Abstract:
This dissertation reconstructs a history of the greater Qacha’s Nek district of
Lesotho, southern Africa from 1880 when farmers first settled the area, until 1965
on the eve of independence from Great Britain. This place-based study speaks to
broader questions. How have people incorporated new and often foreign ideas into
existing beliefs and practices? How did a person’s social position affect how they
interacted with new ideas? How have people applied knowledge to make and
remake environments such as in gardens and fields? This study is based on field
research in Lesotho, South Africa, and the United Kingdom. The author examined
archival materials including colonial records, agricultural reports and surveys,
national council proceedings, and vernacular newspapers. During four months of
rural fieldwork in Lesotho the author collected oral histories, took photographs, and
participated in village life.
The approach focuses on colonial government interventions into agriculture
and pastoralism. These interventions serve as sites for examining historical changes
in how Basotho people engaged with the non-human world. In so doing, the study
makes three main interventions. First, the claims are situated within scholarly conversations about local knowledge, science, and environment under colonialism.
Second, the stories of chiefs, farmers, and government employees told here extend
the literature on Lesotho’s political and economic history by highlighting the nuance
of local politics, ecology, and agency. Finally, to contribute to the environmental
historiography on Africa and rural places in general, the study probes the interplay
of culture and nature. To do this, it narrates how people deployed eclectic
knowledge to build, rebuild, and redefine environments.
The dissertation argues that the compilation of environmental knowledge
must be understood as a historical process that encapsulates the meanings that
people have imbued the landscape with, for example, by building homesteads, along
with how people have understood the landscape as a system of resources to be used
economically for subsistence and market purposes. These aspects of knowing are
part of a single process that has unfolded, and continues to unfold, along a temporal
trajectory that has varied across different social groups, such as men and women
and chiefs and commoners.
