From Africa to America, entrepreneur, architect and urban planner Mokena Makeka speaks to his journey from a Maseru childhood to working as a globally recognized scholar in urban planning and advisor trying to bring innovation to climate justice initiatives around the world.



Growing up between the rolling hills of Lesotho and the skyscrapers of New York can be a jarring experience, but also an insightful one. As the son of the Kingdom of Lesotho’s envoy to the United States of America, Mokena Makeka found himself living between two very diverse worlds, and has brought his varied education and experiences to bear to drive a novel sphere; that of sustainable development and impacting communities as a management consultant.



“One challenge is to reconcile your domestic identity versus your international identity,” said Makeka to FORBES AFRICA, “but the other is sheer contrast between somewhere like Lesotho and New York, and I think that produces tensions; why are there these inequalities, are they structural or are they systematic?”



Indeed, understanding both the systematic and the personal reflects in Makeka’s interests. Originally enrolling at the University of Cape Town in engineering, he found himself dissatisfied until he stumbled upon architecture; “I love mathematics, I love physics… but I also love art – this is a place where I was able to use both sides of my mind.”



Merging understandings between the personal and the structural is what gave Makeka the ability to earn much success as an architect and business, becoming a Desmond Tutu Fellow and Young Global Leader at the World Economic Forum, but also exposed him to many different kinds of people, experiences and spaces – and how these interact.



“There’s a lot of cognitive dissonance [regarding architecture],” says Makeka, using the spatial and geographical legacy of apartheid South Africa, and the recent extreme flooding in Durban as an example.



“After the floods, there were calls for professionals to come in and assist in reconstruction, quantity surveyors, engineers – which is great – but the one discipline that understands space, architects, was not invited.”



The obstacles in making effective change in spaces that are not necessarily responsive is what led Makeka to his current role as a management consultant. “I don’t think it’s my duty to convert the marketplace… I need to go where I can be effective. That’s just the truth,” he says wryly.



When one thinks management consultancies, one thinks of the big advisory firms, many of which are working with large businesses and institutions in an orthodox and established manner, which doesn’t seem to fit the personality and values that Makeka demonstrates. When questioned on how this fits in with his work at Dalberg Advisors, he smiles; “At Dalberg, I found people thinking the same way about community impact, the importance of cities, job creation and youth development… people who understand the value of designing an environment.”



And indeed, constant change and flexibility is something that he advocates for very strongly, stating that everyone should have several lives within their lifetime. “I’m quite disruptive… but I think productively disruptive,” he contemplates – and has followed through, pushing change in the architecture space by founding Cape Town’s School of Explorative Architecture, which took in its first group of 22 students in March of this year.



“I’ve always been keen on doing a few things,” says Makeka. “One is decolonizing education, which is an important project even if it does get tied up in other narratives.”



The future will keep bringing change, and surely a new life and path for Makeka – which is a hope he has for others as well, particularly African youth. “Don’t settle on who you are too quickly… make mistakes and maintain your curiosity – it’s only a failure if you don’t learn from it,” he says firmly. “But otherwise, pivot. Keep growing.”

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The Disruptive Lesotho Architect Pushing Change

As I traveled through Lesotho on assignment, I was struck by the resilience, innovation and hospitality of its people despite the land-locked kingdom being affected badly by the Covid-19 pandemic. 



Travel is something of a luxury&nbsp;in life, more so&nbsp;during&nbsp;the pandemic – and while as a journalist and photographer,&nbsp;I was fortunate to be in the field for most of the lockdowns, I did feel very privileged leaving&nbsp;Johannesburg to Lesotho&nbsp;by road&nbsp;at 5AM&nbsp;last Monday, for what would be my first cross-border trip in over a year.&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp; If you haven’t been to Lesotho, here’s a travel brochure summary;&nbsp;it’s a small kingdom with a population of some two million, entirely surrounded by some of the most beautiful mountainous scenery in this world and to both its benefit and detriment, South Africa.&nbsp;&nbsp;



Populated primarily by the Basotho people, anyone familiar with South Africa would find themselves very much at home, but also notice subtle differences.     Crossing the border is a painless but expensive process. Entering Lesotho requires a negative PCR test, which costs around $60, and is valid for 72 hours. I was in the country for a few days and required another test before leaving.    Once through the Maseru bridge border post, you are greeted with the capital city itself, a bustling, vibrant town reminiscent of the provincial capitals in South Africa. Street vendors ply their wares, taxis overtake at speed but with a friendly wave, and none of the traffic lights are functional, which made for a perilous drive to my accommodation. 



