South to Clocolan. Saturday 1/12, Joburg and Clocolan
-I’ll try to give as clear of a picture as possible of what I learned about Lesotho from my time with the workers on this farm and with the Mashologu family, but a lot of it will come in jagged bits and pieces, not an entirely linear narrative. It’s kind of like Pulp Fiction in that way, but not in any other way–no bloody cars, heroin overdoses, cheeseburgers, gimps, or diner robberies…so it’s actually really not like Pulp Fiction at all, sorry if I got your hopes up. Just be patient and enjoy learning about Lesotho, and where it fits into the broader story of southern Africa, at the same pace I did.
Early in the morning, I thank Vin for everything before going to meet Steve. Steve leads us in a quick prayer one more time before I order a Taxify to take us straight to the minibus station we found yesterday, and I hand Steve my cash ahead of time to get my ticket. Our driver, Victor (black), is originally from Limpopo in the northeast of the country and tells me he’s been grateful for the opportunity he now has in Joburg. He curses the minibus taxis, which I can now see from being in a car on the road with them how crazy their driving really is. Steve and I jump out, I haul my backpack on and we hurry into the alleyway to the ticket window, where some other people are waiting too. Steve sorts out my ticket, and I feel a huge sense of relief and gratitude once more for my friend as the driver loads my backpack into the minibus-taxi-van-whatever vehicle thing. I get one of the front seats that will give me a solid view of the open road.
“I’m happy you have a good seat,” Steve says. “I’m just happy to have any seat,” I remark as I get in. I thank him again half a dozen times for all his help, but we’ll see each other in two months when I come back before flying back home. These longer distance minibus things work on a loose schedule, so they don’t get going until all seats are full; I wait for another fifteen minutes for the last couple seats to fill, and of course Steve waits with me. As the engine finally fires up, Steve gives me a double fist-bump through the passenger window, and the minibus pulls out and accelerates into Joburg traffic, acting as if pedestrians, who scatter out of the way like pigeons, don’t exist at all. Soon enough we’re on the highway, speeding south across gentle plains towards Lesotho.
At one point the minibus gets pulled over by some police for some kind of routine ID check. The two cops (black African) chat casually with the driver, and they’re surprised to see a white guy among the dozen passengers. “Benjamin…Sumner…Victor…” he reads amusedly from my passport. He asks what my business is, less interrogating me and more asking out of his own personal interest. I tell him I’m going to work on a farm for a couple weeks. “You’re a farmer?” he asks, looking me up and down. I think back to Daher dubbing me a farmer two months ago, in the hills above Nahallin, south of Bethlehem. “Yep,” I grin back. I guess I am. That’s good enough for the cop. He remarks that my English sounds very different before he and his partner let us keep going, and the rest of the ride is pretty uneventful. The driver is friendly but keeps the windows open most of the time, so I can’t hear him talk much over the roar of the blowing air. The bus makes stops in some towns, and also passes by some less formal shanty-town like settlements here and there. After four hours the landscape starts to get a bit more jagged as we get closer to Clocolan, the mountains of Lesotho faintly rising in the far distance. Vuyo texted me earlier the gas station he would meet me at; I have the driver drop me off there. Some of the other passengers pass my backpack up to me, smiling, and as the minibus continues on to Lesotho, Vuyo Mashologu pulls in and calls over to me through his window.
Vuyo is almost 40, and his English is very good. He briefs me on the farm, though some of the information I learn from him and his father when he picks me up three weeks later. His parents bought the farm from a white family back in 2002, though his family doesn’t work it themselves; they hire a bunch of full-time workers. Recently the family decided to start hosting volunteers through WWOOF on the internet, more for the benefit of the wwoofers, as they have enough workers to keep the farm running. Vuyo works most of the time in Maseru, the capital city of Lesotho less than an hour away across the border, where he and his family live. One of the full-time workers, Makatsang (pronounced more like “Magazang”), is with us in the car, though his English isn’t as good. We pick up some groceries from a supermarket in Clocolan, but other than that I don’t get to see much of the town. Vuyo mentions that that town has been growing more in recent years as people move off their farmland.
