Ferguson Ch. 2 & 5

Ch. 2 "The Constitution of the object of 'development'- Lesotho as a 'less developed country."

I like the opening of this chapter that basically debunks the World Bank's Report that Lesotho has "bleak economic prospects" and was "so ill-prepared" (WB1975). The following is a list on page 26 the proof that Lesotho was in fact already established- just not in the same way that is measured by the WB.

factors in Lesotho's economy identified in 1910:
money economy
market for Western commodities
plough agriculture
cash/subsistence crops, wool production
airports, roads, schools, churches, hospitals, labor migrant system

In 1910 the area Lesotho stands today is called "Basutoland." Ferguson makes it clear that the WB's description of Lesotho is very inaccurate. He says academic scholars would think it was crazy to say that the country was "untouched" by modern economic development."

Ferguson says: "Academic scholars of Lesotho, of all stripes, acknowledge this transformation [in 1910]. Suffice it to say that it is almost inconceivable that a serious scholar of Lesotho's history could say that Lesotho in 1966 was 'a traditional peasant, subsistence society...' (p.27)

This makes me think about all the guidelines of the WB and how dangerous it is to see things from only one side. If development projects were always based on inaccurate perceptions of developing countries, I would be very skeptical of how helpful they really are and I would not just take information as it is given. When analyzing the state of a country, it is important to look at the history, culture and not only measure progress in numbers. This whole chapter goes on to analyze the rest of the WB's plan titled " Lesotho: A Development Challenge." Ferguson goes on to discuss the preamble and each section of the plan like "the setting," "human resources," "trends in the economy," and "wages," "government operations," "employment" etc.

On "sectors," Ferguson comments that all the sectors have no unity. He says they make no sense unless we see them NOT as a description of an economy, but as a list of things which might potentially be "developed" (p. 49). This would mean that agriculture, mining, water resources, manufacturing industries, tourism, public services, education and banking do not work in unity to make the nation function at its potential. I can see how Ferguson describes the sectors in disarray and how the development agency of the World Bank has a chance to interceded and help out.

I found it humorous that Ferguson (p. 55) compares hasty classifications of LDCs to the following:
(1) all banks have money
(2) every river has two banks; therefore
(3) all rivers have money

the development version is:
(1) poor countries are "less developed"
(2) less developed countries (LDC) are those which have not yet been fully brought into the modern economy; therefore
(3) poor countries are those which have not yet been fully brought into the modern economy

In conclusion to chapter 2, LDCs differ everywhere. The classification of Lesotho as a LDC shapes the way policies are formed and assistance programs are enacted within the country.

Ch. 5 "The Bovine Mystique"

This chapter studies the power, property and livestock in rural Lesotho and takes a closer look at the Thaba-Tseka Project. Cattle is important to people in Lesotho. They highly prize their cattle for religious, social and symbolic reasons. The Westerners saw people keeping their livestock as "backward"- why keep skinny cattle if you can sell them on the market and make some money for yourself?

The puzzling thing to "westerners" Ferguson calls "the Bovine Mystique." Even in times of drought, the Basutos refused to sell their livestock and if they sold for a high market price. People took such pride in their livestock that they would rather die. But it's not that the Basutos were ignorant. They understood the concept entirely. The bottom line was that livestock is not a commodity in Lesotho. Ferguson states that the Bovine Mystique is "the result of the fact that "livestock" is constituted as a special domain of property by cultural rules, the most important of which establishes a "one-way barrier" between the domains of money as livestock" (p. 147).

I think this concept was so surprising to westerners because we would sell our cattle if that meant saving our lives. But to the people of Lesotho, cattle was not people property that could be sold off so simply. This fact would have set an alarm off in my head that the cattle development projects was on slippery slopes. Since a Canadian agency drew up the plans for this, they may not have anticipated the HUGE failure that was to come, because they didn't understand the relationship between the people and their cattle.