Basotho Kingdom

It is not thus that kings are slain

formationDrafted from Casalis, The Basutos, or Twenty-Three Years in South Africa (1861)

Before 1820, Casalis records, the scattered Sotho chiefdoms of the highlands lived in something like the feudal disorder of medieval France - the house of Monaheng, of which Moshoeshoe was a representative, held nominal supremacy, while every town's chief pushed for as much independence as he could get, and disputes rarely cost more than a few stolen herds. That order collapsed all at once when Shaka's own conquests in Natal drove a defeated vassal, Matiwane, to flee west with thousands of followers still loyal to him - a flight that set off a chain reaction, driving one displaced people into the next, until the peaceful valleys of Lesotho became, in Casalis's own words, "the scene of continual slaughter."

A famine that turned neighbors into cannibals

Years of war left fields untilled and famine layered on top of violence, until bands answering to no chief at all took to living in mountain caves and hunting other people for food - caves Casalis himself later visited, still scattered with cracked skulls and bloodstained rock. Moshoeshoe, alone among the region's chiefs, held his ground against the tide. Cornered after a defeat with only four or five men and a wall of enemy spears yards away, he is said to have sat down calmly, then risen and walked straight at the encircling warriors, announcing, "It is not thus that kings are slain" - and they let him through.

A word that ended what an army could not

Moshoeshoe took final refuge on the flat summit of Thaba Bosiu, a natural fortress whose cliffs made surprise impossible, and set about rebuilding order out of the wreckage around him. His first act was to end the cannibalism that had taken hold among the starving and the lawless - not by force, which he judged would only touch off a ruinous civil war on top of everything else, but by declaring simply that men who ate human flesh were already living corpses, unworthy of being fought at all. The declaration alone, Casalis writes, was enough to shame the practice into decline: those guilty of it took the verdict as an unlooked-for path back into the community, rather than a sentence, and returned to it.

Casalis, The Basutos, or Twenty-Three Years in South Africa (1861) · Unknown photographer · Public domain

Oxen for the road home

peakDrafted from Casalis, The Basutos, or Twenty-Three Years in South Africa (1861)

With cannibalism suppressed and the lesser threats of Pakalita and Matiwane spent, one enemy remained: the army of Mzilikazi, the Zulu general who had broken from Shaka's own service to build a kingdom of his own to the north, and now turned his forces on Thaba Bosiu itself. The Basotho barricaded every breach time had opened in their mountain's natural defenses and waited. Mzilikazi's regiments attacked two faces of the mountain at once, advancing in tight ranks that did not break even as boulders came thundering down the slopes at them; when the avalanche of stone and spears finally told, the attackers fled faster than they had come, their own officers snatching off the plumes of the routed and trampling them in fury as they tried, and failed, to force a second assault.

Casalis, The Basutos, or Twenty-Three Years in South Africa (1861) · Unknown photographer · Public domain

A gift instead of a boast

The attack broken, Mzilikazi's army withdrew the next day toward home. As they marched, a lone Mosotho met the retreating column driving a herd of fat cattle before him, with a message from Moshoeshoe: supposing that hunger alone could have brought them into his country, he sent these oxen so they might eat on the journey back. It was not surrender dressed as generosity - the mountain had already beaten them - but a calculated act of respect toward a defeated enemy, delivered at the exact moment it would be remembered longest.

A promise a beaten army kept

Years later, Casalis met envoys from Mzilikazi's own court at Cape Town and asked whether they knew the chief of the Basotho. "Know him? Yes!" they answered at once. "That is the man who, after having rolled down rocks on our heads, sent us oxen for food - we will never attack him again." They kept their word. Of all the powers that had tested Thaba Bosiu in the chaos of those years, the most formidable never returned - not because Moshoeshoe had merely defeated it, but because he had made defeat cost the enemy nothing to remember but gratitude.