I say a bit more about WWOOF (Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms) back in the long-winded introduction to the blog. Obviously my time on the farm near Bethlehem was through the Tent of Nations initiative, but the other farms I’ll be working on throughout this year I’m arranging through WWOOF. What’s worth noting about the WWOOF website for South Africa is that of the 75 farms available across the country, only 2 of them look like they’re run by black Africans based on their names and languages listed, even though they’re the overwhelming majority of the population. This alone shows the larger reality of land ownership in the country still being in mostly white hands.
The topic of farm attacks—black Africans attacking white farmers—as part of South Africa’s overall crime has recently been making rounds in international media. When I was buying my backpack back home in October, the guy at the counter straight up said to me, “be careful there man, I hear they’re killing white people down there” when I told him which countries I was going to. One episode of that Dark Tourist show on Netflix that I mentioned has the host travel in South Africa and meet a right-wing white supremacist militia dedicated to defending their people from the threat of “white genocide.” And of course, Donald Trump brought the most attention to the issue with some of his tweets, probably after seeing it covered on Fox.
But the counterpoint is that of course, if whites still own most of the land, then any farm that gets robbed will most likely be owned by white people. And Vuyo himself points out that some of the few black-owned farms have been attacked as well. He thinks that, rather than being part of some larger racially charged campaign, farm attacks are mostly just motivated by poverty like other crime, and sometimes more of a personal issue; someone robbing a farm in the dark at night has to know where everything is, the barbed wire fences, the alarms, the dogs, the animals, the valuables. Therefore a thief has to have some inside knowledge of the farm’s layout, so Vuyo and others think that in many cases the thieves used to work at the target farm, didn’t like their bosses and got fired, and came back to attack the farm as revenge. Anyway, I will thankfully be quite safe from becoming a victim of white genocide over the next couple weeks. Vuyo says that this area has been pretty safe, and the farm is quite small, while it’s the bigger, more profitable farms that probably tend to be more of a target. Most importantly, Vuyo seems like a nice guy, so I don’t think there are many vengeful ex-employees out there who’d want to do his farm any harm.
The farm is just a ten-minute drive further down the main road, then onto a dirt path towards a nice stretch of land at the foot a big rock mesa. I get to meet four other workers, some of whom are fixing up the plumbing for my bathroom in my own little cabin. In addition to Makatsang, there’s Mpho (pronounced mm-Po, the ph doesn’t make a “f” sound here), Ka Moho, and two guys named Tapero. They’re all about my age, except Ka Moho’s approaching forty. A lot of Basotho (the main ethnicity around here) cross the border from Lesotho to work jobs in South Africa, though more Basotho actually live in South Africa than in Lesotho, which is only populated by less than 2 million. I’m also fascinated to learn that all of these guys on the farm, except one of the Taperos, are of the Baha’i Faith. Vuyo and his family are as well, so they’ve hired several members of the local community in Lesotho. More on all that later. Also, very important: Lesotho (along with Basotho, and Sesotho, their language) is pronounced “Leh-SOOT-hoo.” The t and h don’t combine, and for some reason it’s spelled with o’s and not u’s.
Vuyo briefly points out the different areas of the farm to me, but he leaves most of that to the other guys for tomorrow, and he drives back to Maseru. I settle in to my cabin and see a bit more of the farm before sunset. There are a couple fenced patches with bountiful crops inside, including a little forest of grapevines. Chickens and ducks get free range in the main yard during the day, living at peace alongside a couple of farm dogs. An expanse of cornfields stretches further out alongside the mesa, surrounded by grazing pastures for a flock of almost fifty sheep. I then hear the heavy footsteps and lowing of a bunch of cows, and am delighted to see Mpho and some of the others herding almost forty majestic brown and black cattle up from pastures back by the main road and back into the farm. A flock of thirty geese also returns after a day out for their dinner in their enclosure, along with the chickens and ducks.
