The Dead Will Rise Against Us

Reflections on the Lesotho Highlands Water Project and developmental logics of displacement.

“The dead are going to rise against us and say, ‘You leave us here, so we could be smothered by water” (Rakotsoane 2009, 10). A sacred place where the living and dead commune, the ancestor’s grave is a guarded site upon which no irreverent action may occur lest the perpetrator wish to suffer severe misfortune. The same is to be said of the family land. Land, under Basotho belief, belongs to the ancestors, the living are merely caretakers. To forsake one’s land, to sell, to resettle, without the permission of the dead, is sacriligeous. To treat land as a commodity is a betrayal of the Basotho life system. Yet this betrayal was the very foundation of the Lesotho Highlands Water Project. 

A multibillion dollar binational project between the nations of Lesotho and South Africa, the Lesotho Highlands Water Project [LHWP] set out to channel Lesotho’s water into South Africa via systems of tunnels and dams. The project was touted as a solution to South Africa’s water shortages and Lesotho’s poverty; it would provide infrastructure, capital, wage labor jobs, and electricity to the rural “undeveloped” Lesotho. However the wealth that the Lesotho Highlands Water Project promised to generate, was wealth that necessitated the destruction of the indigenous Basotho life system in order to be realized. 

Whereas Basotho peoples see the land as a living entity with which they have a reciprocal relationship with, capitalist economic systems imported via pathways of imperialism view land in Lesotho as a commodity to be mined for profit. Visions of land diametrically opposed cannot co-exist peacefully. Therefore, it was inevitable that when the Lesotho Highlands Water Project, born of the ideological system which viewed land as commodity, arrived in the ancestral lands of Basotho peoples, the indigenous Basotho life system had to be wiped out to allow for the capitalist vision of land to be realized.

The history of the Lesotho Highlands Water Project is a violent one whose origins can be traced to British colonial rule. Sir Evelyn Baring, the British Royal Commissioner to Lesotho in the 1950s, was the individual to identify Lesotho’s abundant water supply as a resource that could be mined to create a mutually beneficial economic partnership between Lesotho and South Africa. When Baring identified the “benefit,” he never envisioned it to include indigenous Basotho peoples. Baring saw their land, and extension indigenous livelihood, as something to be ravaged for the benefit of colonial governments and their profit driven economic systems. 

Baring’s concept for a profit seeking venture was picked up again in the 1980s by the governments of Lesotho and South Africa. The Lahmeyer MachDonald Consortium, a consortium of French construction companies, conducted the final in depth study in 1983 that concluded the dam would be an enriching asset to both nations. While this study was conducted decades later, it was still founded upon the exact same capitalist logic which viewed land as commodity. Therefore, what was deemed “enriching” was deemed so under standards not held by the indigenous Basotho peoples occupying the land. The beneficiaries of the project were always intended to be colonial regimes and those allied with them. 

This was made violently clear in the bloodshed that took place in order to push the binational project through. The newly independent civilian Lesotho government had no interest in working with the colonial apartheid government of South Africa. So South Africa, desiring Lesotho’s natural resources, endorsed a coup to overthrow Lesotho’s civilian government. It was through this coup that the future of the LHWP was secured.

Assessments of what constituted economy, wealth, and enrichment which undergird the LHWP were all assessments made from the perspective of elite capitalist beneficiaries, not the perspectives of indigenous Basotho peoples. Rural peoples in Lesotho tirelessly protested the project to no avail. Their ancestral homelands were destroyed, their ecosystems were irreparably damaged, and as a result their quality of life was dramatically decreased. 

Many seem to lament that the project was a failure, that it never accomplished what it set out to. But I’d argue these complaints are a-historical. All of the assessments that deemed the LHWP a lucrative project were assessments made from a capitalist imperialist viewpoint set up to extract natural resources for profit. This viewpoint and logic of extractivism is diametrically opposed to the life systems of indigenous Basotho peoples. If we consider that the LHWP’s true aims were to brutalize indigenous life as a means of enriching capitalist agents, we discover that the LHWP was in fact a success.

Having uncovered these violent aims as the project’s foundational intent, we must ask how the proprietors of the Lesotho Highlands Water Project ever managed to market destruction as salvation? Since Basotho conceptions of land were diametrically opposed to the conceptions of land as commodity, the project had to disavow indigenous worldviews as incorrect in order to set up a situation that would justify their forceful reconfiguration of Basotho land and life. 

The disavowal of indigenous lifesystems involves discursive acts of representation which distort the reality of Lesotho in ways that justify intervention. As Feruguson writes in his work The Anti-Politics Machine “discourse deals not simply with ‘the facts’ but with a constructed version of the object’” (Ferguson 1990, 29) and “interventions are then organized on the basis of this structure of knowledge” (Ferguson 1990, xiv). The structure of knowledge undergirding the Lesotho Highlands Water Project was a system of knowledge that defined wealth in terms of the transformation of life into capital. Because indigenous Basotho peoples did not adhere to this system of knowledge they were constructed as impoverished. The fact that they were not integrated into a capitalist society was constructed as a deficit, a problem in need of correction. Promotional literature for the Lesotho Highlands Water Project paints Lesotho as poverty stricken and in desperate need of economic development. This despite the fact that rural Basotho peoples were being sustained from living in reciprocal relationship with their ancestral lands. The reconfiguration of Lesotho as “impoverished” distorts the reality on the ground through asserting that indigenous Basotho peoples are inadequate at sustaining life and using their land productively. 

I write affirmatively that this assertion is a distortion because Basotho peoples are in fact experts at living in reciprocal relationship with their ancestral lands in a manner that sustains life. The LHWP sought to make Lesotho land economically productive. Yet, making land economically productive in a capitalist sense necessitates the destruction of land’s productive capacities to sustain life. As Mbembe writes, “the domination of politics by capital has resulted in the waste of countless human lives and the production in every corner of the globe of vast stretches of dead water and dead land” (Mbembe 2016, 8). The Lesotho Highlands Water project was an explicitly extractivist project, aiming to extract water to generate capital. Extractivism, which is the process of removing large sums of natural resources for profit, is a capitalist enterprise that results in extreme environmental degradation. The Lesotho Highlands Water Project eradicated plant species, made wild vegtables inaccessible, drowned entire fertile valleys and arable lands, and drove herds of animals onto small plots resulting in overgrazing.

Cash, infrastructure, wage labor, electricity: these things LHWP promised did not enhance the lives of indigenous Basotho peoples. Furthermore, not having these things prior to the project did not make the Basotho peoples impoverished. What the LHWP really meant when they described “impoverishment” was impoverishment on the grounds that indigenous Basotho life systems were not integrated into capitalist systems of economy and governance. The process of assimilating Basotho peoples into these structures via the Lesotho Highlands Water Project involved forced ressettlement and the reconfiguration of land as capital. Reconfiguring indigenous lands as capital is a genocidal project because the life system of indigenous Basotho peoples relies on the social uses of land. The land provides spiritual connection, medicine, food, community, home. The land sustains indigenous life so when The Lesotho Highlands Water Project took indigenous peoples rights to their land away, it destroyed indigenous Basotho life in the process. 

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