Morgan Sherburne:
Welcome to the Michigan Minds Podcast, where we explore the wealth of knowledge from faculty experts at University of Michigan. I’m Morgan Sherburne, a public relations representative for the Michigan News Office. I want to welcome Brian Stewart, an associate professor of anthropology and curator of African Archaeology, who’s here to talk about his work in Lesotho and the effects of the Trump administration’s tariffs on the small African country. Welcome, Brian, to Michigan Minds Podcast. Thanks for being here.

Brian Stewart:
It’s a pleasure.

Morgan Sherburne:
Lesotho has been in the news recently for President Trump’s comments on its size and importance and for imposing high tariffs on the country. Many Americans have probably never heard of it. What should we know and what do we import from them?

Brian Stewart:
Lesotho, it’s a really small country. It’s about the size of Belgium. It is totally surrounded by South Africa. That in itself is worth knowing because it’s one of the only countries on the planet that is totally surrounded by another country that also doesn’t have access to the sea, like the Vatican, like Monaco. There’s very few independent sovereign states that have this kind of situation.
It’s a super beautiful mountainous country. The fact that it’s mountainous is related to why it’s its own country. It has to do with defense against colonial forces and others during the 19th century. It is a very mountainous country. Actually, another thing worth knowing is that it has the highest low point of any country in the world. A lot of people equate it to Switzerland, so people say the Switzerland of Southern Africa.
But in Lesotho they say Switzerland is the Lesotho of Europe. And it’s just got an amazing, really fascinating story of resistance against colonial forces wrapped up in how it came to be. And then more recently, and people may not know this, its fashion and overall history and ethnogenesis was inspirational for the Wakanda Forever in Black Panther movie series. The blankets that it’s famous for feature really heavily in those costumes in that movie.
Lesotho’s tariff rate by President Trump as announced was one of the very highest in the world, coming in just under China at basically 50%. And again, the formula to do this was based on the trade deficit. But of course, the trade deficit with Lesotho is very large because America is very wealthy and can afford to import all sorts of stuff from Lesotho, and it does, and Lesotho is very poor and can’t afford to import that much as many people have pointed out.
And that’s the reason for the trade deficit, not because Lesotho doesn’t want to import from the US as some kind of penalizing sentiment. Far from it. So what does the US import from Lesotho? It’s primarily textiles. Lesotho is a major producer of textiles, things like denim, knitted wool suits, t-shirts, but also precious stones, especially diamonds. Lesotho has a lot of diamonds.
Most of them are not super high grade, high quality diamonds like you have in South Africa, but rather mostly diamonds used in industrial applications, and the US imports lots of those. The US imports a lot of that. Lesotho exports the same kind of stuff, diamonds and textiles and stuff, to South Africa and to other Southern African regions in the Southern African Development Community, the SADC.
But the primary export surprisingly to a lot of people to other Southern African countries and especially South Africa is water. Lesotho is one of the highest rainfall areas of the subcontinent. Southern Africa generally on an average is a sub-arid area, and so water is very, very precious, and Lesotho has a lot of it. It also has very steep, deep, canyon-like valleys where you can create hydroelectric dams and store it.
It has low evaporation, so the water stays there by and large. And then they’re building infrastructure to pump it into South Africa, in some cases very far away, including major urban centers like Johannesburg. Johannesburg was founded based on the gold wealth there, not based on having a river or a navigable waterway like most cities.
And so it has no natural or doesn’t have any natural body of water or aquifers that could possibly feed the size of the population, which is way over 12 million now. And so that water comes from Lesotho and they’ve been pumping water there for decades. So Lesotho is very, very important regionally. It’s often called the water tower of Southern Africa for obvious reasons.

Morgan Sherburne:
Can you talk a little bit about why Lesotho is so archaeologically significant and what are some of the major findings there?

Brian Stewart:
Yeah, I think to answer that question, it’s important to give a tiny bit of background on why Southern Africa is important for deep time paleoarchaeology. So Southern Africa obviously has a record going back to the beginning of hominins and humans millions of years ago. But for the context of understanding why Lesotho is important, it’s important to understand why Southern Africa is crucial to the record of our own species, to homo sapiens.
We now know after protracted battles that lasted decades through the ’80s and ’90s that our species is an African specific species. We arose in Africa between around 300 and 200,000 years ago, spreading out of Africa beginning around 100,000 years ago and then interbreeding with various hominins that had come out of Africa beforehand. But still that interbreeding was limited and we are a largely or almost completely African species.
And the Southern African record has been really crucial for understanding not just our anatomical development, but especially our behavioral development because some of the earliest material archeological evidence for things that we really recognize as being particularly like us very human, things like symbolic behaviors encapsulated in artifacts like engraved little tablets of ochre or jewelry that people wear.
Some of the very earliest instances of those anywhere in the world come from Southern Africa. And so Lesotho is very important because it stretches our understanding of early behaviorally modern homo sapiens in Southern Africa from coastal areas where a lot of this early evidence comes from into more interior areas and from lowlands up into highlands.
And we’re really interested in that because we’re interested in how people adapted to different kinds of environments over a long period of time. That then allowed us to rapidly move out of Africa and exploit the full sweep of global ecosystems.
And we think that more challenging habitats like high mountain systems like Lesotho or heavy desert systems are really important to the story of becoming resilient and adaptively fluid and fluent and flexible before moving out of Africa effectively over a long period of time. I’m not saying right before we moved out of Africa we figured it out and we’re like, “Yeah, we’re gone.” These are long-term evolutionary processes that I think Lesotho is important for shedding light on.