Makatsang mostly takes charge of preparing dinner tonight, while a couple of the others haul out a frozen sheep carcass from a freezer and saw off part of it for him to cook. They’ve got an open fire with an old bicycle wheel on top as the stove, where Makatsang boils the chewy mutton and some mashed beets, and he also gets a big pot of pap going, which I now know how to eat with my hands from the place with Steve back in Joburg. I get to know the guys a bit, and they’re curious to know more about my story and what brings me here. Whenever asking about life back at home, they always refer to the US as “your side,” as in the other side of the Atlantic. They have varying levels of English; Ka Moho has the best, and is the most talkative in either language. Over dinner they all mostly chat in Sesotho together, and even though I can’t understand them I can tell Ka Moho is the clown of the group, always saying something that brings a chorus of chuckles from the others, imitating other peoples’ voices and gestures with his body. I also begin to get friendly with the bigger dogs, giving them scraps, as well as Dalvi, a littler but very pregnant one.
On the frontlines of “white genocide?” Sunday 1/13 to Sunday 1/20, Clocolan
Sunday the farmhands usually rest, so there’s not much to do just yet. They only take care of the essentials, mostly feeding the animals and letting them out to roam. Two other guys come by the farm though, Abel and Simon (not Baha’i), and they don’t live on the farm like the others. They’re a bit older, and seem to have more farming experience; usually one of them is the leader by default for what has to get done on any given day. Abel’s English is pretty good, and he invites me to join him and Tapero as they go for a hike up the mesa to gather some herbs. The brother dogs follow us, and even little Dalvi drags her prego doggo body up the steep and wooded cliffside. Abel points out the streams flowing a spring that feed the farm. After seeing all the besieged and parched farms in Palestine, I don’t take water access for granted anymore. The top of the mesa gives a magnificent view of all the surrounding farmland and other mesas. Abel and Tapero pick some herbs that Abel says can help with pimples and flu symptoms, as well as with “pleasing a woman,” he smirks. I didn’t find out though which part of the equation that herb affects–with a male’s performance or with a female’s enjoyment.
The next day I get to work. Of course one of the things I help out with right away is cleaning up poop again—though this time, for almost fifty sheep, a much bigger task than the poop from the chickens and one single donkey I did back near Bethlehem. Thankfully I’m not alone; I work alongside a couple of the others in scraping and sweeping the entire sheep pen. I find that all the shed wool that mixes with the sheep shit actually makes it a bit denser and dryer, easier to clean up. For the next few days after that, the main project I help with is clearing the old soil in patches filled with old crops and weeds so new things can be planted. A lot of unharvested onions, potatoes, and beets fly up into the air as we turn the soil with shovels and pitchforks, and the old bushels get thrown over the fence for the sheep to eat. The work is pretty similar to how I would prepare the land for planting with Daher, except that was in late autumn up in the chilly hills of the West Bank, while down here I’m working in the brutal summer sun. Some days I just keep my showers cold, even though there is hot water.
Later in the week I also get out into the cornfields, first onboard a tractor with Abel and Simon while they use the plough to turn the soil between the rows for the water to get in better. I keep an eye on the claws in the back to make sure they stay in line between the rows without ripping up any of the crops. Later in the week I join them in hacking away at weeds between the cornstalks with hoes so they don’t sap all the soil’s nutrients and water for themselves, which we keep doing into next week. I also start helping feed the fowl when they gather for their evening meal, the geese honking loudly as they approach. I usually work no more than 5 hours a day (the standard time for most farms through WWOOF), as this farm isn’t in the same desperate situation as the Nassers’ farm. I don’t have as much responsibility as I did with the Nassers either, which I actually miss a bit.