<div class="wp-block-image"><figure class="aligncenter size-large is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Forbes-Lesotho-2-of-2-1024x683.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-53119" width="748" height="499" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Forbes-Lesotho-2-of-2-1024x683.jpg 1024w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Forbes-Lesotho-2-of-2-300x200.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Forbes-Lesotho-2-of-2-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Forbes-Lesotho-2-of-2-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Forbes-Lesotho-2-of-2-2048x1365.jpg 2048w" sizes="(max-width: 748px) 100vw, 748px" /><figcaption>Photographs: Yeshiel Panchia</figcaption></figure></div>



“It’s been a hard year,” said Khethisa, a security guard who works at the Avani Hotel, in which I stayed during my time in the capital. “Covid has taken away many jobs. Things are getting a bit better now.”    As with almost everywhere else in the world, the lockdowns aimed at preventing the spread of Covid-19 had an incredibly detrimental impact on Lesotho’s economy, with its most recently reported unemployment rate at 23.9% as of 2019. Data isn’t readily available from during the pandemic, but it can be readily assumed to be much worse.    Despite this, the welcome in Lesotho is always warm and friendly. Humanist approaches to business appear to merge seamlessly with hustle; in a stationery store in Pioneer Mall in Maseru, a person is employed to sanitize and check the temperature of everyone on entry. Another person is employed to check receipts for sales theft or errors. Sales personnel abound. Despite wages not being high and many of these jobs being easily automated, Lesotho seems to have a high reliance on people, not machines, to provide many functions – and with each of these comes a wage.    Wandering through the nearby central market, everything from second-hand clothing to illicit cigarettes are on sale, and every vendor is pushing their wares. Groups of people play a musical game in the sun around the taxi rank where money is thrown at a speaker while music plays – each participant then dances closer to the money. If you are touching the money when the music stops, the pot is yours. In none of those hours of walking or photographing was there any sense of unsafety – markedly different from Johannesburg.     Moving out of the city and into the Lesotho highlands you are greeted by arresting panoramic views – rolling hills, now green since the end of a brutal drought in 2016. Sheep graze on the steppes, while herdsmen in traditional blankets and balaclavas on foot or on horseback stand watchfully, reminiscent of my last trip into the country, where I covered the traditional horseraces in Semonkong.    This journey into the mountains and a chance meeting in Maseru also led to another story of innovation and rejuvenation in this small nation, battered by Covid-19.  



A company called MG Health, a medical cannabis manufacturer, has become the first country in Africa to obtain a&nbsp;Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP)&nbsp;license from Germany, allowing the export of their product&nbsp;into that&nbsp;country.&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp; The licensing is a massive task, and the&nbsp;growery&nbsp;itself, nestled in one of the quietest parts of the mountains, is looking to expand&nbsp;its&nbsp;production massively. Making use of&nbsp;cutting-edge&nbsp;technological advancements,&nbsp;and building the business hand in hand with the community, Director Andre Bothma is pioneering&nbsp;in both the literal and economic sense&nbsp;in the remotest part of Lesotho, providing community infrastructure and employment in a region that sorely needs it.&nbsp; &nbsp; “My vision here is that we are going to create thousands of jobs. We have the potential of making a difference to the country here,” says Bothma.&nbsp; &nbsp; I’d say more on this, but it’s a story in its own right and one for&nbsp;another&nbsp;day, but I think these vignettes accurately reflect the hospitality, resilience and warmth of Lesotho and its people. There was a sense of loss on the drive back toward the border, and I would have loved to have had the time to explore the relationships and stories that seemed to lurk on every&nbsp;street corner.&nbsp; &nbsp; On arriving at South African Customs and Immigration, I was confronted with the usual confusion of where to go and what process to follow. As my passport was stamped, I do wish I’d stayed&nbsp;on&nbsp;in Lesotho.&nbsp;&nbsp;

Forbes Lesotho (1 of 2)

