The history of Lesotho

Lesotho is a mountain kingdom entirely surrounded by South Africa, the only independent state in the world lying wholly above 1,000 metres. For thousands of years its highlands were home to San hunter-gatherers, whose paintings still cover its rock shelters, before Sotho-speaking farmers settled the lowlands of the Caledon valley. In the 1820s, amid the wars and upheavals of the Lifaqane, a young chief named Moshoeshoe gathered refugees from many communities on the mountain fortress of Thaba Bosiu and forged them into the Basotho nation. Squeezed by Boer settlers, he sought British protection in 1868, and that decision kept Basutoland out of white-ruled South Africa. Independent since 1966, Lesotho has lived through one-party rule, military government and repeated political crises, while remaining economically bound to its giant neighbour.

The mountains of the Maloti and the Drakensberg escarpment were the land of the San and their ancestors long before farming arrived. Rock shelters in the highlands, such as those of the Sehlabathebe basin in the south-east, hold layers of Stone Age occupation, and the cliffs and overhangs across the country preserve thousands of San paintings of eland, hunters, rain animals and trance dances, some of them made within the last few centuries. Between about 550 and 1300 CE, during a warmer phase of climate, hunter-gatherers moved more often into the high valleys, and some of them kept cattle obtained from farming neighbours.

The Bantu expansion brought farming peoples into southern Africa during the first millennium CE. Among the first to live in what is now Lesotho were Nguni-speaking groups such as the Zizi, remembered as skilled ironworkers. From around the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries Sotho-Tswana communities spread into the grasslands of the Caledon valley, building villages of stone-walled cattle enclosures and growing sorghum. They were organised in chiefdoms traced through lineages such as the Bakoena, the people of the crocodile, and the Bafokeng, and they lived alongside the San, trading, intermarrying and sometimes fighting with them. San communities survived in the mountains into the nineteenth century, when settler and Basotho expansion destroyed their way of life.

Moshoeshoe was born around 1786 at Menkhoaneng in the north, the son of Mokhachane, a minor chief of the Bamokoteli branch of the Bakoena. As a young man he won a name as a cattle raider and leader of his age-mates, and by about 1820 he had his own following at the mountain of Butha-Buthe.

The early nineteenth century brought a time of violence across the highveld, known in Sesotho as Lifaqane and in Nguni languages as Mfecane. The rise of the Zulu Kingdom under Shaka, drought and competition for land and cattle, and the pressures of the Cape frontier and slave raiding from the Portuguese coast all drove communities to flee and to attack others. Groups such as the Batlokoa of Queen MmaNthatisi and the Amangwane of Matiwane swept across the Caledon valley, villages were destroyed, harvests failed, and some starving people turned to cannibalism. Historians now debate how far the Zulu were responsible and whether the idea of a single catastrophe was exaggerated by settlers who wanted to portray the interior as empty, but the suffering in the region is well documented.

In July 1824 Moshoeshoe led his people to Thaba Bosiu, a flat-topped mountain with springs and grazing on its summit that could be held by a few defenders. From there he beat off attacks, including one by the Ndebele of Mzilikazi, who had broken away from Shaka. He offered land and protection to refugees of many origins, including Nguni speakers, lent cattle to the destitute through the mafisa system, and ruled through councils and public assemblies, the pitso. By such generosity and diplomacy he built the Basotho nation from the survivors of the wars.

In 1833, at Moshoeshoe's invitation, three missionaries of the Paris Evangelical Missionary Society, Thomas Arbousset, Eugène Casalis and Constant Gosselin, settled at Morija. They brought Christianity, put Sesotho into writing and printed the first books in the language, while Casalis served Moshoeshoe as an adviser on dealings with Europeans. The Basotho also acquired horses and guns, and by the 1840s they had become formidable mounted riflemen.

From the late 1830s Boer trekkers leaving the Cape Colony arrived on the fertile lowlands west of the Caledon, claiming land they described as empty. Britain annexed the region between the Orange and Vaal rivers as the Orange River Sovereignty in 1848, and its resident, Major Henry Warden, drew boundaries that ignored Basotho claims. In 1851 the Basotho defeated a British force at Viervoet, near Kolonyama, and on 20 December 1852 they checked a larger army under Sir George Cathcart at Berea. Moshoeshoe, fearing a second attack, sent a conciliatory letter that allowed the British to withdraw with honour. In 1854 Britain abandoned the territory, which became the Boer republic of the Orange Free State.

Wars with the Free State followed in 1858 and from 1865 to 1868. The Basotho won the first, but the Boers had better guns and more ammunition, and in the Seqiti War of 1865 to 1866 they took much of the lowlands and forced the Treaty of Thaba Bosiu, which ceded most of the kingdom's arable land. When fighting resumed, Boer commandos burned crops and villages, and famine threatened. Moshoeshoe appealed repeatedly to the High Commissioner, Sir Philip Wodehouse, and to Queen Victoria, and on 12 March 1868 Britain declared Basutoland under its protection. The Convention of Aliwal North in 1869 fixed borders that left the lands west of the Caledon, still called the Conquered Territory, to the Free State, roughly halving the kingdom. Moshoeshoe died on 11 March 1870 and was buried on Thaba Bosiu.

