In a remote mountain village in Lesotho, the beautiful Dikosha lives for dancing and for song, setting herself apart from her fellow villagers. Her twin brother, Radisene, works in the lowland capital of Maseru, struggling amid political upheaval to find a life for himself away from the hills. As the years pass, Radisene's fortunes rise and fall in the city, while Dikosha remains in the village, never leaving and never aging. And through it all, the community watches, comments, and passes judgment.

She Plays with the Darkness

The Sanctuary. High up on the mountain, the Sanctuary is a place of refuge. It is a place where humans save dogs, who, in turn, save the humans. It is a place where the past does not exist, where hopelessness is chased away, where the future hasn’t been written, where orphans and strays can begin to imagine a new meaning for “family.” 

Evie is making her way to the Sanctuary. She has lied to gain entry. She has pretended to know more than she does about dogs, but she is learning fast. Once the indomitable Mrs. Auberchon lets her pass, she will find her way. Like the racing greyhound who refuses to move, the golden retriever who returns to his job as the Sanctuary’s butler every time he’s adopted, and the Rottweiler who’s a hopeless candidate for search-and-rescue, Evie comes from a troubled past. But as they all learn, no one should stay prisoner to a life she didn’t choose. 

This is the story of two women and a whole pack of dogs who, having lost their way in the world, find a place at a training school—and radical rescue center—called the Sanctuary. It is a story of strays and rescues, kidnappings and homecomings, moving on and holding on and letting go. And it is, ultimately, a moving and hilarious chronicle of the ways in which humans and canines help each other find new lives, new selves, and new hope.

The Mountaintop School for Dogs and Other Second Chances

A compelling and unique autobiography by an African woman with little formal education, less privilege, and almost no experience of books or writing. Mpho's voice is a voice almost never heard in literature or history, a voice from within the struggle of "ordinary" African women to negotiate a world which incorporates ancient pastoral ways and the congestion, brutality, and racist violence of city life. It is also the voice of a born storyteller who has a subject worthy of her gifts - a story for all the world to hear.

Singing Away the Hunger: The Autobiography of an African Woman

Funny and heartfelt, this amalgamation of memoir and essay collection tells the story of twenty months the author spent in Lesotho, the small, landlocked kingdom surrounded by South Africa. There he finds a spirit of joyful absurdity and resolve, surrounded by people who take strangers’ hands as they walk down the road, people who―with sweetest face―drop the dirtiest jokes in the southern hemisphere. But Lesotho is also a place where shepherds exact Old Testament retribution, where wounded pride incites murder and families are devastated by the AIDS epidemic.

Driven by a spirit of openhearted cultural exchange in the style of Bill Bryson’s "In a Sunburned Country" and Alexandra Fuller’s "Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness", Will McGrath’s "Everything Lost Is Found Again" is a love-drunk ballad to Lesotho, infusing humor and heart into pop ethnography.

Everything Lost Is Found Again: Four Seasons in Lesotho

The Basotho kingdom emerged and consolidated in the dramatic and dangerous environment of nineteenth-century South Africa. Elizabeth Eldredge explores its transition from chiefdom to kingdom to the British colony of Basutoland. She provides a rich description of local agriculture and craft industries, including an analysis of the roles of women in production and politics. Emphasizing the resourcefulness of the Basotho, the book describes how they united in their struggle to sustain their society and economy in the face of political and environmental threats.

A South African Kingdom: The Pursuit of Security in Nineteenth-Century Lesotho

How we buried Puso is a novel which deals with themes characteristic of post-colonial African literature - identity, spirituality, community, and Africanness. It examines the impact of exile on the individual and the community, as well as the related problem of alienation. The themes of colonialism and dispossession are presented through Molefe's, often rather wry, observations. The manner in which the recent history of Lesotho is narrated is a graphic take on the neglect of Empire, and the understated cynicism of the narrator's tone is extremely eloquent.

How We Buried Puso

Development, it is generally assumed, is good and necessary, and in its name the West has intervened, implementing all manner of projects in the impoverished regions of the world. When these projects fail, as they do with astonishing regularity, they nonetheless produce a host of regular and unacknowledged effects, including the expansion of bureaucratic state power and the translation of the political realities of poverty and powerlessness into "technical" problems awaiting solution by "development" agencies and experts. It is the political intelligibility of these effects, along with the process that produces them, that this book seeks to illuminate through a detailed case study of the workings of the "development" industry in one country, Lesotho, and in one "development" project.Using an anthropological approach grounded in the work of Foucault, James Ferguson analyzes the institutional framework within which such projects are crafted and the nature of "development discourse," revealing how it is that, despite all the "expertise" that goes into formulating development projects, they nonetheless often demonstrate a startling ignorance of the historical and political realities of the locale they are intended to help. In a close examination of the attempted implementation of the Thaba-Tseka project in Lesotho, Ferguson shows how such a misguided approach plays out, how, in fact, the "development" apparatus in Lesotho acts as an "anti-politics machine," everywhere whisking political realities out of sight and all the while performing, almost unnoticed, its own pre-eminently political operation of strengthening the state presence in the local region.James Ferguson is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of California at Irvine.