Even though the farmhands often cook outside on the old bike wheel over the fire, they don’t live in squalor on the farm. There is an actual stove in the kitchen, which is in a nice one-floor building with a comfy lounge, and the cabins are pretty nice. We eat pretty well, with all the mutton available along with the pap, homegrown beets and spinach often on the side, and plenty of eggs for breakfast. People take turns cooking, though I don’t have experience cooking mutton. We also forage for a prickly pear that grows on cacti in the area, which they call droveli, and lots of wild green peaches and blackberries. I’m a pretty happy farmer. During free time the guys watch a lot of movies from the 80s through the 2000s recorded on VHS tapes in the lounge. They’ve clearly seen Gladiator, Johnny English, and Beverly Hills Cop many times. There’s also some more obscure ones, like Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt’s Seven; some random kung-fu movies; Little Nikita, an 80s Cold War thriller about an American boy who finds out his parents are Soviet sleeper agents; a dramatization of the 1989 United Airlines Flight 232 crash and rescue; a documentary about the descendants of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson; and of course the Steven Seagal B-movie crime flick Out for Justice, one of their favorites. It certainly is an interesting range of western cinema.
In addition to the movies, some of the guys (Ka Moho especially) put on tapes of old recorded news reels, mostly of events in South Africa. They watch the footage of Mandela’s inauguration and the festivities around the end of apartheid in 1994, as well as some coverage of the Oslo Accords between the state of Israel and Palestinian leaders. They also watch some footage of events from the 1990s in Lesotho, especially around meetings between politicians, financiers, journalists, and UNESCO people planning the Lesotho Highlands Water Project, designed to export water to Johannesburg and the rest of nearby South Africa. Ka Moho though says he and many other Basotho aren’t fans, knowing that the money just circles back to politicians and businesses involved, not doing much to help out the average citizen.
“Look at them, they’re not even paying to attention to what the person speaking is saying,” Ka Moho says casually, pointing at the attendees of a conference. “They’re all just there to clap, eat, and get paid.” He ties it back to the corruption across all of Africa. There were some protests this past year in Lesotho, mostly in Maseru (being the only real city), and some benefits and pay increases were given, but Ka Moho says it’s still not enough to meet living costs. “There are five rich people in the country who alone have more money than the government does,” he adds. It should also be noted that foreign corporations involved in the economy here have done their fair share of adding fuel to the fire of corruption; some 18 American and European companies were charged with bribing Lesotho officials for contracts in the LHWP back in the ’90s.
Ka Moho often decompresses too by watching videos about the Baha’i faith, and he gives me some pamphlets to learn more about he faith, though he puts no pressure on having me join–Baha’is are prohibited from proselytizing. He’s a cool guy in general, starting to do beekeeping on the farm, and he also DJ’s back in Lesotho and remixes music. Unfortunately I never get to see the bees, as he soon goes on vacation back to visit family in Lesotho.
The Basotho Baha’i. Monday 1/21 to Thursday 1/31
I continue helping out with the weeds in the cornfields into the next week, as well as feeding the fowls and cleaning their enclosures, which I have enough experience with. I don’t work much with the bigger livestock, though I do help them corner an untamed horse for Mpho to jump on and tame. I also get to go along once with some of them to herd back the cattle one afternoon. On our way we open a gate for another farm’s pickup truck, and they give us a lift in the back. The cattle are familiar with them, and respond well as we surround them, gently whistling. They’re pretty docile on the half hour walk back from the pasture, though one of the bulls tries to mount a female while crossing the road, and I have to take care not to step in any of their piles of poop they leave behind them on the trail.
As for the sheep, one of them dies suddenly in their field one day, and a couple of the guys have to haul its carcass onto the roof of a shed for the night so no other animals come to start scavenging it. Thankfully I don’t have to help with that; some green bile leaking out of the sheep’s mouth drips onto Makatsang’s arms while they lift the body. Vuyo stops by the next day to check out the sheep and bring some more groceries. Towards the end of my second week, I also go on a small adventure with Abel and Taper to get some corn feed for all the birds. We drive the tractor to a neighboring estate with a huge warehouse full of corn and grains that we fill into sacks to take back on the tractor. That farm and its warehouse looks like it’s run, and most likely owned, by white people.
