"Matekoane ke bophelo" Cannibis is Life: Marginality and survival, a historical analysis of illicit cannabis production by the communities of Mokhtlong District of Lesotho

Abstract

<p> </p><p> This study examines the evolving historical, geopolitical and economic context of illicit cannabis cultivation by the marginalised highlands communities of Mokhotlong district of Lesotho. Mokhtlong is one of the most impoverished districts of Lesotho with a population that has historically operated on the margins of the state and SouthAfrica as either providers of cheap sheep products to the rest of Lesotho or as suppliers of cheap labour to the mines in SouthAfrica. It considers the implications of the supply of cannabis to mainly the Gauteng metropolitan area in South Africa to the Mokhotlong district’s inhabitants’ state of marginalisation. Historically, cannabis production in the highlands resulted in a reproduction of the asymmetrical relations between and inside the metropolitan and mountain areas of both countries. Coalitions of actors merged from these new relations that the cultivation produced, and as such, this article should be analysed as an assemblage in which three distinct scales of territorialities were clashing or cooperating with each other. The article argues that the irregular migrants from Lesotho to South Africa took advantage of the fluctuations of their legal status as they moved between South Africa and Lesotho and the fluidity of the movement across the mountainous border to the migrants and smugglers to traffic cannabis across Lesotho into South Africa. In essence, the article makes the bold claim that cannabis production was one of the key ways in which the borderland communities of Mokhtlong dealt with their economic and social marginalisation.</p>