The Anti-Politics Machine: "Development," Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho

An oral autobiography compiled from interviews with 89 year old JJ Machobane, who spent 13 years in Lesotho researching an agricultural system that would allow its impoverished farmers to harvest food year-round.


Drive Out Hunger

In "Dreams for Lesotho: Independence, Foreign Assistance, and Development", John Aerni-Flessner studies the post-independence emergence of Lesotho as an example of the uneven ways in which people experienced development at the end of colonialism in Africa. The book posits that development became the language through which Basotho (the people of Lesotho) conceived of the dream of independence, both before and after the 1966 transfer of power.

While many studies of development have focused on the perspectives of funding governments and agencies, Aerni-Flessner approaches development as an African-driven process in Lesotho. The book examines why both political leaders and ordinary people put their faith in development, even when projects regularly failed to alleviate poverty. He argues that the potential promise of development helped make independence real for Africans.

The book utilizes government archives in four countries, but also relies heavily on newspapers, oral histories, and the archives of multilateral organizations like the World Bank. It will interest scholars of decolonization, development, empire, and African and South African history.

Dreams for Lesotho: Independence, Foreign Assistance, and Development

This historical dictionary provides comprehensive entries on historical events and personalities and focuses especially on the Basotho who have shaped Lesotho's development rather than on colonial officials and other expatriates. Greatest attention is given to the events, institutions, issues, personalities, places and external relationships of the post-independence era. The bibliography introduces a plethora of newer publications about Lesotho that have supplanted the rather sparse published literature previously available. An extensive chronology of Lesotho's evolution is included.

Historical Dictionary of Lesotho

Hill of Destiny The Life and Times of Moshesh, Founder of the Basotho

As global health institutions and aid donors expanded HIV treatment throughout Africa, they rapidly scaled up programs, projects, and organizations meant to address HIV and AIDS. Yet these efforts did not simply have biological effects: in addition to extending lives and preventing further infections, treatment scale-up initiated remarkable political and social shifts.

In Lesotho, which has the world's second highest HIV prevalence, HIV treatment has had unintentional but pervasive political costs, distancing citizens from the government, fostering distrust of health programs, and disrupting the social contract. Based on ethnographic observation between 2008 and 2014, this book chillingly anticipates the political violence and instability that swept through Lesotho in 2014.

"This book is a recipient of the Norman L. and Roselea J. Goldberg Prize from Vanderbilt University Press for the best book in the area of medicine."

Mistreated: The Political Consequences of the Fight Against AIDS in Lesotho

Just before Christmas in 1920, six people sat down to a meal at Morija, headquarters of the Paris Evangelical Missionary Society in Basutoland (Lesotho). All six were taken violently ill, and one of them died. They had been poisoned. The dead man was �douard Jacottet, an eminent scholar and missionary. There was no trial and subsequently no one was ever convicted of the murder.Who killed Jacottet? Drawing on the great tradition of the "locked room" detective story, Tim Couzens sets out, eighty years after the event, to solve the crime. Why was Jacottet killed? The answer lies buried deep in the past and is revealed here -- for the first time -- in a tale of heroism and courage, of sacrifice, deception, betrayal, and faith.

Written and researched with extraordinary care, this is a brilliant piece of detective work, but it is also much more. It is the biography of a deeply committed man, and a history of the Christian mission he served in an isolated African country to whose people and language he devoted his life before it was brutally cut short in strange circumstances. And the story is a national and religious epic, enclosed in a classical tragedy tempered with the sardonic smile of comedy.

A compelling, groundbreaking study, "Murder at Morija" is the outcome of many years of travel and detailed inquiry by its author in pursuit of elusive solutions to complex mysteries.