In my free time, besides watching old movies on VHS with the others and taking in the scenery outside, I get to read a bunch of the stuff that Vuyo’s family has left in the lounge. There are some magazines about Lesotho’s history and heritage, old editions of magazines talking about current events and politics across Africa, and most notably a lot of pamphlets and books about the Baha’i faith. I had only heard a little about the Baha’i before, but it really is fascinating, and I’ll talk about it here more than I thought I would because it’s relevant to many of the people I met during these few weeks. In short, Baha’i believe that most major religions come from the same divine source, but that they took on different forms for the cultures in different places, and times, around the world. They believe that Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and even Hinduism, Buddhism, and Shinto are all true, with all their prophets being different messengers from the same ultimate God, but that the time has come for humans to move beyond their different religions and unite in one faith.
This whole thing started over 150 years ago in Persia with the Prophet Baha’u’llah, and spread further under his son, Abdu’l Baha. Over the decades the faith has grown to 8 million followers in a huge range of countries, which is pretty impressive for a new religion in the modern age, especially since they don’t actively proselytize people to join. They don’t have many strict rules besides abstaining from drinking and fornication (though they don’t say you should be severely punished if you break those rules), since those things in short lead to more drama and regretted decisions. Because of their theology of unity, the faith and its followers make a very big deal about countering racism and other types of prejudice, actually ending poverty and not just charity, and breaking down nationalism and uniting cultures, including gradually building a better global government (Alex Jones would have a cow, or perhaps a frog, at that last one). One of my favorite ideas I come across relating to this is “unity, not uniformity” between all peoples.
The Baha’i emphasis on genuine altruism and real community projects dedicated to uniting people and fighting bigotry shows in the stuff I read, and it really shows in the character of the faith’s followers, including the ones who I meet. Ka Moho, Makatsang, Mpho, and one of the Taperos, with their differing English levels, all say how much they want to see humans unite and rise above their differences and fears of one another. Unfortunately I didn’t get to talk with them too much about their paths to the faith (it does seem that most of them didn’t have Baha’i parents, but heard about it themselves and chose to join), as most of them go on vacation during my last week to their hometowns hours away in the mountains to the east in Lesotho, which also would have been cool to hear about, but they don’t return until after I finish my time on the farm. They also all express a desire to visit the Baha’i world center in Haifa, Israel/Palestine, and do a year of service there, though getting there is very expensive for them. Ntsiki, Vuyo’s father, visits one morning and leads a small discussion for the four of them about one of the Baha’i world organization’s latest pamphlets, about world peace in the context of the 100-year anniversary of World War I ending. Ntsiki and I talk for a bit too, but I’ll talk about him when I get to know him a bit more when I stay with Vuyo’s family after I leave the farm.
Other than that, there’s not too much that goes on during the last week as most of the guys go to visit their hometowns in Lesotho. Simon and Abel come sometimes to take care of some things, I help them whack some prickly weeds in the sheep field, and the other Tapero (not Bahai) is still here too but doesn’t speak much English. Dalvi gives birth to half a dozen puppies, which she nurses in a little nest under a bunch of tree roots. I continue helping with the ducks, chickens, and bloody loud geese. Thankfully I’ve got plenty to read, and my phone also came downloaded with a Spider-Man game and Asphalt Nitro, an intense 3D racing game, to keep me busy. I also get to meet Themba, Vuyo’s uncle, when he visits one night. He’s interestingly a convert to Islam, while his several brothers (except Ntsiki) are still Christian. He’s pretty well traveled himself, and likes to talk a lot about African and global politics, but he’s not all serious, grinning a lot of the time and joking around. As a kid Themba also had experience with traditional and more organic farming methods with his family, and he tells me about how they didn’t even need enclosures for a lot of the crops and livestock, who knew which plants they were supposed to eat and which they weren’t. They also had different sounds for fowls and beasts, who knew to respond to the calls. While traditional pastoral life is never easy, Themba laments the loss of these kinds of skills with the rise of big farms and agribusiness.