Oxen for a man of prayer

peakDrafted from Casalis, The Basutos, or Twenty-Three Years in South Africa (1861)

Word of the Basotho kingdom reached the outside world through its own victims. Koranna and Griqua raiders armed with muskets had been plundering tribes along the upper Caledon in complete secrecy, until some of those they had ravaged tracked their persecutors' own route and, in despair, resolved to die near the flocks stolen from them rather than live without hope. Among the very people their raiders belonged to, they instead found men moved to kindness by their story - one of whom had himself been taught by English missionaries, and told the grieving refugees plainly that only the Christian faith could restore peace to their country. Moshoeshoe, hearing of the encounter, summoned the man in person, was persuaded, and before the visitor left secured a promise that missionaries would be sent. When time passed without word, Moshoeshoe sent oxen after him with a plain request attached: procure him, in exchange, "a man of prayer."

A country littered with the evidence of its own ruin

Casalis and his companions, newly arrived at the Cape and still uncertain where to begin their own mission, heard the story from Dr. Philip, the missionary and reformer who had done more than anyone to protect the Cape's indigenous peoples, and set out at once to find the Basotho who had carried it to the coast. Six months and two hundred leagues after leaving Paris, their ox-wagon crossed into a landscape the wars and famines of the previous decade had left almost uninhabited - human bones whitening in the open on every side, the occasional hunter diving into the grass at the sight of their caravan rather than risk being seen at all.

Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris · Casalis, The Basutos, or Twenty-Three Years in South Africa (1861) · Charles Reutlinger · Public domain

A welcome that changed as the mountain came into view

The closer the party came to Moshoeshoe's own residence, the more the land transformed: armed shepherds tending real flocks, fields visibly under cultivation, villagers coming out to see the white men rumored to be able to "repair all past disasters," bringing pumpkins, milk and cane in curious welcome. It was, in miniature, the whole story of Moshoeshoe's own reign made visible in a single day's approach - devastation near the frontier giving way, the nearer one came to the mountain, to a kingdom still standing amid the ruin of everything around it.

Casalis, The Basutos, or Twenty-Three Years in South Africa (1861) · Unknown photographer · Public domain

A moral sovereignty

contractionDrafted from Casalis, The Basutos, or Twenty-Three Years in South Africa (1861)

The peace of the mission's early years did not last. Boer families from the Cape Colony, emigrating chiefly, Casalis writes, because they had been made to free their own slaves, began crossing the frontier in small numbers, asking only temporary leave to settle thinly populated ground. Once their numbers grew, they judged themselves strong enough to stop asking. War followed - Casalis declines to narrate its incidents in detail, noting only that alarm and victory songs rang around the mission stations by turns for nearly four years, during which the Basotho won back some of what had been taken from them, and might have vanished from the map entirely before the distant colonial government grasped what was happening in its name.

A war ended by withdrawal, not by settlement

A show of force - a handful of dragoons and the mere sight of colonial troops crossing the Orange - was, Casalis writes, enough on its own to awe both settlers and Basotho into laying down arms, and a diplomatic congress opened to find some remedy for troubles it ought to have foreseen. Before it finished its work, a newly arrived colonial governor cut through the negotiations at a stroke, proclaiming the sovereignty of the Queen of England over the whole territory - a sovereignty framed as purely moral, protecting black and white alike, guaranteeing that each should keep what he already held and encroach no further. It did not hold. England, unwilling to fund a war promising neither glory nor profit, withdrew her troops and magistrates once she judged the danger past, leaving the settlers who had caused the trouble exactly where they had been.

British Museum, London · Casalis, The Basutos, or Twenty-Three Years in South Africa (1861) · Edwin Dalton · Public domain

A verdict from the man who watched it happen

Casalis's own judgment, written with the trouble still unresolved around him, is blunt: nothing had actually changed. The two rival populations remained face to face, English neutrality was "very often merely nominal," and successive Cape governors had never pursued any frontier policy beyond reacting to whatever the colonists' own encroachments had already made unavoidable. The chiefs of his own day, he writes, faced difficulties their fathers had never known - a mountain kingdom that had outlasted cannibal bands, the Ndebele and every rival Sotho chief now found itself measured instead against a colonial frontier that kept moving regardless of what any single victory or treaty achieved.

