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Book Review
| Imperial Gullies: Soil Erosion and Conservation in Lesotho. By Kate B. Showers. Athens: University of Ohio Press, 2005. xxix + 346 pp. Series in Ecology and History. Illustrations, maps, notes, appendices, bibliographic essay, bibliography, index. Cloth $55.00.
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| Kate Showers carefully documents the history of gulley erosion and its relationship to colonial economies and colonial and postcolonial soil conservation schemes in Lesotho. Imperial Gullies is a thorough well-researched case study that contribes to the work of Melissa Leach and Robin Mearns—Lie of the Land (Oxford, 1996), and James Scott—Seeing Like a State (Yale, 1998). As this book shows, Lesotho is the high-profile dramatic national example linking failed development projects to soil erosion and extreme rural poverty. This is a powerful and devastating critique of colonial and postcolonial soil conservation programs, methods, and administration. The theses are clear: Erosion in Lesotho is a twentieth-century phenomenon brought on by colonial and national economic and development schemes and not the result of local farmers' ignorance and mismanagement. Colonial and national administrators applied projects not with bad intentions, but in haphazard ways with little research or oversight, with disregard for local knowledge, for local social and economic relationships, and for local environments, and with not enough attention to questions of sustainable and appropriate technologies. |
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Kate Showers is a soil scientist, and the book draws on twenty-five years of soil mapping as well as on archival and oral history research on Lesotho. The explanations of soil science are clear—exactly how gullies happened, and how contour furrows produced gullies in certain types of soil with certain types of land use, vegetation, and weather—and the relationship between these very localized combinations of variables and national and international policies and economies. |
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Imperial Gullies both indicts past soil conservation projects and provides a model and data for better future soil science. It presents historical data in a scientific way. Certainly the Basotho voices in chapter 7 are left to speak for themselves. Kate Showers focuses on victimization and resistance, and her generalizations about the Basotho reflect a strong solidarity. But she seems to leave for future analysis questions about what land and landscape meant to local people, and about power negotiations and maneuvering among Basotho (and among other colonial interest groups)—how class, gender, generation, and regional relations changed and played out. |
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There is also a chafe between a historical critique of soil science as a method and ideological product of colonial and postcolonial power, and the promotion of a better soil science as part of the future solution to erosion and rural poverty in Lesotho. Kate Showers advocates a "coherent program of research"(p. 253) that replaces science as ideology, as a method of imperial and national power, with the spirit of scientific inquiry. |
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But can even the spirit of science be brought to bear in rural Lesotho to battle problems of poverty, demography, and global neoliberalism, divorced from the global politics, institutions, and economies that produce scientists, scientific knowledge, and scientists' funding? |
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This is an important environmental history case study and an interesting model for grounding development science in historical contexts, as well as a welcome addition to the historiography of Lesotho. It raises key questions about the relationships between environmental science and environmental history, relationships that continue to be fraught with high hopes and impediments. |
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Kirk Arden Hoppe is associate professor of African and world history at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He does environmental and cultural history of modern East Africa. |
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