‘The Country has Eaten Wool’: Nutrition, Environment, and Decolonization in Lesotho

• In Event: Extraction, Nutrition, and the Challenges of Environmental Control in Southern Africa.

Abstract

Surrounded by South Africa, Lesotho offers a case for thinking historically about the relationship between extraction, intensifying drought, nutrition, and justice in small nations. Before the current diamond mines and the Lesotho Highlands Water Project which captures water for export to South Africa, the wool industry had exploited grasslands in the name of national progress; a program that emphasized livestock as commodities rather than as food. Nationalist leaders planned for futures in which their people would achieve health and prosperity through modern development. This model meant new industrial projects and bolstering wool production as Lesotho’s economic engine. While new infrastructure focused on this extractive endeavor in the 1950s and 1960s, nutritional diseases increased. The local proverb, naha e jele boea (the country has eaten wool), indicated how people understood this contradiction. As Basotho elected their leaders in 1965, another drought created a food crisis that shaped policies and the volatile politics in the first years of independence. In this context, a cast of characters that included nationalist politicians, ordinary women and men, and international experts from the FAO and OXFAM, produced knowledge, debated policy, and struggled for themselves and for Lesotho’s future as an independent nation. This paper draws on diverse written and oral sources and forms part of chapter six in my forthcoming book, titled The Poverty of Progress: Environment, Knowledge, and Injustice in Lesotho.

Author

• Christopher Conz, College of the Holy Cross