British subjects

contractionDrafted from Theal, History of South Africa since September 1795, Vol. IV: The Orange Free State, the South African Republic, Zululand, Basutoland, Bechuanaland and Matabeleland from 1854 to 1872 (1908)

By the late 1860s the war Moshoeshoe had been fighting to hold back Free State encroachment on his own territory had gone on, with intervals of truce, for the better part of a decade. Moshoeshoe had already offered more than once to place himself and his people, with their land, under the Queen's authority rather than the Free State's; for years the offer went unanswered, colonial officials wary of the tangle of obligations it would create with the republic and with neighbouring tribes. By 1867 the calculation had changed. With farms burning on both sides of the Caledon and no end to the fighting in sight, the secretary of state gave his consent that December to receiving the Basuto as British subjects.

The high commissioner, Sir Philip Wodehouse, moved as soon as the despatch reached South Africa, informing both Moshoeshoe and the Free State's president of the power now placed in his hands and urging a suspension of hostilities while the arrangements were made. Moshoeshoe's own reply was full of thanks. On the 12th of March, 1868, Wodehouse proclaimed the Basuto British subjects and their country British territory outright.

Theal, History of South Africa since September 1795, Vol. IV: The Orange Free State, the South African Republic, Zululand, Basutoland, Bechuanaland and Matabeleland from 1854 to 1872 (1908) · Unknown photographer · Public domain

A protection that came with a smaller country

Peace did not restore the ground already lost. The months that followed were consumed by boundary negotiations with a Free State president unwilling to give up territory his own commandos had already occupied, and it was not until 1870, after more than two years of what the record calls near anarchy in the unsettled territory, that a final convention fixed the frontier and let British administration actually take hold. Moshoeshoe had secured his people against conquest, but the kingdom that emerged from the settlement was smaller than the one that had entered the war, its own western lands permanently ceded to the republic that had fought it for them.

A kaross for the Queen

endDrafted from Theal, History of South Africa since September 1795, Vol. IV: The Orange Free State, the South African Republic, Zululand, Basutoland, Bechuanaland and Matabeleland from 1854 to 1872 (1908)

The final ratification of the boundary settlement dragged on for more than two years past the 1868 proclamation, a delay the historical record of the time describes as leaving the Lesuto in a condition of near anarchy. By the time the arrangements were at last completed in 1870, the man whose own repeated appeals had brought British protection in the first place had little left to do with any of it. Moshoeshoe was seventy-seven, worn down by decades that had asked more of him than of almost any other chief of his generation, and his sons Letsie, Molapo and Masupha now governed their own followers without troubling to consult him at all. No one came to him for orders any longer, and no one asked his opinion on the affairs of the kingdom he had spent fifty years building.

Theal, History of South Africa since September 1795, Vol. IV: The Orange Free State, the South African Republic, Zululand, Basutoland, Bechuanaland and Matabeleland from 1854 to 1872 (1908) · Unknown photographer · Public domain

Four months before he died, he chose a fine kaross made of panther skins and asked the resident agent Mr. Bowker to send it to Queen Victoria in his own name, as a mark of gratitude and a plain request that British protection not be withdrawn from his country. He died at Thaba Bosiu, the mountain stronghold that had sheltered his kingdom through every war fought against it, on the 11th of March, 1870. So little was left of his former standing that hardly a colonial newspaper printed more than a brief notice of his death.

Theal, History of South Africa since September 1795, Vol. IV: The Orange Free State, the South African Republic, Zululand, Basutoland, Bechuanaland and Matabeleland from 1854 to 1872 (1908) · Marduk · CC0

From helpless old man to guardian spirit

The Basotho judged him differently than the colonial press had. Where, in his last months, even his nearest relatives had shown him little regard, his death transformed Moshoeshoe at once into the highest object of his people's own reverence - a spirit whose favour could bring prosperity and whose displeasure meant ruin. The kingdom he had spent fifty years building, narrowed by war but never conquered outright, passed to his son Letsie as a British protectorate rather than a prize divided among its neighbours - the outcome the kaross sent to a distant queen had been asking for.