| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Sub-Saharan Africa

Kate B. Showers. Imperial Gullies: Soil Erosion and Conservation in Lesotho. (Series in Ecology and History.) Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press. 2005. Pp. xxix, 346. Cloth $55.00, paper $26.95.
The past decade has seen the publication of histories of sugar, corn, happiness, tea, opium, coffee, tears, and clouds. That list is an indication of a shift in the subject matter deemed suitable for historical inquiry. Historians of southern Africa have recently turned to the physical environment as a way of exploring the colonial legacy. Among the notable results are William Beinart's The Rise of Conservation in South Africa: Settlers, Livestock, and the Environment, 1770–1950 (2004) and Nancy J. Jacob's Environment, Power and Injustice: A South African History (2003). In a wider setting there is Alfred W. Crosby's Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900 (1986) and Mike Davis's Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (2001). The new environmental history pays close attention to the workings of colonial science and in that sense it falls into a wider body of scholarship. Some of that scholarship is as distant in time as colonial psychiatry with its concept of the African personality and as recent as research on lung disease among South African gold miners. In each instance, historians have shown how local knowledge and its subtleties has been pushed aside in favor of universal science.	1
Kate B. Showers has written a history of soil and human need in one of Africa's poorest countries, Lesotho. The challenges facing Basotho farmers include droughts, frosts, electrical storms, and erratic rains capable of stripping topsoil from fields in an hour. The political challenges have been even more daunting with the regional dominance of South Africa and its apartheid-based economy. Lesotho is a cold place' and the first thing that strikes visitors is the lack of trees and the deep gullies or dongas that run across the landscape. Those gullies identify Lesotho as one of the most eroded countries in the world and have given the Basotho a reputation as ignorant and uncaring farmers.	. . .

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