The Mashologus of Maseru. Friday 2/1 to Sunday 2/3, Clocolan, Maseru area, and Ladybrand
Friday morning Vuyo Mashologu comes to pick me up. It’s been an enriching and rejuvenating few weeks, and I’m ready to see some of Lesotho for a couple days before heading west to Cape Town. Vuyo was just on a business trip out around Cape Town (he works managing gambling over sports and racing), and he gives me some tips for traveling around there next. He also talks to me about his personal experience with the Baha’i faith, and says that right now his 14-year-old son isn’t that enthusiastic about it, but it’s for him decide. As I said it’s less than an hour’s drive to Maseru just over the border, Lesotho’s capital. Unfortunately the really high mountains for which the Mountain Kingdom gets its name are further east in the country, but I still get nice views of some rocky peaks rising up around the small city.
The Mashologus host me for another night night. They’ve got a nice place, not too surprising with Vuyo’s work as well as Ntsiki’s (engineering), and of course they’re able to own a farm. Most of the next couple days I spend with Ntsiki, Vuyo’s dad, though I also get to briefly meet Vuyo’s wife, as well his mother. When I politely ask how long she’s been Baha’i for, she tells me that she’s actually Christian—Anglican—not Baha’i like her husband. Ntsiki takes me out for a late lunch at a mall, and while it’s pretty modern with some fancier fashion and electronics stores, I notice that Ntsiki stops by a tailor’s shop, where plenty of people have their regular clothes mended–you’d never find a tailor in a mall back in the US, unless it was for fancier clothes like suits and dresses. Ntsiki fills me in a bit more on agriculture in Lesotho, how British colonial taxes and other pressures caused many Basotho men to leave Lesotho to work jobs in South Africa, especially in the gold mines around Joburg, for more money. This of course disrupted traditional rural life. Communities of farmers used to graze their animals together on the same land, but now everything is all fenced off and constrained, not just the big corporate farms but many small family ones as well. And of course Ntsiki has noticed the effects climate change here, summers getting hotter.
Saturday Ntsiki takes me for a really great day of sightseeing in the areas surrounding Maseru, and Vuyo’s son Ponzo comes along. Maseru itself is more like a large town, informal with just some office building, though there’s a pretty big manufacturing district that I’ll see on Sunday. Even close to the city center some herdsmen cross the roads with their cattle, and vendors sell fruit and roasted corn at intersections. As we escape the city though the countryside quickly opens up, and there are even more cattle herds. While in the city most people wear jeans and t-shirts with writing printed on them, the further we get from the city the more traditional clothing we see, robes and tunics with different colors (not too bright) and pointed straw hats, though there are still some people wearing more western stuff. Some clusters of traditional huts with thatched roofs also appear among the more modern little houses.
Ntsiki first takes me by the town near where he grew up, Morija. He shows me where one of the first French missionary schools started almost 200 years ago, as well as the first major printing press. There’s also a small museum, even though I had heard that there’s not a single museum yet in the whole country, with artifacts going back to the colonial period and the Mfecane, the “scattering” from when the Basotho and other groups fled from Zulu expansion further east. and it talks about some of Lesotho’s unique history as separate from South Africa. Interestingly, as the Dutch Boers encroached on Basotho land, King Moshoeshoe actually enlisted the British to protect them against the Dutch. So that’s one time the British can say they were actually asked by a colonized people to intervene. He also converted to Christianity, as many leaders around the rest of Africa and other continents did when met with Europeans. Ntsiki shows me the old missionary school of Morija he went to, as well as the country’s first printing press nearby.
Next Ntsiki takes us to Thaba Bosiu, the site of King Moshoeshoe’s mountain fort that he defended successfully against the Boers in 1865. His descendant Moshoeshoe II, with his supporters, also occupied the place a hundred years later in protest against the legitimacy of the country’s then-government. I climb up the small mountain with Ponzo while Ntsiki hangs out in a café at the bottom. Ponzo hasn’t been very talkative, even though his English is pretty good, but he seems to enjoy this adventure. Up at the top there are still some stone ruins from the fort, as well as the grave of the first King Moshoehoe himself. On the way back home, we drive past the palace of the current king, Letsie III. Vuyo then brings me to Maseru’s Baha’i house of worship in the evening, where I’ll get to stay for the next night in one of their guestrooms, and I get to see Makatsang again there too. I thank Vuyo for everything before he heads off.
