Critical Reflections on Physical Culture at the Edges of Empire

Abstract

instructive to hear how and why this transition happened, and what challenges these women faced and continue to face. Maliehe’s book fills a lacuna in Lesotho’s historiography by providing a narration of Lesotho’s history fromMoshoeshoe to the present. Not since Gill’s 1993 survey, which is a difficult book to find outside Lesotho, has a historian attempted such a feat, and Maliehe is to be commended for succeeding admirably. But it is not just Lesotho specialists who should read this book, as its exploration of the linkages between politics and economics has lessons that cut across national boundaries in twenty-first-century southern Africa. The book, especially the last few chapters, is a damning indictment of the injustices of colonial rule, but also of the economic mismanagement of the political classes since independence. Writing about rigid national boundaries and policies that seem to benefit only politicians and senior bureaucrats, Maliehe notes that ‘rigid constructions of national identity work mostly for the rulers, not the majority who continue to struggle to break through forces confining their self-determination’ (161). Setting the long-term story of the Basotho struggle against a variety of foreign dominations in commerce, Politics as Commerce not only points out where political decisions have disenfranchised the majority, but also points to the potential for grassroots efforts, mass mobilisation, and mobile money to help make a better future for Basotho individuals and Lesotho as a whole.