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.