Lesotho's history: a kingdom cut to its mountains

Who lived in the Caledon valley before the kingdom

Hunter-gatherers who spoke Khoisan languages lived in the territory from at least the Neolithic, in Britannica's account, and the San and their ancestors left the evidence in rock art across the southern and eastern mountains. UNESCO's statement for the Maloti-Drakensberg Park, which since 2013 has included Sehlabathebe National Park in south-eastern Lesotho, counts an estimated 690 rock art sites in the property and probably more than 35,000 individual images, made by the San over a period of about 4,000 years. Some later paintings in the same shelters, from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, are attributed to Bantu-speaking people.

Wikipedia's history of the country records a period between about 550 and 1300 when hunter-gatherers moved into the Lesotho highlands while the Drakensberg to the east was abandoned, and some of the highland people of that time kept cattle. From about the sixteenth century, Britannica writes, farmers who were the ancestors of the present population moved across the grasslands and settled in the fertile valleys of the Caledon River. They belonged to the large Sotho group, kept stock, grew crops and were divided into clans that formed the core of chiefdoms. The amaZizi are remembered as one of the first of these farming peoples to settle in the area, and had a reputation as ironworkers.

How Moshoeshoe built a state on Thaba Bosiu

The upheavals of the early nineteenth century reached the Caledon valley in the 1820s. Sotho speakers call the period Lifaqane or Difaqane, Britannica glosses the word as "crushing", and the chiefdoms of the region were destroyed, scattered or absorbed into larger ones that could defend themselves. Wikipedia's history notes that the older reading of these wars, which blamed raiders displaced by the Zulu kingdom and described an empty land that Voortrekkers then occupied, is disputed by historians such as Norman Etherington.

Moshoeshoe was born Lepoqo, the son of Mokhachane, a minor chief of the Bamokoteli lineage of the Bakoena; the most commonly given year is 1786. He took the name Moshoeshoe, "the Shaver", from a praise poem about a cattle raid after his initiation in 1804. In the early 1820s he and his followers held Butha-Buthe mountain in the north, and in 1824, by Britannica's date, he moved to Thaba Bosiu, a flat-topped hill whose name means "mountain at night". From there he drew in individuals, lineages and whole chiefdoms, many of them refugees, and the result became the kingdom of the Sotho, later called Basutoland.

Moshoeshoe invited the Paris Evangelical Missionary Society, whose missionaries reached Thaba Bosiu in 1833 and were placed at Morija and other points of the kingdom. Eugène Casalis and Thomas Arbousset gave Sesotho its first written orthography, printed works in it between 1837 and 1855, advised the king on foreign affairs and helped him buy guns. After Koranna raids in the 1820s the Basotho captured or bought horses and firearms of their own and began stockpiling gunpowder, although most of their guns were outdated flintlocks.

Why the Free State wars cost the lowlands

Boer trekkers from the Cape began settling on the western edge of the kingdom in 1834, Britannica writes, and challenged the Basotho right to the land. Moshoeshoe tried to manage them through the British. In 1843 he signed a treaty with the Cape governor Sir George Napier that recognised the Basotho as allies; in 1848 Sir Harry Smith pressed him into accepting British authority north of the Orange River, which became the Orange River Sovereignty. When the British resident, Major Henry Warden, marched about 2,500 men against the Basotho's Taung allies, a Basotho and Taung army defeated them at Viervoet on 30 June 1851. A British expedition was turned back at Berea on 20 December 1852, and Moshoeshoe sued for peace on favourable terms.

Britain withdrew from the Sovereignty in 1854, and the Orange Free State replaced it. Its wars with the Basotho began in 1858 with Senekal's War and resumed, more seriously, in 1865 with the Seqiti War. In the Treaty of Thaba Bosiu of 1866 Moshoeshoe ceded most of the kingdom's arable land; fighting resumed, and the Boers burned crops and fields. Moshoeshoe and the missionaries appealed to the high commissioner, Sir Philip Wodehouse, and on 12 March 1868 Basutoland was placed under British protection.

