The border lands that encircle Lesotho like a crescent moon from the west are known as the Conquered Land, lost to the Basotho nation in a war with white Boers in 1866. When Greg Marinovich moved to this rural area with his wife in 2001, they had little idea of the contested nature of the terrain they would live in. The superficial impression of the eastern Free State province is of white hegemony with black workers occupying a subservient role, despite black governance post-apartheid.

This work is a scrutiny of rural whiteness, set against an exploration of the mostly hidden cultural life of black people on farms, neglected townships and the strong link to Lesotho itself, a tightly constrained mountain land, claustrophobically encircled by South Africa.

If one were to only look at these areas linguistically, the extent of the Sesotho speaking people reaches far beyond the legal constraints of Lesotho.

Greg Marinovich is co-author of The Bang-Bang Club, a nonfiction book on South Africa’s transition to democracy that has been translated into six languages. He is a Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer and documentary filmmaker.

He spent 25 years covering conflict around the globe.

His 2012 award winning investigation into the Marikana massacre of miners by police was called the most important South African journalism post-apartheid, and a book on the massacre and the socio/political context it took place in “Murder at Small Koppie” won the Alan Paton award for non-fiction in 2017.

Marinovich was Editor-In-Chief of the Twenty Ten project, working with over 100 African journalists in all forms of media.

He was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University in 2013 and now teaches visual journalism and filmmaking at Boston University’s Journalism school, as well as photography at Harvard. He has an MS in Journalism (Boston University 2020).