Cry not for Lesotho

It would be a grand Reparations Day as multinational corporations, companies and individuals that made billions of Rand or Dollars from exploiting millions of labour-hours – and blocked self-realisations – invested for decades by hundreds of thousands of Basotho male workers in mines and farms in South Africa. The quantum of this reparation is hidden […]

It would be a grand Reparations Day as multinational corporations, companies and individuals that made billions of Rand or Dollars from exploiting millions of labour-hours – and blocked self-realisations – invested for decades by hundreds of thousands of Basotho male workers in mines and farms in South Africa.
The quantum of this reparation is hidden in several rude statistics. For a start, the country’s population of 2.067 million (in 2011) hides the millions of children who were not conceived because thousands of able-bodied sexually-active men were trapped away from sexually starved Basotho women and sweating  in gold mines or on farms of white farmers and foreign companies in the United States or Europe. This was a case of silent biological genocide. After 1948 social engineers of apartheid denied these workers the option of bringing along their wives to live with them.
Another brutal statistic is Lesotho having a rape rate of 92 per cent for every 100,000 persons in the population (in 2008). 61 per cent of women reported suffering domestic violence. Males who suffer humiliation, violent treatment by employers and/or the police; earn slave wages and a sense of powerlessness in changing the situation, transfer their frustrations to bashing girl friends or wives. Being jeered or mocked as immigrants who are taking away labour from native South Africans also oils elbows that later hit out at women at home.
75 per cent of Lesotho’s population live in rural areas and, like Swaziland, from colonial rule lost their most fertile lands to foreign companies and white farmers, including those from South Africa. Like colonial Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe and Zambia), Kenya and Algeria, administrative measures were taken to ensure that those forced to live in poverty without access to land sold their labour at slave rate to big land owners. Those who crossed borders to labour in South Africa would be out for 3 to 9 months annually. The brutality in this dynamic is expressed in the report that ‘’almost 50 per cent of the population earn income through informal crop cultivation or animal husbandry’’. Furthermore, ‘’nearly two-thirds of the country’s income’’ is eked from the agricultural sector. Put another way, all the labour expended in South Africa brought such little income that for over a century no industrial multiplier effect had emerged inside Lesotho to generate new employment and higher incomes.
In 1996, the African Development Bank and the World Bank  invested capital in Lesotho Highlands Water Project to ‘’capture, store and transfer water from the Orange River system to South Africa’s Free State and great Johannesburg area’’. This area hosts a big concentration of industries and farmlands. Lesotho’s mountains host snow which melts and feed rivers whose water is harvested outside her own economy. There is no evidence Lesotho charges adequate rent for the economic benefits derived beyond her borders.
Unlike Mount Kenya, these highlands do not have fertile volcanic soils to support farming. Since 2004, diamonds are being mined from locations in the harsh mountains. Unlike Botswana, Lesotho’s leaders have not developed both technical manpower and capacity to cut the diamonds locally and add value to earn more from the export market. So-called ‘’developers’’ have cynically ‘’laid down roads to reach its mineral and water resources’’. The hundreds of thousands of Basotho who over many decades trekked into South Africa had never attracted such ‘’investment’’.
The picture is not all bleak. 95 per cent of females are literate. With 99.7 per cent of the population being Basotho, the government has made Sesotho one of the official languages of administration. With the blockage to the growth of education to black populations across Southern Africa, it is perplexing that successive governments did not, at independence, borrow the Cuban, Japanese and Korean strategy of investing primarily in top quality education from primary to university levels so that she would both export, and mine for local productivity, the brain power of her people.
 Managers of apartheid in South Africa regarded as subversive examples of highly educated human resources brewed in colonial Basutoland. British colonial officials never built a university in the kingdom; a case of ‘intellectual genocide’ against Basotho people for which reparation should be called for. With freezing climatic conditions conducive to indoor intellectual work, Lesotho should borrow from Switzerland’s ploughing of such time into inventions and creating precision instruments, including watches. Lesotho invested similar time into weaving beautiful blankets for domestic use. It is not clear that after independence she sought markets in mountainous Morocco, Algeria, Kenya, Ethiopia, Canada, China, Mongolia or Japan. The country’s creative energies seem to have become frozen inside the inhibitive stomach of racist South Africa.
Egypt, Norway, India and Senegal have rich records of large numbers of their nationals employed by international organisations, notably: United Nations agencies. In Africa, small countries like Gambia, Togo, Benin, Eritrea, Gabon, Uganda, and Djibouti must seek intellectual challenges and visionary elbowroom inside Pan-African institutions. Lesotho and Swaziland are prime examples in Southern Africa. Singapore’s tiny size became fuel for driving her development.
Jingoistic appeals by ‘’People’s Charter Move-ment’’ for South Africa to annex Lesotho, seek to divert attention from reparations by her exploiters.