The youth and community groups that were driving many of the grassroots development efforts in Lesotho were popular because they gave participants the opportunity to work for their own conceptions of independence. They also offered a venue for broader national and international imaginings. These groups were self-consciously operating not only against the backdrop of the transfer of political power in Lesotho, but also against continental decolonization, and efforts to end apartheid in South Africa. As Rosenberg and Honeck argue for transnational youth organizations in the Cold War, “youth subjects are less empty vessels for the ambitions of adult organizers than they are complex players with their own agendas, interests, and desires.” Similarly, Basotho political leaders, church leaders, and colonial administrators all hoped that by channeling youthful political, spiritual, and economic energies into organizations run by adults they could control the molding and shaping of political sensibilities, and harness the energies of youth for their own purposes. In large part, they were wrong. Basotho in organizations as diverse as Boy Scouts, Girl Guides, Homemakers Association, University Christian Movement, and the Lesotho Workcamps Association used these organizations as spaces to learn about and act upon their own ideas about independence and development.
Focusing on the actions of individuals in these groups, rather than just the recollections of young Basotho, also helps surmount the methodological challenge of pinpointing the memories of oral informants in specific time periods. People often conflate memories of one failed development project with another because of the long history of project failure in Lesotho. Actions like building infrastructure or service undertaken through school groups are easier to pinpoint in time because of the specificity of the work, and the ability to find corroboration in print about the finished products during the independence era. Thus, these actions serve as a good proxy for understanding how youthful conceptions of independence emerged and changed over time.
The high rates at which young Basotho were participating in groups and their projects challenged state theorists and political commentators who saw a failure of Africans to embrace the idea of nationalism or feel a part of national communities. Widespread, active participation in Lesotho suggests this was less a failure of Africans to grasp the concept of nationhood, or to embrace nationalism, and more a failure of African institutions at independence to deliver on the promises of citizenship and national belonging in forms that people desired. In the early independence period from 1965-70 when democratic institutions prevailed, Basotho of all ages embraced the process of building the nation and state, though their visions split along partisan lines. After the coup of 1970 destroyed democratic institutions like Parliament, Basotho still tried to influence state processes, though their avenues for such ventures were more constrained. In all times and places, Basotho participated in development projects that fit their visions for the nation, or that promised to bring enough benefits to outweigh the costs. They were certainly not “traditional,” afraid of the idea of development, rooted in the past, or unable to look forward, as various official reports from the colonial and independence periods suggested. Rather, people were only willing to participate in projects that aligned with their needs and desires. For many, this meant that they only wished to participate in projects that made room for them to express potentially divergent opinions, gave citizens mechanisms for input into projects, and held out the promise of creating institutions that better served their material and imaginative interests. Basotho in community organizations were willing and able to invest in nationalist efforts, and questions about their desire to do so reflected a failing of the state and international development planners to adequately recognize and be attuned to the rights and desires of a newly independent citizenry.
Despite the differences in what they meant when using the terminology, by the late 1960s and early 1970s a wide swath of Basotho society was communicating their understandings of and dreams for political and economic independence through the language of development. Newly minted citizens found the language of development congenial to making demands on the governments of the day for increased and improved services. Government leaders also utilized the language to press for more funding from abroad, as well as political support at home from citizens for delivering development projects.
That Basotho defined independence by reference to development was only possible because of the groundwork laid by colonial officials, Basotho politicians, and the small but steadily increasing number of educated youth. From the 1950s, these actors deployed the rhetoric of development to link citizenship, independence, and nationalism. The widespread acceptance of the conflation of these three ideas is what this book calls the “rhetorical consensus around development.” While the possibility of rapidly increasing and centralizing state power helps explain why colonial officials and politicians wholeheartedly embraced the rhetorical consensus around development, its ability to spread so quickly to all levels of society owes much to the grassroots activities of Basotho in community groups. Seeing all segments of society not merely accepting the ideas of independence and development, but actively working for them challenges characterizations of African nationalism as “thin,” only a “discourse of protest,” a “banal” sentiment that people felt “lazily,” or a force harnessed only by “militant urban nationalists” for use as the “social and ideological glue” that held together anti-colonial coalitions. While Lesotho is often seen as exceptional on the continent for its supposed ethnic homogeneity, the created nature of the Basotho national community (detailed later in this chapter), and the strength of political rivalries that often correlated strongly with religious affiliation mean that the country is no less “African” or representative for having a larger degree of linguistic and cultural homogeneity. Thus, this study of independence-era Lesotho suggests that African nationalism was both a deeper and more robust phenomenon than others acknowledge, but also that African nationalism took forms that were not necessarily congruent with the interests of the state and government officials.
(excerpted from introduction)
