her life, with luck."Ethiopia has one of the lowest rates of enrolment in the world and one of the largest gender gaps. Muslim countries are found, on the whole, not to neglect girls' schooling.African countries fare badly in the index, with Niger and Ethiopia found to be worst of the 104 countries in the survey. Girls are the main losers. At press conferences today in London, Washington and Johannesburg, Oxfam will urge donor countries and institutions concerned with debt relief to focus on the education crisis which, it says, is directly linked to Africa's poverty.A new "education performance index" - which looks at enrolment, equality of treatment for boys and girls, and the number of years spent in school - is topped by Bahrain, Singapore and the United Arab Emirates. War-torn countries are among the worst affected, but even Zambia lacks blackboards in a quarter of its classes, and there is one textbook to every 20 children in Tanzania. In a ground-breaking report on education in the developing world, the charity finds that sub-Saharan Africa has the lowest school enrolment rates and highest drop-out figures. THE SIGHT of African schoolchildren gathered enthusiastically for class in the shade of a tree is becoming rarer, and poverty is increasing as a consequence, Oxfam will warn today. She said: "I spoke the language to my children but it was always when I was disciplining them.

So they did not like the language."Her 27-year-old daughter Lena said: "I knew N/u when I was small but Afrikaans was the language of school and it was not comfortable to talk our own tongue.". When you learn it, you first get to know all the animals' names and then what they do," said Mrs Kassie, whose age is unclear but who has a 27- year-old daughter She also has four other daughters and four sons. Finding /Guna was a crucial moment for the land claim and the language." Her friend and fellow N/u-speaker, Anna Kassie, said: "When I am no longer here, and I die, I want it to be known in my language that this was our land."N/u is very beautiful and expresses things you can never say in Afrikaans. She was never allowed to return to her birthplace - beneath a tree where the warden of the national park now lives.Nigel Crawshaw, the Sasi linguist who found her thanks to word-of-mouth contacts, said: "Until 1997, the park was still claiming that no Khomani were ever removed. But the land claim has brought about a new sense of identity and has saved the N/u language.Mrs Rooi, who lives in Upington, a large town 160 miles away, was taken from the Kalahari with her two sisters to be an exhibit in the 1936 Empire Exhibition in Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town.

Early plans include raising rents from farmers on 100,000 acres and from the parks board on 55,000 acres in the Kalahari.Sasi is proposing an eco-tourism project - under which Khomani might lead trails following animal tracks - but the national park is resisting it.There are many questions over the extent to which the Khomani, who have alcohol problems and live a settled existence in a shack village, will thrive on their new land. Their traditions, which include hunting with poisoned arrows, date back at least 20,000 years and co-exist uncomfortably with settled farming."Some of the Khomani may decide to live in the traditional, nomadic San fashion, and others may prefer to use the land to combine their historic way of life with a more modern approach," said Alec Harper, of the Department for International Development.As part of an aid policy with a new focus on human rights, Britain has pledged pounds 600,000 to the South African San Institute (Sasi).The institute has been charged with helping the Khomani to manage the land awarded to them yesterday. San in Botswana and Angola are still subjected to forced removals.The San, nomadic hunter-gatherers of small build who have distinctive high cheek-bones, were for hundreds of years the targets of a genocide by white and black settlers who saw them as sub-human. Both the Khomani, one of three San clans in South Africa, and the Mier, who are mixed-raced settlers, were expelled from the Kalahari Gemsbok National Park between 1931 and 1973.

Here the Khomani can fulfil a dream that can be lived collectively by all people."Yesterday's settlement - the most poignant among hundreds aimed at compensating South Africans for apartheid - included an equal land gift to the 5,000- strong Mier community, also of the Northern Cape. Mr Mbeki understood the sentiment, if not the word. "Today marks the rebirth of a people who were landless and were called thieves when they asked for the land back," he said, marking South African Human Rights Day."This land is a place to rebuild a community. She hugged Thabo Mbeki, South Africa's deputy president, and said "/aise". It simply means "thank you" - the slash denotes a click in N/u, the original language of the Khomani clan Mrs Rooi is one of only 15 known speakers of it.