I briefly meet Makatsang’s wife, also a Baha’i. It’s mostly a quiet night, though Makatsang and I go out to grab some groceries to prepare for dinner, and I get to see some of the foods stalls and vendors that have popped up around the nearby factories. The next morning I get to join a Baha’i devotional gathering, a nice and informal setting where people share different prayers, some specifically from Baha’i writings but a lot from scriptures of the other religions that Baha’is recognize as legitimate. About a dozen people congregate, including Ntsiki, and a couple of them are white (expats, though there are a few white people in Lesotho who were actually born here). One of them, an older American guy named Cal, takes me out for brunch. I say farewell to Ntsiki and thank him again before joining Cal, who tells me about about his travels working with different Baha’i communities around the US before coming to support the Baha’i presence and work here in Maseru. I tried to make a little donation to the house of worship at the devotional, but they politely rejected my money–they only accept donations from actual Baha’i followers. I myself would strongly consider joining the faith if I were part of a larger religion, like Hinduism or Islam, but I have a tight connection to still being Jewish because of how few of us there are in the world.
Back at the Baha’i house, Makatsang takes me for a little stroll around the factory district nearby. It’s not the most charming place, but it’s interesting to see especially because of all the factories with Chinese characters on them. Chinese companies are of course getting more involved across the whole continent, as my new Huawei phone shows. I did see what looked like a a couple Chinese businessmen around town yesterday with Ntsiki, and Makatsang tells me most of these are Chinese-owned textile factories. We now see by daylight the villages of stalls which we walked through last night. It isn’t news that China has been building its presence in sub-Saharan Africa for some years now. Makatsang says that many Basotho in Maseru are thankful for the jobs they’ve gotten from the new factories. But many of them have been striking for the past few years for better conditions and pay. Lesotho is also probably taking loans from China, just like many other African countries are, and Chinese companies have gained much influence to those that get trapped in debt, in some cases seizing control of ports like in Djibouti, just like how American and Europeans companies did when they were first imperializing the world last century. Lesotho being landlocked doesn’t have any ports to seize, but when will the Chinese debt collector come knocking at the door of Maseru’s commerce?
Anyway, that’s enough of my Thomas Friedman op-ed-like speculation (hopefully I wasn’t as incoherent as him). I have a bus ticket to Cape Town from Ladybrand, a town on the South African side, tonight. Makatsang helps me flag down a shared taxi that will take me back to the border, and I quickly say thanks (kea leboha, sadly one of the only Sesotho phrases I picked up) and goodbye to him as I jump in. The shared taxi here is just a regular-sized car, with other passengers going on other trips. I get to the border and wait in line for a while, going through customs on each side of the bridge as it starts to rain. There are plenty of vendors setting up shop next to the lines on each side, selling food as well as umbrellas and SIM cards, and I do as the Romans do and have some roasted corn while I wait. At the other side I get into a good old minibus taxi, which drops me off at a gas station to wait for the bus heading west to Cape Town.
I was not able to get anywhere close to a full understanding of Lesotho, politically separate from surrounding South Africa, its past or its future. But I have seen some of the general in the particular, the overall patterns of postcolonial Africa here in one little country—corruption, fueled by western companies, as Ka Moho pointed out with the water and dam project; and a new chapter of exploitation by Chinese companies, as Makatsang showed me with the factories. And caught in the middle of it all, the traditional rural way of life in decline, as the Mashologu family showed me with their own modest farm in Clocolan surrounded by the growing behemoth of agribusiness, that blessing and curse that makes our food cheaper but strangles small farmers and ruins ecosystems.
Foreign Fields 