Power in Colonial Africa: Conflict and Discourse in Lesotho, 1870–1960 (review)

Using Michel Foucault's conceptualization of power as a "multiplicity of discursive elements," Elizabeth Eldredge draws upon archival records and oral sources to unveil what she calls the "hidden transcripts" of "self-conscious initiatives" by the Basotho people to determine "their own fates and their own history" (pp. 8, 24). She notes that "no single voice represented all Basotho," and argues that "each individual African voice must be given due weight and consideration" (p. 22). Though she offers acute and perceptive analysis of some periods, the difficulty of articulating the multiple discourses of all such voices throughout a century of Basotho history leads her to offer incomplete and flawed perspectives on others.

The best chapters of the book deconstruct the Basotho and colonial discourses that guided the Moorosi rebellion of 1879, the Gun War of 1880–1881, the resumption of direct imperial rule in 1884, and subsequent struggles among the colonial administration, Paramount Chief Lerotholi, and his uncle, Masopha. Eldredge demonstrates how leading chiefs' public statements and correspondence appear outwardly deferential to colonial authority, but contain covert, and frequently not so hidden, assertions of independent authority and discretion. She shows how Paramount Chief Letsie, whose capabilities were much underestimated by colonial officials and subsequent analysts, hedged his bets to assure the survival of the nation. Letsie, like his successor, Lerotholi, pretended to comply with colonial demands for disarmament while covertly encouraging some sons, brothers, and other chiefs to resist forcefully. Even as the colonial administration deliberately bolstered the power of the paramountcy to promote stability, both these leaders preserved and enhanced their favored positions by claiming to lack the power to reign in their rebellious subordinates.

Eldredge errs, however, in evaluating conflicts within the Molapo segment of the royal dynasty. She does not recognize that evidence from her primary informant, C. D. Molapo, simultaneously incorporates several different discourses and objectives. Molapo alleged that half-brothers Jonathan and Joel Molapo were assigned the role of loyalist and rebel, respectively, by Paramount Chief Letsie. While one dimension of Molapo's comment was about the Gun War period, the second countered Congress Party allegations that Leabua Jonathan's National Party Government, in which he served, was just the most recent case of the Molapo family's betraying the nation to foreign intruders. Not all Basotho view Molapo and the defections of his son Jonathan as dissembling. Moreover, none of Eldredge's informants represented discourses from Joel's line, leading her to portray him and his cause, rightly or wrongly, in unflattering terms. That rivalries within the Molapo lineage were more than a short-term stratagem is illustrated by the fact that, decades later, Joel's descendants aligned with the royalist MFP party, while Jonathan's were at the core of the rival National Party.

After a narrative chapter covering the reign of Paramount Chief Griffith, Eldredge turns to her second analytic focus, Basotho discourses on the phenomenon of medicine murders. These events captured local and global attention during the 1940s and 1950s in the context of colonial restructuring of the number of chiefs and the powers they exercised, as well as two highly controversial succession crises involving the paramount chieftainship. Clearly appalled by the gruesomeness of these murders, Eldredge argues that the Basotho discourse about them "was driven by a divide between those who were the victims and those who were the perpetrators" (p. 184). Having initially criticized Marxist assumptions that "exaggerated the control and dominance of chiefs over their people" (p. 20), Eldredge herself accepts the self-serving testimony of commoners, who claimed to have acted as accomplices solely because of "overt and explicit death threats" from the chiefs who initiated these killings (p. 192). Her analysis lacks the more nuanced understanding that Murray and Sanders (2005) provide regarding the counternarrative about these murders created by chiefs and some radical commoners.

Eldredge neglects many of the "multiple discourses" that she argues are so important. Despite evidence of abuses...