Morgan Sherburne:
You’ve been doing research in Lesotho for 15 years and have revealed a lot about early humans and how they develop social relationships. Why is this country so compelling to you?

Brian Stewart:
So its ecological setting is really interesting. Again, high mountain environment. It’s wedged between this subtropical coastline, which is just over this very steep escarpment, which is a beautiful area called the Drakensberg escarpment or the uKhahlamba Drakensberg. uKhahlamba is Zulu for barrier of spears because it’s like these enormous cliffs, jagged peaks.
And on the eastern side of that, you’ve got KwaZulu-Natal, which is like a largely subtropical, tropical coastal area. And then over the escarpment you’ve got the highlands of Lesotho, which is really a temperate, quite relatively cold, mountainous, very rugged environment. And then as you move west from that, you get into this inland interior plateau that becomes increasingly more arid as you move west out into the Karoo-Kalahari areas.
So you’ve got these really sharp altitudinal, but also rainfall gradients moving east-west across Lesotho, from heavy rainfall along the coast and up in the mountains to much less as you move west. And the largest river in Southern Africa, the Orange River, rises in Lesotho, the headwaters in Lesotho. Instead of flowing east, which is really close going right to the coast, it flows west out of Lesotho across about over 2,000 kilometers of increasingly arid interior desert to reach the Atlantic Coast 2,000 kilometers away.
So you’ve got these really interesting gradients, and that ecological structure did we know strongly influence hunter-gatherer movements, people moving in and out of the area along river corridors, up over the mountain passes, but also sociality, how people were socially connected to one another, why they were connected to one another.
We know from ethnography that hunter-gatherers often form these social connections with people not living right next to them in a similar environment, but actually further away in an environment that is purposefully different. So that if their environment at home experiences degradation or loss of resources due to climate change, you can rely on relations that you’ve built up through, for instance, exchanging precious little artifacts like beads and other jewelry.
You’ve created these long distance social contacts that you can call upon, kind of like insurance networks, to move into other areas in times of need. Long distance neighbors taking in friends that you’ve built up over these relationships. But to do that, you need to have people in different environments that also are not similarly impacted. That’s the key to that. So having coastal highland and desert environments packed together, it’s really interesting to think about these adaptive differences and then social connections between them.

Morgan Sherburne:
Is there any other aspect of your work about social relationships that you want to highlight here?

Brian Stewart:
Yeah, so one thing I haven’t mentioned is that Lesotho and the Drakensberg area in general is super famous for its rock art, especially its rock paintings. These are some of the most abundant and some of the most elaborate anywhere in the world. It’s really a hub for global rock art. And very importantly, the insights that have come out of trying to understand the rock art corpus up there have influenced global understandings of rock art worldwide.
Interpretations of rock art were never the same after researchers really started to grapple with the records up in Lesotho and adjacent parts of South Africa. The problem with rock art, not just there, but in many parts of the world, is that it’s very difficult to get dates out of it. So it’s like this really enticing, really intriguing record sitting there staring you in the face. And that speaks to worldview and cosmology and religion.
We know now that religious beliefs are the primary justification for people that were painting and engraving things in the past. And it would be really nice to connect that into our more mundane, humdrum everyday diets and paleoclimates nuts and bolts archaeology, but we often can’t do it because we don’t have the capacity to actually put a chronological anchoring on that rock art record. We can’t date it, so we can’t connect it.
And one of the most exciting things we’ve been doing is getting high quality radiocarbon dates for these rock paintings, which is very difficult because there’s all sorts of problems with contamination and making sure that the dates that we’re dating are really, like for instance, the black paints that were made at the time that the person was putting them on there as opposed to lichen and other things that can get in there later or stuff that came earlier.
We’ve developed, my colleagues and I, have developed really rigorous techniques for ensuring that we’re dating the actual pigments themselves. Now we’re able to date, of course, with the pigments kinds of paintings, different corpuses of paintings, different types of paintings, and plug that into the background, general archaeological record of technological change, adaptation, dietary change that we see in the area. And we’re starting to look at impacts of things like climate change and demographic shifts on the religious worldview and cosmology of these people.
And that’s really exciting because it’s unusual to have such a privileged window into religion and worldview, but also because of theoretical advancements in our understanding of the anthropology of religion that especially with hunter-gatherer peoples that make us understand that their separation between what they consider natural and what they consider cultural, what they consider real tangible and what they consider otherworldly, basically non-existent.
That they lived in a world that was completely full of supernatural forces, that those supernatural forces guided pretty much everything. And a lot of what they did not have purely to do with finding the next meal and going to this area because it had certain resources that you wanted and all these things that in the West we often think that they did.
But it often had to do with who was in control of that area, what supernatural forces were influential in that area, or how did supernatural forces control the movements of animals, or how did they have to behave respectfully to deities and supernatural forces in order to get particular resources. And so we’re starting to understand that the social world is much more than just people and people connections.
It’s also people and animal and people and supernatural forces, so people in their spiritualized world and opening up the idea of kinship and social connectivity away from just purely within humans, but also humans into a larger spiritualized cosmos that they’re living in. So it’s a richer and I think much more accurate picture of people’s lives out there. So it’s really exciting, and the rock arts and the connection between the rock art and the dirt classic archeology is really enabling us to get an idea of what’s going on in that regard.