The Convention of Aliwal North in February 1869 drew the boundary. The arable land west of the Caledon stayed in the Free State, and the Wikipedia history of the country says the treaty left Moshoeshoe's kingdom at about half its former size. Moshoeshoe died on 11 March 1870 and was buried on the summit of Thaba Bosiu. The anniversary is kept as Moshoeshoe's Day.

How Basutoland was kept apart from South Africa

Britain handed Basutoland to the Cape Colony in 1871, without the consent of the Basotho in Britannica's words. In 1879 the Cape extended its Peace Preservation Act to the territory to disarm it, a southern chief, Moorosi, rose in revolt and was killed, and in September 1880 chiefs Lerotholi and Masopha led much of the country into the Gun War. The Cape forces could not win a decisive victory, Sir Hercules Robinson announced a settlement on 29 April 1881, and the Basotho kept their guns. The Cape Parliament passed a Disannexation Act in 1883, and an Order in Council that came into force on 18 March 1884 put Basutoland back under the crown.

British rule after 1884 was indirect. A resident commissioner governed through a Paramount Chief descended from Moshoeshoe, regional chiefs drawn from the royal lineage ran their wards, and land was held in trust by the Paramount Chief for the people. A national council first sat in July 1903 and wrote down the customary rules as the Laws of Lerotholi.

The colony became a labour reserve. Britannica describes taxation, population growth behind a closed border and the exhaustion of the soil pushing Basotho men into South Africa's mines, and a budget the administration balanced by keeping a large share of the population in wage work across the border. Between 1929 and 1933 the Depression and a drought drove so many people out that the population barely grew for a decade. When the Union of South Africa was formed in 1910, Britain kept Basutoland, Bechuanaland and Swaziland out of it, and the Basotho resisted every later proposal to transfer them.

Basotho served in both world wars. Over 4,500 enlisted in the first, most of them in the South African Native Labour Corps, and more than 100 died when the troopship SS Mendi sank off the Isle of Wight in 1917. In the second, 21,000 enlisted and 1,105 died; the sinking of the SS Erinpura on 1 May 1943 killed 694 men of two Basuto companies.

Party politics began after the war. The Basutoland Congress Party was founded in 1952 under Ntsu Mokhehle, the more conservative Basutoland National Party in 1958 under Chief Leabua Jonathan, and the Marema-Tlou Freedom Party in 1963. The Basutoland Council won control of internal affairs in 1955, a constitution of 1959 created the first elected legislature, and self-government came in 1965. At the April 1965 election the National Party won 31 of 65 seats and the Congress Party 25. On 4 October 1966 Basutoland became the Kingdom of Lesotho, with Moshoeshoe II as king and Jonathan as prime minister.

Why the first election after independence was annulled

Early results of the general election of January 1970 showed the governing party losing. Wikipedia's article on the country gives the count as 23 seats for the National Party against 36 for the Congress Party. Jonathan declared the election void, proclaimed a state of emergency, suspended the constitution, dissolved parliament and imprisoned the Congress leaders. An appointed Interim National Assembly followed in 1973.

The Congress Party took up arms. Its Lesotho Liberation Army trained in Libya and, after 1978, launched a guerrilla war; one force was defeated in the north, and later attacks were sporadic. Opponents of the government were attacked at home: on 4 September 1981 the family of Benjamin Masilo was attacked and his three-year-old grandson killed, and four days later Edgar Mahlomola Motuba, editor of the newspaper Leselinyana la Lesotho, was abducted with two friends and murdered. South Africa, meanwhile, virtually closed the land borders because of Lesotho's support for cross-border operations of the African National Congress, and threatened more direct action.

How soldiers and the crown shared power

In January 1986 the army removed Jonathan. A decree of the Military Council transferred executive and legislative powers to the king, acting on the council's advice, under a military government chaired by Justin Lekhanya. The arrangement broke down in February 1990, when Lekhanya stripped Moshoeshoe II of his powers and sent him into exile; the king's son was installed as Letsie III. Junior officers ousted Lekhanya in 1991 and Phisoane Ramaema became chairman of the council.

