Abstract
In 1924 the agricultural department in Lesotho, southern Africa, launched a demonstration program whereby local men performed rural outreach. Studies of agricultural demonstration in Africa and elsewhere have focused on the ways colonial and segregationist states deployed knowledge and policy via demonstrators to control people and landscapes. This article complicates this important position by arguing that the problems and possibilities of agricultural demonstration, which today remains central to agrarian policy in many countries, must be situated at the intersection of political, economic, and ecological processes operating across multiple scales. This story involves agricultural networks in the British Empire and the American South, and focuses especially on farmers, demonstrators, and politicians in Lesotho and South Africa. Most importantly, local narratives from mountainous Lesotho show that the location of demonstrations, the identity of the demonstrators, and their changing priorities and approaches were key factors in determining how these programs unfolded.
