KHOMO LIA OELA: CANTEENS, BROTHELS AND LABOUR MIGRANCY IN COLONIAL LESOTHO, 1900–40

Abstract

AMONG the most critical effects of labour migrancy on a labour reserve economy in southern Africa are the psychological and economic implications the dependence on migrants' earnings, and the prolonged absence of men at the labour centres, have for women. Lesotho is one such case. But Basotho women, for their part, developed various survival strategies in response to their social and economic predicament. Judy Kimble and Philip Bonner have pioneered the study of these responses, but they made no effort to look at the strategies of the women remaining at home. When scholarly attention has been given to the latter category of women, the focus has been on the period after 1940. This study, by focusing on the engagement of Basotho women in commercial beer-brewing and prostitution in Lesotho before the Second World War, intends to address this lacuna. An attempt will also be made to link the rise of these phenomena to social and economic changes in colonial Lesotho, particularly the deepening of dependency on the migrant labour system.