http://repository.tml.nul.ls:80/handle/123456789/173 Mon, 02 Jan 2006 13:02:41 GMT 2006-01-02T13:02:41Z http://repository.tml.nul.ls:80/handle/123456789/1417 “Wisdom does not live in one house”: compiling environmental knowledge in Lesotho, Southern Africa, c.1880-1965 Conz, Christopher This dissertation reconstructs a history of the greater Qacha’s Nek district of Lesotho, southern Africa from 1880 when farmers first settled the area, until 1965 on the eve of independence from Great Britain. This place-based study speaks to broader questions. How have people incorporated new and often foreign ideas into existing beliefs and practices? How did a person’s social position affect how they interacted with new ideas? How have people applied knowledge to make and remake environments such as in gardens and fields? This study is based on field research in Lesotho, South Africa, and the United Kingdom. The author examined archival materials including colonial records, agricultural reports and surveys, national council proceedings, and vernacular newspapers. During four months of rural fieldwork in Lesotho the author collected oral histories, took photographs, and participated in village life. The approach focuses on colonial government interventions into agriculture and pastoralism. These interventions serve as sites for examining historical changes in how Basotho people engaged with the non-human world. In so doing, the study makes three main interventions. First, the claims are situated within scholarly conversations about local knowledge, science, and environment under colonialism. Second, the stories of chiefs, farmers, and government employees told here extend the literature on Lesotho’s political and economic history by highlighting the nuance of local politics, ecology, and agency. Finally, to contribute to the environmental historiography on Africa and rural places in general, the study probes the interplay of culture and nature. To do this, it narrates how people deployed eclectic knowledge to build, rebuild, and redefine environments. The dissertation argues that the compilation of environmental knowledge must be understood as a historical process that encapsulates the meanings that people have imbued the landscape with, for example, by building homesteads, along with how people have understood the landscape as a system of resources to be used economically for subsistence and market purposes. These aspects of knowing are part of a single process that has unfolded, and continues to unfold, along a temporal trajectory that has varied across different social groups, such as men and women and chiefs and commoners. Mon, 22 May 2017 00:00:00 GMT http://repository.tml.nul.ls:80/handle/123456789/1417 2017-05-22T00:00:00Z http://repository.tml.nul.ls:80/handle/123456789/300 The role of the non-farm sector in rural development in Lesotho Rantšo, Tšepiso Augustinus Thesis submitted in accordance with the requirements for the Philosophiae Doctor degree in the Faculty of Economic and Management Sciences (Centre for Development Support) University of the Free State Bloemfontein January 2014 Wed, 01 Jan 2014 00:00:00 GMT http://repository.tml.nul.ls:80/handle/123456789/300 2014-01-01T00:00:00Z http://repository.tml.nul.ls:80/handle/123456789/294 Community participation in health education programmes: A case of study of a tuberculosis programme in the rural communities of Thabana-Morena, Lesotho Molale, Mosemote G. A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Social Work in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Sociology. Sat, 01 Sep 2012 00:00:00 GMT http://repository.tml.nul.ls:80/handle/123456789/294 2012-09-01T00:00:00Z http://repository.tml.nul.ls:80/handle/123456789/232 Consolidating Democracy through integrating the Chieftainship Institution with elected Councils in Lesotho: A case study of four community councils in Maseru Kapa, Motlamelle Anthony This study analyses the relationship between the chieftainship institution and the elected councils in Lesotho. Based on a qualitative case study method the study seeks to understand this relationship in four selected councils in the Maseru district and how this can be nurtured to achieve a consolidated democracy. Contrary to modernists‟ arguments (that indigenous African political institutions, of which the chieftainship is part, are incompatible with liberal democracy since they are, inter alia, hereditary, they compete with their elective counterparts for political power, they threaten the democratic consolidation process, and they are irrelevant to democratising African systems), this study finds that these arguments are misplaced. Instead, chieftainship is not incompatible with liberal democracy per se. It supports the democratisation process (if the governing parties pursue friendly and accommodative policies to it) but uses its political agency in reaction to the policies of ruling parties to protect its survival interests, whether or not this undermines democratic consolidation process. The chieftainship has also acted to defend democracy when the governing party abuses its political power to undermine democratic rule. It performs important functions in the country. Thus, it is still viewed by the country‟s political leadership, academics, civil society, and councillors as legitimate and highly relevant to the Lesotho‟s contemporary political system. Because of the inadequacies of the government policies and the ambiguous chieftainship-councils integration model, which tend to marginalise the chieftainship and threaten its survival, its relationship with the councils was initially characterised by conflict. However, this relationship has improved, due to the innovative actions taken not by the central government, but by the individual Councils and chiefs themselves, thus increasing the prospects for democratic consolidation. I argue for and recommend the adoption in Lesotho of appropriate variants of the mixed government model to integrate the chieftainship with the elected councils, based on the re-contextualised and re-territorialised conception and practice of democracy, which eschews its universalistic EuroAmerican version adopted by the LCD government, but recognises and preserves the chieftainship as an integral part of the Basotho society, the embodiment of its culture, history, national identity and nationhood. A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements of the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy of Rhodes University Wed, 01 Dec 2010 00:00:00 GMT http://repository.tml.nul.ls:80/handle/123456789/232 2010-12-01T00:00:00Z