Just a flea on the Queen's Blanket

Just a flea on the Queen’s Blanket

Today we went to the Kingdom of Lesotho—yes, that tiny little enclave in the middle of South Africa. Its border is very close to where we are in Froiesburg, so it was just a day trip, but we got to drive around most of the country. Our main goal was to see the Katse Dam, the second largest dam in Africa. As anyone who knows me knows, I hate dams. But my family doesn’t really care about that, and I wanted to see the country side, so off we went.

An interesting bit of colonial history: Lesotho became a country under the leader King Moshoehoe in 1822 as his followers settled in what they called Basutoland. Moshoehoe and his people fought agaist the Boers at times and the British at times, defeating both groups, to their embarrassment. Eventually, he appealed to Queen Victoria, asking that his people might be considered “fleas on the Queen’s blanket.” Swaziland and Botswana soon followed, and these three countries became British territories, (which are different from colonies, by the way). Baustoland became independent in the 1960s, when most African countries were achieving independence. Today Lesotho is a Kingdom, and has a constitutional monarchy much like Great Britain, where the monarch is mostly just a figurehead.

So we spent most of the day driving through the Maluti mountains, which are grander than the Drankensburg at around 6,000 feet, and totally gorgeous. The soil there is a rich dark color, and all around were rows and rows of meales (corn) and other crops. Most people subsistence farm with little use of modern technology—we saw only hand scythes and plows pulled by oxen and other draft animals. The houses are small, round brink huts with straw roofs. We also say lots of people herding sheep, goats and cows on the side of the road, and the people rode horses and donkeys. Though extremely poor, everything looked clean and tidy somehow. This is probably because people are just too poor to litter, as they keep every scrap, and it’s not like they have the means to buy disposable things (which brings to mind, how everything in American seems to be made to be disposable). Though the people did not have much, I didn’t see any glaring poverty, akin to the slums of South Africa and Kenya. Actually, set against the beautiful mountainous background, the whole countryside seemed so idealistic. With my own dreams of being a farmer one day, it was hard not to romanticize the whole country…but in reality, it has one of the highest HIV/AIDS rates in the world, and over 40% of the population live beneath the global poverty rate of $1.25 a day. As much as I would like to grow my own food, being a woman under 40, living in Lesotho I would have a 50% chance of having AIDs…and I would not want that.

This is what the Katze dam looks like:

The redeeming part about the dam is that it enables Lesotho to be almost completely independent in energy production. Actually the country’s main exports are the water and electricity created by the dam, which it sells to South Africa. Of course I don’t like dams and I know this one displaced lots of people and had some pretty terrible impacts on the local environment. But it is also hard to hold developing countries to the same standards as developed. And in a country that has basically skipped industrialization, it is important that it is not only independent in energy production, and has the means to be independent economically and not dependent on foreign aid.