Moshoeshoe I

Moshoeshoe I, the son of a minor chief, drew together refugees and scattered clans during the turmoil of early nineteenth-century southern Africa to create the Basotho nation, the forerunner of modern Lesotho. From his mountain fortress of Thaba Bosiu he survived wars with neighbouring peoples, the British and the Boers. Shortly before his death in 1870 he secured British protection for his people, saving them from conquest by the Boers.

He was born Lepoqo at Menkhoaneng in what is now northern Lesotho. The year is uncertain; estimates run from 1780 to 1794, with about 1786 most often given. His father, Mokhachane, headed the Bamokoteli, a small branch of the Bakoena clan numbering a few thousand people at most. After his initiation in 1804 he led his age-mates on a daring cattle raid and boasted in a praise poem that he had shaved off a rival chief's beard. The name Moshoeshoe, "the Shaver", stuck. As a young man he was ambitious and quick-tempered, but he became known above all for his skill at winning followers.

Around 1820 he succeeded his father and settled with his people on Butha-Buthe mountain. These were the years of the Mfecane, the wars and migrations that followed the rise of the Zulu kingdom under Shaka, when Nguni groups driven from the east fell on the Sotho. Attacks forced Moshoeshoe to move to a flat-topped hill later named Thaba Bosiu, "mountain at night", which proved impossible to storm. Many uprooted groups gathered under his rule, and from them the Basotho nation took shape. In the 1820s raids by mounted Koranna gunmen taught them the value of horses and firearms, and by 1843 Moshoeshoe was said to have more of both than any other chief in southern Africa.

In 1833 he invited French Protestant missionaries of the Paris Evangelical Missionary Society, including Eugène Casalis and Thomas Arbousset, to settle among his people. Ten years later the governor of the Cape Colony, George Napier, recognised him as an ally against the Boers who had entered the interior during the Great Trek. In 1848 Sir Harry Smith pressed him to accept British paramountcy over the lands north of the Orange River.

Boundaries drawn by the British resident, Henry Warden, ignored many of Moshoeshoe's claims, and in 1851 a Basotho and Taung army defeated Warden's mixed force at Viervoet. In December 1852 a British punitive expedition under Sir George Cathcart was checked at the Battle of Berea. Fearing a second attack, Moshoeshoe promptly sued for peace and obtained favourable terms. The next year he crushed his old rival Sekonyela of the Batlokoa. The British withdrew from the region in 1854, leaving the Boer Orange Free State as his neighbour.

War with the Free State broke out in 1858. The Basotho won the first round, but in the conflicts that followed, lasting until 1868, Boer marksmanship and weapons told against them. By the Treaty of Thaba Bosiu in 1866 Moshoeshoe gave up most of the kingdom's arable land, and when fighting resumed the Boers burned crops and the Basotho faced starvation. He and the missionaries appealed to the British high commissioner, Sir Philip Wodehouse, who on 12 March 1868 proclaimed Basutoland British territory. Moshoeshoe died on 11 March 1870; his eldest son, Letsie I, followed him as king.

He had many wives, a source of political alliances and wealth, though only the sons of his first wife counted as royal heirs. His death is commemorated each year on 11 March, Moshoeshoe Day, a national holiday in Lesotho, when the king lays wreaths on his grave at Thaba Bosiu.

Our 1815 map shows the region before his rise, and the 1878 and 1880 maps show Basutoland, much reduced by the Boer wars, beside the Orange Free State.