Topping out over 3,000 metres above sea level, the Drakensberg and Maluti mountains bordering South Africa and Lesotho are frequently covered in snow in winter. Back in 1975, German and South African investors planned to build a ski resort there.
There was just one problem: whose land was it?
At the time, the site of the planned resort was in a territory called QwaQwa. This was one of the “bantustans” designated as an “ethnic homeland” for Sesotho-speaking people by South Africa’s apartheid government. The ski resort was to be a showpiece economic development project.
But Lesotho, QwaQwa’s independent neighbour, laid claim to the land.
A seven-year diplomatic dispute followed and the resort was never built. Despite this, the resort had serious consequences for southern African History. It helps us understand the apartheid regime’s turn toward violence against its regional neighbours, and Black South Africans in the townships in the 1980s.
We have spent decades examining the political history of South Africa and Lesotho, the kingdom that’s entirely surrounded by South Africa. We have also published articles on borders and bantustans, the territories which were reabsorbed into South Africa at the end of apartheid in 1994.
Our latest research examined how Lesotho’s long border with South Africa influenced foreign relations during apartheid. We found that small southern African states found ways to thwart apartheid foreign policy despite South Africa’s importance to their economies.
We used a Promotion of Access to Information Act request to South Africa’s Department of International Relations and Cooperation. This lengthy process was necessary because the department no longer transfers files to the National Archives. Its records are not generally available to the public.
Based on our findings, we argue that the failed ski resort project helped shift apartheid South Africa’s foreign policy. When diplomacy failed, the regime took a more militant and aggressive stance.
The ski resort dispute has never before been identified by historians as an important consideration used by apartheid officials when they started launching large-scale cross-border military raids into neighbouring countries. One such raid on 8-9 December 1982 in Maseru left 42 people dead.
Shifting alliances
Lesotho’s prime minister Leabua Jonathan had been one of South Africa’s strongest diplomatic allies after his country’s independence from the British in 1966. He hoped to get direct economic assistance from South Africa to modernise agriculture and start industries. However, the apartheid regime was unwilling to support independent Lesotho. While they appreciated having a diplomatic ally, they did not want to spend money on development projects in a black-run state.
Economic development in Lesotho would have been a direct threat to South Africa’s efforts to put industrial facilities on the borders of its 10 impoverished homelands or bantustans, where the regime wanted blacks to live without any political rights in South Africa, separate from whites.
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By the early 1970s, Jonathan and Lesotho realised that an anti-apartheid foreign policy could be financially lucrative as western states looking to show their opposition to apartheid gave significant amounts of foreign assistance to the states in South Africa’s orbit. So, after 1971, he took Lesotho down the road of open diplomatic resistance to apartheid.
His government had, from 1974, allowed South African liberation leader Chris Hani to live in Maseru, Lesotho’s capital. From there Hani recruited cadres and organised guerrilla attacks in South Africa. This infuriated the apartheid regime.
Failed ski resort
QwaQwa was growing rapidly in the 1970s. Its 24,000 residents in 1970 increased to about 200,000 by 1980 as Sesotho-speaking South Africans were forcibly moved there. However, QwaQwa had limited land and few economic opportunities.
Thus, the ski resort proposal was designed to draw tourists to QwaQwa and provide jobs. Its planning coincided with the escalation of the guerrilla struggle against apartheid South Africa, especially after the Soweto Uprising of 1976. Lesotho’s claim to the land made investors hesitant to start construction. Its security forces also made forays into the area to evict South African security guards protecting the partially built resort.
Further, starting in 1979 the Lesotho Liberation Army, a group trying to overthrow the Lesotho government, operated from bases in QwaQwa. The army had support from the South African Police. Its guerrillas used the ski resort property to cross into and initiate attacks in Lesotho.
By the 1980s, the ski resort was a diplomatic battleground, as well as the site of two small battles between the Lesotho Defence Force and the Lesotho Liberation Army. These skirmishes took place in February 1980 and September 1982. The 1980 battle took place just days after Lesotho announced new diplomatic relations with the communist Soviet Union — a provocative move as the South African government saw communism as the greatest threat to apartheid.
Military aggression trumps diplomacy
Diplomatic efforts to resolve the dispute took place from 1975 to 1982. Foreign affairs officials from Pretoria and Maseru met repeatedly. Nothing they did resolved the tension of Lesotho claiming the ski resort land. Lesotho officials pressed this claim, however tenuous it was under international law, as part of their anti-apartheid policy.
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After the second skirmish in QwaQwa between Lesotho Defence Force forces and the Lesotho Liberation Army in September 1982, the ski resort plan was quietly ended. No ski resort exists in QwaQwa today. However, this was not the end of the story.
The ski resort dispute caused South African security officials to more closely scrutinise Lesotho’s support for liberation forces and its new diplomatic ties with the Soviets. In the later months of 1982, a South African security patrol found that Lesotho soldiers were using a “temporary base” within South African territory in their fight against the Lesotho Liberation Army.
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This caused alarm among South Africa’s diplomats. They and the security forces clearly wanted a military response. A foreign affairs official wrote that the regime had “levers” to use.
On 8-9 December 1982, the South African Defence Force launched the Maseru massacre. The 42 killed included members of the African National Congress, non-political South African refugees, and at least 12 Basotho who happened to live nearby.
The ski resort dispute was not the only source of tension between Lesotho and South Africa, and did not cause the Maseru massacre by itself. But the records we have unearthed suggest for the first time how it contributed to the decision to launch the raid.
The Maseru massacre was the first large-scale cross-border raid by the apartheid regime that led to significant civilian casualties. Thus, it marked an escalation in the apartheid regime’s resolve to go after people it deemed to be its enemies anywhere in the region. The mid-1980s saw cross-border raids into Mozambique, Botswana, Zimbabwe and Zambia, in addition to ongoing conflicts in Namibia and Angola.
The ski resort dispute, and its escalation into deadly military force, shows how apartheid diplomats abdicated their responsibility for finding peaceful solutions in the 1980s. Walking away from negotiations with Lesotho, and calling in the security forces, showed them to be deeply implicated in the violence that would mark the 1980s in southern Africa.