Morgan Sherburne:
I understand you work with many scholars from the region. Can you talk about the current political impacts to Lesotho that you’ve heard of through your contacts there?

Brian Stewart:
I think that predominantly the main sentiment that I’ve been hearing is one of just confusion and shock, letting the dust fall a bit before passing judgment on what’s happening. Lesotho and Southern Africa are used to political turbulence. They’re used to economic upheaval. Between the two countries, they’ve had a long, oftentimes torturous history involving coups and mini invasions and all sorts of stuff like that. So they’re no strangers to drama.
They’re really, I think, put off and put aback by this new, very protectionist posture of the United States, which obviously all over the world and in Southern Africa, there’s no exception, has a reputation for general stability when it comes to its posture towards especially the developing world, its enormous, unprecedented help and economic contributions to the rest of the world and the developing world from food programs to fighting disease and so on.
Lesotho is one of the poorest countries on the planet. Any small economic setback in Lesotho is a very serious one because they don’t have the kind of reserves and resilience that more developed countries do. There’s, I think, enormous fear about the economic impact. Its economy is tied to South Africa. It doesn’t have the economic independence that a lot of other countries do.
And more on a nuts and bolts level, what’s called the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, which has been going on now for several decades and has been enormously important for pumping money into buying or subsidizing antiretrovirals in areas that are heavily affected by HIV, including Lesotho, which has one of the highest rates in the world, has been the main thing that’s allowed countries like that to wrap its arms around the disease and get control of it.
And with one fell swoop, within the first couple weeks, President Trump got rid of it. And that is just disastrous for a country like Lesotho. And not to mention also for South Africa, although again, South Africa has much more money. It’s the wealthiest or one of the wealthiest countries in Africa, and so can build resilience around that and commercial resources to plug those holes. But Lesotho simply does not have that possibility. So yeah, I think they’re reeling.
It’s devastating. And just to say that although I think archaeology is important and people should pay attention to it, and Lesotho has an absolutely sensational archeological record that sheds light on how we became human and how we gained such incredible adaptive flexibility and plasticity, archeology as an issue and its impacts pale in considerations to people’s health and livelihood and economic well-being.
Those are much more serious issues, I think. Yeah, I just wanted to make that clear that I’m not suggesting that archeologists are the ones that are very severely impacted, although archeologists in Lesotho will be impacted by these as well, but the country as a whole will suffer because of these policy changes in the United States.

Morgan Sherburne:
So why is this country so compelling to you?

Brian Stewart:
I mean, as an archeologist, I’ve gone through why it’s a highly significant part of the world, why it’s very important in Southern Africa, I think in Africa more generally. On a personal level, the first time I went there was in like 2003 or 2004. And other than the beauty, I was just so blown away by the culture of the place. It has not had the same colonial history as South Africa, which is quite weird given it’s completely surrounded by it.
It did not experience apartheid because it was a British protectorate. The colonial imprint, although never good, was relatively low level in Lesotho compared to other British holdings. And so while South Africa was in the grip of the National Party and apartheid, Lesotho was its own independent thing that was tied into Britain, which was close to decolonizing, eventually gained its independence with the rest of the British Empire Holdings in the mid ’60s.
And so the fabric of Lesotho, the social fabric, the cultural traditions, did not have the same kind of stressors that South African communities experienced, especially obviously communities of color experienced under the apartheid regime. And so it just seems like a healthier… I don’t mean obviously they have major viral diseases, especially HIV, but a socially and emotionally healthier place.
It’s safe, by and large. Of course, obviously some crime in the only real urban area, which is called Maseru, which is the capital. But even that is not nothing like a lot of the South African cities. It’s just a wonderful place. People are super kind, incredibly friendly, very warm. Especially once you get out of the city into the countryside and up into the highlands where I work, those communities are just so real.
They’re so sweet and so kind, and they’ve been living in those traditional life ways for a very long period of time. They’re incredibly tough people, and they’re just so lovely. It’s a really special place, and you really feel it when you’re there. It envelops you like the blanket. It’s an amazing place. I recommend it very highly to anyone. Yeah, go to Lesotho.

Morgan Sherburne:
Brian, thanks so much for sharing about your work with Lesotho. It’s been really interesting to learn more about this country.

Brian Stewart:
It’s a pleasure.

Morgan Sherburne:
Thank you for listening to this episode of Michigan Minds, produced by Michigan News, a division of the University’s Office of the Vice President for Communications.