Lesotho

Lesotho, officially the “Kingdom of Lesotho,” is a small country of 2 million inhabitants totally surrounded by the Republic of South Africa. The reception of Christian missionaries by King Moshoeshoe of the BaSotho in the mid-1800s gave Sotho religious practices a global dimension they have never lost. Moshoeshoe welcomed evangelical missionaries from Paris in the hope that they would help him protect his kingdom. He had good reason to fear. Not long thereafter, the kingdom lost much of its arable land to Afrikaners from the adjacent Orange Free State.

Although Moshoeshoe never officially became a Christian, much of his elite entourage did. The missionaries' purveyance of literacy, ploughs, stone houses, and wagons bolstered his authority. Under missionary influence, he reformed burial rites, abolished youths' initiation rituals, divorced two of his wives who had converted to Christianity, condemned witchcraft killings, and banned alcohol, although he never abjured polygyny or the practice of appropriating the children of his debtors after their deaths. His reforms caused popular dissent, exacerbated by the missionaries' calls for pacifism in the face of enemy attacks. As a result, Moshoeshoe and his retinue temporarily returned to their previous practices. But after the French Catholics and Anglicans arrived, Mohsoeshoe took a renewed interest in Christianity, claiming to be a Christian before his death but dying before he could be baptized. Gradually, Sotho Christians acquired equal control over the Paris Evangelical Mission as the Kereke ea Lesotho, and in 1964, they initiated the independent Lesotho Evangelical Church.

Ironically, the very wave of global influence that brought Christianity and threatened Sotho rituals also challenged Christian ideas about marriage and gender and gave Sotho rites a new meaning. When migrations to South African mines began in the early 1870s—and continued into the 20th century to urban areas in South Africa and Lesotho—men moved in as laborers and women as providers of illicit beer, food, and sex for cash. Many wives who stayed at home took lovers, and Basotho girls’ initiation rites featured songs describing how to keep adultery a secret. In the 1940s and 1950s, as Sotho chiefs feared being marginalized by British colonial administrative changes and possible incorporation into racist South Africa, they altered the nature of the protective medicines (diretlo) prepared by ngaka ritualists to include the body parts of clan members as opposed to those of clan strangers, prompting the terror of the so-called medicine murders. Among the chiefs implicated were Catholics and Protestants. But today, BaSotho make pilgrimages to ancestral shrines in the South African lands that Afrikaners stole more than two centuries ago, reclaiming through the synthesis of Christianity and Sotho ritual what they lost through colonial conquest.