Recycled Fable or Immutable Truth? Reflections on the 1973 Land-Tenure Reform Project in Lesotho and Lessons for the Future

Leduka, Resetselemang Clement

doi:10.2979/aft.2007.53.3.90

Cited by 3 publications

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“…As Quinlan and Wallis (2003) explain, "dualism" gives the false impression that these are distinct political formations, when in fact chiefs are legally and practically entangled with the state in many ways. See also Leduka (2007) and Kapa (2013) for analyses of how dualism works on the ground. Coplan and Quinlan's (1997) essay on the subject represents the fullest account of dynamics between the state and the nation as it relates to the chieftaincy and identity.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…60. Criticism of chiefs dates from the Pim Report in 1935 to the Morse Commission in 1960, and the United Nations in 1965, the British Ministry of Overseas Development in 1967, and the World Bank in 1975 (see Leduka 2007, 94). Lesotho's First Five Year National Development Plan (1970-71 to 1974 asserted this, illustrating that the position was not exclusively a foreign one.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Placing Islam: Geographies of Connection in Twentieth-Century Istanbul

Hammond

2023

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Luminos is the Open Access monograph publishing program from UC Press. Luminos provides a framework for preserving and reinvigorating monograph publishing for the future and increases the reach and visibility of important scholarly work. Titles published in the UC Press Luminos model are published with the same high standards for selection, peer review, production, and marketing as those in our traditional program. www.luminosoa.orgThe Fluvial Imagination CRITICAL ENVIRONMESERNTS: NATURE, SCIENCE, AND POLITICS Edited by Julie Guthman and Rebecca LaveThe Critical Environments series publishes books that explore the political forms of life and the ecologies that emerge from histories of capitalism, militarism, racism, colonialism, and more.Map 3. Map of the Union of South Africa circa 1975, showing the Bantustans. Note that not all Bantustans had been granted "independence" at that time. Dotted line shows the "conquered territories" of Lesotho. Cartography by Jon Caris and Tracy Tien, Spatial Analysis Lab at Smith College. Bantustan boundaries adapted by author from https://commons.wikimedia.org/w /index.php?curid=25392438 by Htonl. Conquered territories boundary digitized by author based on map in Lelimo (1998). Ocean bathymetry made with Natural Earth. All other administrative boundaries and city locations from ESRI Living Atlas. social activity: of imagination, of production, of reproduction. 40Above all, engineering storage requires regular reckoning with contradiction, namely the contradiction between storage and extraction. During apartheid, South Africa sought to store up workers it could tap at any moment. Industry then wanted laborers but not rights-bearing citizens. It needed them close, but wanted them far away. Industry today wants Lesotho's water, but without having to worry about the landscapes from which it issues. It demands minimal impact by livestock, but as I'll show it provides almost no long-term employment, leaving livestock production as one of the few options for rural people living in upstream catchments. South Africa's labor reserves required "upstream" mechanisms to manage their contradictions. 41 Some of these mechanisms were material in nature, while others were symbolic or social. Borders and passbooks, for example, helped regulate the flow of people, while ethnic or national identities helped to justify that regulation. The disciplining of kinship relations, too, for example by prohibiting spouses and children to accompany mineworkers, reinforced miners' status as "temporary sojourners" in white areas. 42 South Africa's water reserve requires similar upstream mechanisms. As during its labor-reserve era, the demands of storage and extraction in this reimagined apartheid infrastructure come into conflict. The contradictions generated by Lesotho's structural position as water reservoir must be managed. Over my sixteen months of ethnographic and ecological field research between 2011 and 2019, 43 I found that such management is in large part an exercise in theorizing environmental proce...

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Placing Islam: Geographies of Connection in Twentieth-Century Istanbul

Hammond

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Women Entrepreneurs in Lesotho

Rantšo

2022

Women Entrepreneurs in Sub-Saharan Africa

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Measuring gender, development, and land: Data-driven analysis and land reform in Lesotho

Fogelman

2016

World Development Perspectives

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This paper focuses on a land reform in Lesotho, southern Africa, to explore theoretical concepts around development, land access, and measurement. The reform, which moved land allocation rights from traditional authorities to market exchange, was sponsored by the U.S. government's Millennium Challenge Corporation [MCC]. The MCC, a U.S. government agency separate from USAID and the State Department, is an international development agency dedicated to "poverty reduction through economic growth." The MCC has demonstrated that it acknowledges "the critical role that land, natural resources and other property assets play in economic development" (MCC.gov), with at least 15 of its funded projects devoting money to land rights. This is substantial, accounting for a third of MCC's 45 partner countries. Among MCC's main foci is "data-driven" development. The MCC contributed $20 million to Lesotho's land reform. That funding was contingent on the passage and execution of Land Act 2010 by Lesotho's Parliament. That law was part of a number of other pieces of legislation that sought to "modernize" (MCC Compact) Lesotho's land tenure system. The land tenure system that existed prior to these laws allowed chiefs substantial power in determining the allocation of land. The MCC and Government of Lesotho (GoL) prioritized passage of these laws, in part to remove a significant remaining power of the chieftaincy. This reflects a longstanding tension between institutions of the state in Lesotho and the chiefs. Of a similar effort at land reform in 1973, R.C. Leduka said "it brings into sharp relief the historically entrenched political and institutional tensions between customary and Lesotho's colonial and postcolonial states" (Leduka 2007, 104-5). Women were a targeted demographic of this development intervention. Women's status in Lesotho is complex and changing. On one hand, a majority of primary school students in the country are girls, and the World Economic Forum regularly ranks Lesotho highly on its Global Gender Gap report. On the other, married women were legally considered minors until 2006. The shape of labor and geography is also changing in Lesotho. Before 2000, a massive number of working-age men traveled to South Africa to work in that country's mining sector. Since the end of Apartheid rule in South Africa, that country's labor market has shrunk significantly to

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Recycled Fable or Immutable Truth? Reflections on the 1973 Land-Tenure Reform Project in Lesotho and Lessons for the Future

Cited by 3 publications

References 10 publications

Placing Islam: Geographies of Connection in Twentieth-Century Istanbul

Placing Islam: Geographies of Connection in Twentieth-Century Istanbul

Women Entrepreneurs in Lesotho

Measuring gender, development, and land: Data-driven analysis and land reform in Lesotho

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