The Collapse of Economic Solidarity in the Struggle for Political Sovereignty in Lesotho, 1900s–1960s

This chapter revisits the liberation struggle in colonial Lesotho, then Basutoland. The chapter depends on historical, archival and secondary sources. Led by early political organisations, and thereafter, by political parties, the liberation movement had two major phases: the anti-colonial protests and rise of nationalistic movements (1910s–1940s) and the independence movement (1950s–1960s), respectively. In the country’s historiography, the first phase is treated as the origins of the second phase without interrogation of what the transition lost. This linear progression ignores the pitfalls of the evolution, and effectiveness, of the liberation struggle. I argue in this chapter that the independence movement marginalised economic solidarity built by early political organisations. Focusing on political sovereignty, defined as self-rule, political parties separated the “political” from the “economic”, something that the early organisations did not do. By the time Britain colonised Lesotho, national capitalism had emerged seamlessly blending the nation state with industrial capitalism. By disembedding the political struggle, the independence movement narrowly defined the struggle for emancipation. In their charge, they were trapped in the locus of colonial power embedded in national capitalism. The independence movement inherited the apparatus and logic of colonial power, leaving no room for alternative possibilities. They failed to reunite Moshoeshoe’s binding principles of peace and “Botho” (Ubuntu) broken down by Enlightenment principles and colonialism.