Astral Codex Ten

Lesotho

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Lesotho

Article

Lesotho is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between May 27, 2022 and October 13, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “a report on Lesotho: a tiny, mountainous country surrounded on all sides by South Africa”; “Lesotho as a country virtually untouched by modern economic development”; “Most of the population in rural Lesotho grew crops”. It most often appears alongside Kenya, 2023, @a_centrism.

Metadata

  • Category: Places
  • Mention count: 3
  • Issue count: 3
  • First seen: May 27, 2022
  • Last seen: October 13, 2025

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Your Book Review: The Anti-Politics Machine
May 27, 2022 · Original source
In 1975, the World Bank released a report on Lesotho: a tiny, mountainous country surrounded on all sides by the much larger nation of South Africa. This report, written by and for outside “development experts”, set out to identify problems that were holding the country back which could be solved by simple, technical “interventions”.
The report portrayed Lesotho as a country “virtually untouched by modern economic development” after gaining independence, whose “traditional subsistence peasant society” had been disrupted by depleted soil and failed crops, compelling most of its young men to find work in nearby South Africa. To solve this problem, the report made a variety of recommendations, many of which involved boosting agricultural productivity and connecting farmers in Lesotho to better markets to sell their crops and especially their livestock.
Most of the population in rural Lesotho grew crops, but they did not make very much income from them.
Links For June
July 01, 2022 · Original source
50: BBC Africa: The Deadly Accordion Wars Of Lesotho. Related: BBC from 2011 on the African space program (ie one Ugandan man trying to build a shuttle in his backyard).
Inline links: The Deadly Accordion Wars Of Lesotho, BBC from 2011 on the African space program
ACX Grants Results 2025
October 13, 2025 · Original source
Eli Elster, $13K, to research traditional psilocybin use in Africa. Psilocybin, aka magic mushrooms, is in the process of being integrated into mainstream psychiatric practice; it is already approved for treatment-resistant depression in Australia, and undergoing (currently promising) FDA trials in the United States. Much of what we know about the preparation and administration of psilocybin - including widespread ideas about “set and setting” and “integration” - comes from traditional use by the Mazaetec Indians. In 2023, anthropologists discovered that traditional healers in Lesotho, Africa also use psilocybin mushrooms - the first time such a practice has been found in the Old World - and that they seem to prepare and administer it differently from the Native Americans. Eli and his collaborator Betsy Sethathi conducted the first in-depth fieldwork on the topic earlier this year; our grant funds a return trip to Lesotho to further investigate their ethnobotanical practices and see if we can learn anything from them.
Inline links: Eli