Christopher Conz 
Environment, Knowledge, and Injustice in Lesotho 
The Poverty of Progress

Shows that a fraught historical process was at work in which Basotho drew on local and global sources of knowledge and how this small nation surrounded by South Africa can serve as a valuable case-study for wider conversations about ‘progress’ and ‘modernization’ in the Global South.


Both place-based environmental history and global intellectual history, this book explores the politics of environment, agriculture, poverty, development, and science in Lesotho. Drawing on diverse experiences with this landlocked, mountainous nation, and based on bilingual archival and oral history research in Sesotho and English, the book examines how Basotho intellectuals, farmers, migrant workers, chiefs, experts, and politicians formed vernacular ideas of
tsoelopele (progress) amid the structural violence of colonialism and capitalism in southern Africa. Rather than a unidirectional flow of ‘enlightened’ knowledge from Europe to Africa, the study shows that a fraught historical process was at work in which Basotho drew on local and global sources of knowledge, from ancestral agricultural practices to colonial soil science and from African American missionaries to African nationalists in Ghana. Basotho ideas about
tsoelopele, it is argued, informed the many political, social, and environmental innovations that enabled survival within a sea of white supremacy and that underpin approaches to development in independent Lesotho. Throughout, the book shows how this small nation surrounded by South Africa can serve as a valuable case-study for wider conversations about ‘progress’ and ‘modernization’ in the Global South.

Table of Content

List of Illustrations


Acknowledgements


List of Abbreviations


Selected Sesotho Terms Used


Introduction

1. Making a Place in the Mountains

2. Animals, Pests, and the Politics of Veterinary Knowledge

3. Forestry in an Imperial Watershed

4. Soil, Progress, and Preserving the Status Quo

5. Agriculture, Knowledge, and Paths of Progress

6. Nutrition in the Era of Decolonization

Conclusion


Bibliography

About the author

CHRISTOPHER R. CONZ is a Visiting Assistant Professor of History at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, USA and a Research Fellow in the Department of History at the University of the Free State in South Africa.