School of Social Sciences Virtual Seminar by Dr Chris Conz

Abstract

Both place-based environmental history and global intellectual history, this book explores the politics of environment, agriculture, poverty, development, and science in Lesotho. The book examines how Basotho intellectuals, farmers, migrant workers, chiefs, experts, and politicians formed vernacular ideas of tsoelopele (progress) amid the structural violence of colonialism and capitalism in southern Africa. Rather than a unidirectional flow of 'enlightened' knowledge from Europe to Africa, the study shows that a fraught historical process was at work in which Basotho drew on local and global sources of knowledge, from ancestral agricultural practices to colonial soil science and from African American missionaries to African nationalists in Ghana. Basotho ideas about tsoelopele, it is argued, informed the many political, social, and environmental innovations that enabled survival within a sea of white supremacy and that underpin approaches to development in independent Lesotho. Throughout, the book shows how this small nation surrounded by South Africa can serve as a valuable case-study for wider conversations about 'progress' and 'modernization' in the Global South.

Bionote

Dr. Chris Conz is an American historian whose experience with Lesotho dates back to 2007. In 2024, he published his first book, titled Environment, Knowledge, and Injustice in Lesotho: The Poverty of Progress. Currently, Dr. Conz is researching environmental histories of forced removals in South Africa as a Fulbright Scholar, based at the University of the Free State. Conz has
published articles in Agricultural History, Environment & History, and the Journal of Southern African Studies.