White Gold and Thirsty Communities

The story of the Lesotho Highlands Water Project (LHWP) is a tale both of international diplomacy and of the ways that high politics and the antiapartheid struggle played out—and continue to play out—in the daily lives of the people of Lesotho and South Africa. The LHWP is the result of a 1986 treaty between the apartheid regime in Pretoria and the military regime in Maseru. John Aerni-Flessner traces the twenty-year negotiations leading up to the signing of the treaty, assesses how the Cold War and anti-apartheid struggles shaped those negotiations, and considers the effect of global geopolitical battles on the entire process. He also shows that, while the LHWP can by one metric be judged a success—today the project delivers hundreds of millions of cubic meters of “white gold” per year from Lesotho to Gauteng—it is also a failure in that many communities in both countries still lack access to water. These communities are emblematic of the continuing divide between haves and have-nots that existed during the apartheid era and that persist today.