A new constitution in 1993 left the king without executive authority and barred him from politics. At the election that followed the Congress Party, under Mokhehle, won every seat in the 65-member National Assembly. Mutinies in the army, the police and the prison service followed in early 1994. In August 1994 Letsie III, with the support of part of the army, suspended parliament and appointed a ruling council; domestic and regional pressure, with SADC states negotiating, restored the elected government within a month. Under the settlement Letsie abdicated in favour of his father in 1995. Moshoeshoe II died on 15 January 1996; a government statement said his car left a mountain road as he returned to Maseru from his cattle at Matsieng. His son returned to the throne.

Why foreign troops entered Maseru

Mokhehle split the Congress Party in 1997, took two-thirds of its members of parliament into his new Lesotho Congress for Democracy and stayed in office. At the election of May 1998 the new party won 79 of 80 constituency seats, and Pakalitha Mosisili became prime minister. The opposition alleged fraud. A commission appointed by SADC and led by the South African judge Pius Langa found no evidence of electoral malpractice. Protests grew into a demonstration outside the royal palace in August, and in early September junior members of the armed forces mutinied.

The government asked SADC for help. South African troops entered on 22 September 1998 and Botswana troops followed, in an operation codenamed Boleas and described at the time as an intervention to restore democracy and the rule of law. Wikipedia's account of the country records that the Botswana soldiers were welcomed while South African troops met fighting, and rioting grew when a South African flag was raised over the palace. The central business district of Maseru was burned and looted, and the towns of Mafeteng and Mohale's Hoek lost over a third of their commercial property. The Encyclopedia of the Nations notes that most firms were not insured, which lengthened the rebuilding.

Two readings of the intervention are on record. In one, the elected government asked for it, and the United Kingdom, the United States and the European Union backed it as an appropriate assumption of regional responsibility. In the other, put by critics, South Africa used its military and diplomatic weight to protect its own interests, in particular the water its Gauteng province draws from the Lesotho highlands. The last South African troops left in May 1999. An Interim Political Authority set up in December 1998 designed a mixed system that kept the 80 constituency seats and added 40 filled by proportional representation, and at the election of May 2002 opposition parties won all 40 of them.

How two army commanders came to be killed

The election of 2012 produced the country's first coalition, led by Thomas Thabane. On 19 June 2014 he suspended parliament, which allowed him to avoid a vote of confidence. On 29 August he appointed Maaparankoe Mahao to replace Lieutenant General Tlali Kamoli as commander of the Lesotho Defence Force. Early on 30 August soldiers disarmed the police and radio stations went off air; a minister said troops had surrounded the State House and police headquarters, and one policeman was killed. Thabane fled to South Africa, saying a coup was under way and that he had been targeted. The army denied staging a coup, said it had moved against police suspected of arming a political faction, and Kamoli remained in post.

SADC mediation, led by South Africa's deputy president, produced the Maseru Facilitation Declaration and an early election in February 2015. The coalition that won restored Kamoli and declared Mahao's appointment void. On 25 June 2015 Mahao was shot dead near his farm at Mokema. The Ministry of Defence said he was killed after a confrontation during an operation to arrest suspected mutineers; his family said he was chased, stopped and shot by soldiers, and an autopsy by two SADC doctors and one chosen by the family found eleven gunshot wounds. A SADC commission under the Botswana judge Mpaphi Phumaphi finished its report in November 2015; the government at first refused to receive it, the report was published in February 2016, and its recommendations included Kamoli's immediate removal. He was retired in November 2016 and succeeded by his deputy, Khoantle Motsomotso.

On 5 September 2017 Motsomotso was shot dead. Military officials quoted by AFP said two officers forced their way into his office at a barracks and were killed in the exchange with his guards; a defence official quoted by DPA said he was shot at his home by soldiers who had recently been dismissed. Thabane, back in office after an election in June, called the killing a serious setback to efforts to restore peace. Freedom House reported in 2025 that the trial of soldiers including Kamoli for Mahao's murder, on charges dating from 2017, had resumed in 2024. The election of October 2022 was described by observers from SADC, the African Union and the European Union as meeting international standards.