In 1871 Britain handed Basutoland to the Cape Colony, whose magistrates undermined the chiefs and raised taxes. A southern chief, Moorosi, rebelled and was killed in 1879. When the Cape extended its Peace Preservation Act to Basutoland and ordered the Basotho to surrender their guns, much of the country rose in the Gun War of 1880 and 1881 under Lerotholi and Masopha. Cape forces could not win, the settlement of 1881 allowed the Basotho to keep their guns, and the Cape gave up the territory. In 1884 Basutoland became a crown colony of the British Empire, ruled by a resident commissioner through the paramount chief, Moshoeshoe's descendant Letsie and then Lerotholi, and the hereditary chiefs.

That arrangement shaped the next eighty years. Britain invested little, and the small, mountainous territory became a labour reserve for the gold and diamond mines of South Africa, with tens of thousands of Basotho men working on contracts in places such as Johannesburg. Population pressure pushed settlement deep into the highlands. When the Union of South Africa was formed in 1910, Basutoland, like Bechuanaland, now Botswana, and Swaziland, now Eswatini, was left out pending possible transfer; Basotho opposition, and later the apartheid policies adopted by South Africa from 1948, prevented incorporation.

Basotho served in both world wars as labourers rather than soldiers. In World War I more than 4,500 joined the South African Native Labour Corps, and Basotho were among those who drowned when the troopship SS Mendi sank in the English Channel in 1917. In World War II about 21,000 served in the African Auxiliary Pioneer Corps in the Middle East and Italy, and 694 men of the Basotho companies died when the SS Erinpura was torpedoed in 1943. At home, the Lekhotla la Bafo, or Commoners' League, which attacked both colonial rule and the abuses of the chiefs, was banned during the war and its leaders imprisoned after they criticised the treatment of recruits.

The Basutoland Congress Party, founded by Ntsu Mokhehle in 1952 and inspired by pan-Africanism, led demands for self-government. A constitution of 1959 created the first partly elected legislature. In the elections of 1965, held under universal suffrage, the conservative Basotho National Party of Chief Leabua Jonathan, backed by the Catholic Church and supported by South Africa, narrowly won. On 4 October 1966 Basutoland became the independent Kingdom of Lesotho, a constitutional monarchy under King Moshoeshoe II, part of the wider decolonisation of Africa.

When early results in the January 1970 election showed the Congress Party winning, Jonathan annulled the vote, declared a state of emergency, suspended the constitution, and jailed opposition leaders. Congress supporters formed the Lesotho Liberation Army, which waged a small guerrilla campaign, and the regime answered with killings of its own opponents. In the 1970s Jonathan turned against apartheid, gave refuge to members of Nelson Mandela's African National Congress and opened ties with Communist states. South Africa responded with pressure and force, including a commando raid on Maseru in December 1982 that killed dozens of people, and in January 1986 a blockade of the border. Within weeks the army under Major General Justin Lekhanya removed Jonathan in a coup.

The military government first gave executive powers to Moshoeshoe II, then stripped them and exiled him in 1990, installing his son as Letsie III. Lekhanya was himself ousted by junior officers in 1991, and his successor allowed elections in 1993, which the Congress Party won with every seat in the National Assembly. In August 1994 Letsie III, backed by part of the army, dismissed the elected government, but regional pressure restored it within a month. Letsie abdicated in favour of his father in 1995, and after Moshoeshoe II died when his car fell from a mountain road in January 1996, Letsie returned to the throne, where he remains.

In 1997 Prime Minister Mokhehle split from his own party to found the Lesotho Congress for Democracy, which won 79 of 80 seats in May 1998. The opposition alleged fraud, protests surrounded the royal palace, and junior officers mutinied. On 22 September 1998 troops from South Africa and later Botswana entered the country under the banner of the Southern African Development Community. They met armed resistance, and rioting and looting left much of central Maseru in ruins. The crisis led to a new mixed electoral system in 2002 that gave the opposition seats in proportion to its vote.

The great economic project of these decades was the Lesotho Highlands Water Project, agreed with South Africa in 1986, which dams the highland rivers and sends water through tunnels to the Gauteng region. Its first major dam, at Katse, was completed in 1998, and the scheme earns royalties and makes Lesotho self-sufficient in hydroelectric power, although it displaced villagers and was marked by corruption trials. Textile factories serving the United States market, favoured by American trade preferences, became the largest private employer, mostly of women. Lesotho also suffered one of the worst HIV epidemics in the world, with nearly a quarter of adults infected.

Politics after 2012 was unstable, with fragile coalitions and a politicised army. In August 2014 Prime Minister Thomas Thabane fled to South Africa, saying the army had attempted a coup, which it denied; a former army commander was killed by soldiers in 2015, and the serving army chief was assassinated in 2017. Thabane, back in office from 2017, resigned in May 2020 after being named a suspect in the 2017 murder of his estranged wife, and Moeketsi Majoro succeeded him.

In the election of 7 October 2022 the Revolution for Prosperity, a party founded months earlier by the wealthy businessman Sam Matekane, won the most seats, and he became prime minister at the head of a coalition. His government survived an attempted vote of no confidence in 2023 during which the army intervened, and it struggled to pass long-promised constitutional reforms. In April 2025 the United States imposed a 50 per cent tariff on goods from Lesotho, one of the highest rates applied to any country. Textile orders were cancelled and thousands of workers lost their jobs, and the government declared an economic emergency before the rate was cut to 15 per cent in August 2025.