Golden Threads — clinging to traditional herding culture on Lesotho's scarred and shrinking land

Daily Maverick

14-05-2025

When a culture, whose economy has long been built on each family having a small herd or flock, is crowded into shrinking areas of land, what is left of the commonage?
Are the notoriously overgrazed Lesotho mountains a case of the tragedy of the commons, where too many people selfishly plunder the commonage, taking more than their fair share? Or is the tragedy in the capturing of the commons, where the powerful elite in a society are able to claim large parts of the commonage for themselves, pressing more and more commoners onto smaller parcels of land?
The method of capture could be the notion of a title deed, defended with fences and brute force, or the construction of a nation state that throws a hard political border across grasslands where herders had long moved their animals between summer and winter pastures.
When a culture, whose economy has long been built on each family having a small herd or flock, is crowded into shrinking areas of land, what is left of the commonage? How much can that shared grazing be expected to support all those families? What does this mean for a single community – like South Africa's apartheid-era tribal lands or Bantustans – or a nation state such as Lesotho which is now ring-fenced by a hard border and whose land practices are shaped by how the landlocked country has integrated into South Africa's stronger economy?
It's hard to imagine that the villagers whose homes dot the Lesotho landscape amid neat rows of summer maize and sorghum can feed themselves from such excoriated land.
An erosion gully near Quthing in Lesotho's southwestern lowlands is as deep as the mature trees growing inside it are old. Boom-and-bust cycles of droughts followed by ample rain spells leave the ground open to this kind of scarring.
A farmer near Malealea village has words with a 'herd boy', local parlance for men of any age who mind small cattle herds or flocks of sheep and goats. It looks as though the cows have wandered into his maize fields and helped themselves to some corn on the cob.
Lesotho's population is 2.3 million, and many in rural areas rely on some form of agriculture to feed themselves or earn a bit of an income. Cattle, sheep and goats are more than just a form of currency and savings. They have deep roots in marriage dowries and other customary practices.
Wool was one of Lesotho's most bankable exports a century ago, when the looms of the European war machine couldn't weave fast enough to keep pace with the slaughter in the trenches. Once this traditional herding culture saw the benefit of running flocks of sheep for meat and wool, stock numbers shot up. This simple economics has driven extensive overgrazing that is decades-old and hard to repair.
Another major export: muscle. Lesotho's men have long fed new blood into the conveyor belt of migrant miners in South Africa. Basotho men began investing their earnings in sheep, whose flocks they added to the longer tradition of cattle herding. Then came the mohair boom, which saw the country's stockmen add goat herds to the mix.
With 60% of the country covered in rangelands, today more than half of rural families in the higher mountainous parts depend on wool and mohair for their income, writes soil and conservation specialist Mashekoe Likoti in a 2019 report for the Lesotho Ministry of Forestry, Range and Soil Conservation.
Rangelands experts were concerned about the state of the country's grazing as far back as the 1980s. Things continue to deteriorate because of 'weak institutional arrangements, poor grazing management practices, climatic conditions, overstocking, fire and brush invasion,' according to Lesotho's Department of Range Resources Management.
Soil must be the country's biggest export today, though, but not in a way that tops up the national coffers. Every hour, Lesotho's rivers ship an estimated 4,500 tonnes of fertile topsoil – 'up to 300 lorry loads' – down to South Africa, according to 2016 figures from the European Union. This hefty delivery of an ancient growing medium doesn't benefit the croplands of farmers downstream. Rather, it fills up reservoirs like South Africa's hydroelectric mega-dam, the Gariep, a few hours' drive downriver.
Cattle herding is one of the oldest forms of animal husbandry for indigenous communities in this part of the subcontinent. But the practice of leboella in Lesotho – the widely used system of rotating herds between summer and winter pastures so that the veld can rest and recover – is hard to do when the commonage has shrunk over generations and household numbers have grown. Moving herds in keeping with the needs of the veld is also difficult with the modern-day arrival of fences, notions of private land ownership, or, in this case, the nation state that puts a hard border across traditional herding routes. Many of the old customs that govern how people share grazing spaces have been lost.
The Dutch named it the Orange River, as a tip of the hat to their monarchy, the House of Orange. The Basotho call it the Senqu. Today, 'white gold' is the new money spinner. Lesotho earns about 10% of its gross domestic product from water it ships off to its South African Development Community (SADC) neighbours: South Africa, Namibia and Botswana have thirsty economies and the cash to pay for Lesotho's water.
From the headwaters the Orange-Senqu flows or floods along every twist and turn of an artery that runs just more than 2,4000km from Khubelu, and sponges in northeastern Lesotho, to Alexander Bay, where it spills into the Atlantic Ocean on the South African-Namibian border.
Damaged wetlands and grasslands up here spell disaster locally and downriver: erosion, lost soil, silting of dams, higher risk of boom-bust water flows that cause flooding and damage infrastructure.
Restoring the scar tissue of these heavily damaged grasslands is central to regional climate resilience. It will boost crop production and herd capacity in Lesotho. It'll mop carbon pollution from the atmosphere and contribute to longer-term climate stability. It'll better regulate the water cycle in the Orange-Senqu catchment. It'll also provide natural shock absorbers against extreme events such as droughts and flooding following severe storms.
In his 2012 book, Orange-Senqu Artery of Life, journalist Thomas Kruchem captures the sentiment of an agricultural student who reflects on the lost bond between his people and nature. 'The times when our grandmothers taught the little ones how to live in harmony with nature have gone,' he told Kruchem. 'There is no longer a way to pass on traditional wisdom. People are chiefly interested in how they and their families are to survive.' An academic confirms this, saying that the customs that once 'safeguarded water, fields and pastures have been thrown out of the window, because they are no longer relevant in the economic situation that people find themselves in'.
A farmer near Malealea village in the lowlands points to the Makhaleng River gorge, which may soon disappear under a rising waterline. Locals have long known that a dam was planned for this side, but now it looks as though construction may be imminent. Many families will be relocated, should this happen. The dam is part of a long-standing agreement between Lesotho and Botswana, which will move water through nearly 700km of pipes between the start and end of the scheme.
Sterkspruit on the South African side of the Tele Bridge border crossing looks as heavily napalmed as the Lesotho lowland just uphill from here. The British set in motion a land grab with the 1913 Land Act which after 1948 the National Party stratified further, leaving most of the country's population crammed onto 13% of the land. DM