Basuto

The Basuto people live in southern Africa. They are a nation composed of numerous Sotho-speaking people who were organized into one nation, Lesotho, by the legendary king, Moshoeshoe I. Whereas the Sotho-speaking people existed prior to the union created by Moshoeshoe I, the specific nation of Lesotho is a direct result of the political activity of the king.

The Basuto live in the high savanna regions of southern Africa. Among the main groups of Basuto are the Northern Sotho, including the Lovedu and the Pedi; the Western Sotho, who are really the Tswana; and the Southern Sotho, the Basuto proper of the nation of Lesotho. Most scholars agree that the language spoken by the Basuto is a Bantu language similar to hundreds of languages in southern and eastern Africa. For example, it is closely related to Nguni, Venda, and Tsonga. The language of Basuto is agglutinative because it uses affixes and derivational and inflexional rules to build words. The name of the language is Sesotho. It is one of the languages from which the artificial language Tsotsitaal is derived in South Africa. It is a unique lexicon and a set of idioms that are used with the grammar of Sesotho or Zulu. During the past 2 decades, it has become the language of the Kwaito music in the townships.

Inasmuch as the European domination of much of the Sotho culture created a serious rupture in the traditional religion of the people at the visible level, the language carries an enormous wealth of information about the way the Basuto see the world. For example, the word moritbi, which has the meaning of shade or shadow of a human being, has been translated in English as spirit. However, it is to be understood from the Basuto perspective as also conveying the idea of dignity or reputation and expresses the view that one can become moritbi, one of the ancestors after death.

There is one critical way in which the traditional religion of the Basuto has been corrupted by the Christian interpretations brought into the language. The Basuto word Modimo means essentially the Almighty God. One does not have a plural for this word in the Basuto. Yet the Europeans introduced a plural in the form of medimo, meaning “gods,” a foreign concept in the Sesotho language. When the Sesotho speak of the ancestors, they use the term badimo, the ancestors; the word is never used in the singular. One speaks of a person being among the ancestors.

In the 19th century, when the whites began their push into the interior of South Africa, producing a domino effect on various African [Page 110]nations, Moshoeshoe I opened his kingdom to people who had been displaced by the great chaos of warfare. The king used the strategy of asking Europeans to come live with his people as a way of having access to guns and ammunitions as the whites were pushing into his territory. Nevertheless, the missionaries were not able to prevent the inevitable conflicts between the Afrikaners and the British. The Afrikaners/Boers had started to move into the area around 1831. Moshoeshoe I appealed to the British for aid in fighting the Afrikaners/Boers, but the British did not respond until 1868 when Queen Victoria granted some protection. The Basuto people were placed under a British protectorate and gained their independence in 1966.

...