It wouldn't be all that surprising to find that in this dirt-poor,
land-locked country, there are no casinos, especially in a place where
at least 50% of the population earn their living from subsistence (or
peasant) agriculture and those that do have cash paying jobs have them
in other countries. But, to apply these suppositions to Lesotho would
be to miss the most important fact about the country. It is entirely
surrounded by South Africa, and while it is economically integrated into
it, it is politically and legally quite separate.
During the years of apartheid and the rule of the highly religious
National Party (many of whose members would consider Southern Baptists
to be dangerous liberals), there was a certain sense of what you did not
do at home in South Africa. People would therefore go to the tribal
countries, like Lesotho, to do their gambling. Thus, there is in fact a
list of Lesotho's casinos.
A list of Lesotho's casinos includes:
Maseru Sun Hotel & Casino
Lesotho Sun Hotel & Casino
Both of the casinos are in Maseru, the capital, and the Maseru Casino
itself has just slot machines, while the Lesotho also has roulette and
blackjack tables.
These casinos are really almost purely for the tourist trade. As above,
most of the natives are poor subsistence farmers, not known as great
gamblers. The few of them who have cash paying jobs actually tend to do
them outside Lesotho (although there are a few local manufacturers:
there is a Levi's plant there, for example). The young men travel to
South Africa to work in the mines for six or nine months of the year.
It is this highly mobile (and unaccompanied by wives or girlfriends)
population that leads to Lesotho's biggest problem, an amazing epidemic
of AIDS. It is thought that perhaps 40% of the population actually
carry the virus.
The country doesn't have much else to offer tourists, so Lesotho's
casinos are really it. They suffer, however, from the relaxation of the
rules in South Africa itself and the competition of places like Sun
City, which is in another of the tribal areas (what used to be called
Bantustans after the name of the racial grouping they all belong to,
Bantu). The scenery is OK, but not anywhere as near as spectacular as
other areas in the region. Since the largest export is not interesting
crafts or much of anything else, other than water and electricity to
feed Johannesburg, there's not really much of a reason to continue to
develop the sector. It is therefore unlikely that the list of Lesotho's
casinos is going to get much longer, at least not any time in the near
future.