Murder at Morija: Faith, Mystery, and Tragedy on an African Mission

Lesotho Political History, and Governance: Economy and Environmental layout

This is the story of the Kingdom of Lesotho and its struggle with Apartheid South Africa. It starts with the Soweto uprising and follows two youths as they flee across South Africa to Lesotho. In Lesotho they are helped by ANC members and finish their studies and go to Roma University. Their behaviour is witnessed by a British lecturer and his black wife.The couple experience the tensions, fears and terror that spread throughout the region. As South Africa's patience with Lesotho ran out for harbouring ANC bases, especially Chris Hani, they decided on military action. Initially a fierce attack on reported ANC bases took place - the Maseru Masacre. This only made Lesotho more uncooperative. South Africa waited as the ANC divided between the military wing and the more aggressive young comrades. The latter subjected students and staff to the rules of the townships using kangaroo courts and threats of necklacing. When the government of Lesotho was getting unpopular South Africa attacked the fuel and food supplies and closed the borders, effectively beseigning Lesotho. As the lack of food and fuel took effect the Lesotho Army took power to establish a compliant regime. Shortly afterwards the Lesotho Prime Minister died in prison. Violence is widespread. Mysteriously President Samora Machel of Mozambique dies in an aircrash. Then during the visit of Pope John Paul II to Southern Africa gunmen occupied the British High Commission in Lesotho and threatenned the Pope. Hundreds of less prominent people disappeared or were murdered. Ritual murder and witchcraft re-emerged often explained as traditional herbal medicine. In the end violence engulfed everybody making some flee, some suffer, while others were driven nearly insane or died, Only when the post Apartheid era brings justice will these wounds heal.

...and None Were Innocent: Unreliable Memories of Lesotho's Struggle Against Apartheid

Sarah's bored with her American life, as well as all the traffic and big box stores. She accepts a Peace Corps invitation to volunteer in exotic Lesotho in southern Africa. The idyllic, seven thousand foot mountain village of Malikeng has ambitious residents with limited choices. A pious neighbor brews homemade beer to sell at her backyard shebeen; a handsome neighbor grows dagga between rows of maize. Problems in the past were taken care of by the chief or the sangoma (traditional healer), but a new generation would rather do it their way---with consequences. Some decisions seem medieval to Sarah, and she's caught in a spiral of deceit as her first year progresses.

Spiral Aloe: Deceit in Lesotho, Africa's Mountain Kingdom

Innocents in Africa: An American Family's Story

The book describes some intensely human events in which the author was involved during a period of working in Lesotho, Southern Africa. It provides a collection of interesting and often humourous personal anecdotes which, though based upon his own factual experience are, in many respects, remarkably fiction-like in their content. All the people described are real people and the events are real events. Nevertheless it has been thought prudent, in most cases, to substitute fictional names for those of the individuals involved in order not to embarrass those people who, after all this time, may still be around in Lesotho or elsewhere.

Abroad in Lesotho

MY AFRICAN ROOTS-My beautiful LESOTHO: Lesotho Tourist destinations photograph booklet

"This is the first comprehensive economic history of the Basotho people of Southern Africa (in colonial Basutoland, then Lesotho) and spans from the 1820s to the present day. The book documents what the Basotho have done on their own account, focusing on their systematic exclusion from trade and their political efforts to insert themselves into their country's commerce. Although the colonial and post-colonial periods were unfavourable to the Basotho, they have, before and after colonial rule, launched impressive commercial initiatives of their own, which bring hope for greater development and freedom in their struggle for economic independence"--

Lesotho

She Plays with the Darkness

Zakes Mda

The Mountaintop School for Dogs and Other Second Chances

Ellen Cooney

Singing Away the Hunger: The Autobiography of an African Woman

Mpho M'Atsepo Nthunya

Everything Lost Is Found Again: Four Seasons in Lesotho

Will McGrath

A South African Kingdom: The Pursuit of Security in Nineteenth-Century Lesotho

Elizabeth A. Eldredge

How We Buried Puso

Morabo Morojele

The Anti-Politics Machine: "Development," Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho

James Ferguson

Drive Out Hunger

Robert Berold

Dreams for Lesotho: Independence, Foreign Assistance, and Development

John Aerni-Flessner

Historical Dictionary of Lesotho

Scott Rosenberg

Hill of Destiny The Life and Times of Moshesh, Founder of the Basotho

Peter Becker

Mistreated: The Political Consequences of the Fight Against AIDS in Lesotho

Nora Kenworthy

Murder at Morija: Faith, Mystery, and Tragedy on an African Mission

Tim Couzens

The Anti-Politics Machine: "Development," Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho

James Ferguson

Lesotho Political History, and Governance: Economy and Environmental layout

Stanley Bradford

...and None Were Innocent: Unreliable Memories of Lesotho's Struggle Against Apartheid

Robin H. Meakins

Spiral Aloe: Deceit in Lesotho, Africa's Mountain Kingdom

L.A. Forbes

Innocents in Africa: An American Family's Story

Drury Pifer

Abroad in Lesotho

Francis R. Denson

MY AFRICAN ROOTS-My beautiful LESOTHO: Lesotho Tourist destinations photograph booklet

Christoph Bonga

Commerce as Politics: The Two Centuries of Struggle for Basotho Economic Independence

Sean Morenakemang Maliehe

My Life In Basutoland

E. Casalis