Highlands, Hustle, And Humanism: A Road Trip To Lesotho

It’s the last place I expected to catch a nap, but I did: lying in the dirt, hugging my body against the cold mountain rain on the edge of a cliff. Just behind my rocky makeshift bed was a sheer drop to the village of Quthing, 183 kilometers south of Maseru, the capital of Lesotho. From below, the squawks of chickens and barks of dogs drifted up as people went about their daily lives. In many ways it was a strange place to be, on a mundane day, on the verge of an ancient art discovery.
Hunkered under a rock five meters in front of me is Justine Wintjes, archaeologist and fine arts lecturer at the University of the Witwatersrand, who is also lying in the dirt. Under her keen eye is a rare rock art panel of stooped over black figures frozen for hundreds of years on the stone. Every now and again, her short cropped hair, black with a stripe of dyed pink fluorescent, bobs up and down as she sketches in the damp.
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“In Africa, you can’t walk two meters without finding an artefact,” she says.
It was because of a journey in the African bush to find lost rock art that Wintjes is on this cliff face in a remote part of southern Lesotho. With her is a pile of black-and-white photographs and dusty diary entries made from a long forgotten expedition 85 years ago. For generations it was buried in the archives in Frankfurt. They called it the Frobenius Expedition, after the German ethnographer Leo Frobenius. For the great grandparents of the people of Quthing the name might mean something, the last time this team climbed these hills on the hunt for rock art was in 1930.
“He only did one exploration in to southern Africa… I was working on a rock art site in northern KwaZulu-Natal [in the] Drakensberg… It was a very broken site and I knew that it had been recorded in the 1940s by people. But there was this earlier copy, which had been recorded by Frobenius. So I looked at that copy and I thought ‘well, if he made one copy, then maybe he made more than one.’”
It was a thought that took Wintjes on a six-year journey, from the hallways of academia in Johannesburg, to the archives of Frankfurt and finally the dirt roads of Lesotho.
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“I went to Frankfurt and I realized that there was this whole archive of photographs, copies and field notes about the site that were really informative. There were two trips made in 1928 and 1930, with quite a large archive and in various southern African countries. It was archaeology and cultures that no one had really looked at in close detail. I realized they had recorded a lot of sites,” she says.
Wintjes brought back piles of the jumbled Frobenius material to Africa where she began to catalogue it. As part of her PhD, she follows in the footsteps of their expedition.
“For its time [Frobenius] was very accurate. Around the same time, you had a lot of people reading into the exotic readings, like the White Lady of the Brandberg. It’s a really popular example of the Europeans looking at the rock art through the European lens, sort of a racist lens, thinking that it can’t be African, that it can’t be San Bushmen, or of African origin. That it had to be Phoenician or exotic to the continent.”
Wintjes and her team may have a host of digital gadgets to help guide them, but they still had to do good old fashioned legwork in Quthing. They needed the help of the people to find the locations.
“Nowadays, because of online digital data, you can do a lot of preparatory fieldwork. Fieldwork on the internet, looking through books, through archival material you have collected digitally. You get a really good sense of where things are. But you are never entirely certain. You get errors in the archival system, or things that are slightly misleading. For example, the two sites that we visited on this trip had the same name in the catalogue, but were in two very different sites. They were not even particularly close,” says Wintjes.
On a mild Saturday morning, the expedition follows up on a lead. They make a breakthrough when 22-year-old Tlhanole Thulo, clad in Basotho blanket and beanie, and his sister Thebane, in jeans and shirt, recognize one of Frobenius’ 85-year-old photographs. It is a chance meeting no internet connection could find. They recognize a river where they played when they grew up – a 20-minute walk from their home in Qomoqomong.
The team’s excitement is palpable as they jump out the vehicle and grab their gear. They follow the siblings along a goat path deeper into the gully. There, hidden behind a giant boulder, is the site. They stand there holding the 1930 photo to see if it fits; a rocky north-east facing overhang hiding a trove of paintings; impossible to see from a distance. Everyone grabs a pile of photographs and starts looking for a match.
“This cave, we call it Halephutha, we know about it from our parents. It shows us how old people were living. Sometimes it can tell us what they ate and how they lived,” says Tlhanole.
Wintjes’ role in African archaeology was as much chance as finding the cave itself. The South African grew up in Canada, studied fine arts and archaeology in Belgium, before coming back to South Africa 10 years ago.
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“To be honest I can’t remember why [I did archaeology]. It was a discipline that I was always interested in, history and pre-history. So it’s about the paintings, but also about the way they have been studied and the way they have been copied; the visual aspect to the rock painting. I just always loved old things. I was fascinated by ruins and abandoned buildings and old stuff.”
“I realized that through rock art I could combine my background in fine arts and archaeology. It was a place where they came together. At that point I felt a little bit schizophrenic. I wasn’t always very sure about what to do with these two very different worlds.”
“It’s a very exciting field particularly in Africa, given the antiquity we have on the continent. But there aren’t enough archaeologists, or art historians. There aren’t enough people interested in these fields. They really are important,” says Wintjes.
So, the team got on with their tasks; taking new photos, drawing sketches of rock art and struggling to geolocate their site under an infrequent GPS signal. So ends the discovery between a rock and a hard to place to find.

Tag: Lesotho

FORBES AFRICA SOCIAL MEDIA

The Disruptive Lesotho Architect Pushing Change

Highlands, Hustle, And Humanism: A Road Trip To Lesotho

The Goat Path To Glory