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This is episode 161 \u2014 and what\u2019s this I hear? The sound of wind whipping and howling through the mountain recesses, snow-capped mountains, where the rivers have torn deep ravines in the geography, terraphysics scraping rocks, rushing waters plunging from the escarpment into the eastern cape and free state, foaming and roiling.
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\nIt must be the home of the BaSotho.
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\nMany South Africans make the fatal mistake of thinking that Lesotho is such a small place, reliant on its big neighbour, it is basically another province of the RSA.
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\nMy friends, harbouring that misconception will get you in deep trouble. Its not size that matters, its pure unbridled pride. Moshoeshoe and his descendents have fought long and hard for independence, albeit in a nation surrounded by a single other nation.
\nBy the mid-1940s, Moshoeshoe had turned to the British authorities and their policies were more favourable to him than those of the Boers. The British at least at this point showed no sign of coveting his land, nor had they ill-treated his people, unlike the amaXhosa to the south.
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\nMoshoeshoe was being kept up to date about diplomatic events by the influential Frency missionary, Eugene Casalis. By 1843 the Paris missionaries had realised that the biggest threat to Moshoeshoe and his Basotho were not the English, despite the bad blood between the French and the English, but the trekboers.
\nThis is important because the Boers didn\u2019t see the Basotho as original owners of the land, they say the owners as San. In the years of discussions, letters, meetings, official notes, logs, missionary biographies, it became obvious that to the Boers, the San being the original owners, meant that the Basotho couldn\u2019t really own the land at all.
\nBasotho national existence began in the midst of what we\u2019d call settler colonialism as well as the intra-African wars between rulers like Mzilikazi, Mantatisi, Shaka. It\u2019s remarkable because this is one of the African states that grew out of a response to invasions by brown, black and white.
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\nSotho oral tradition speaks of the royal family line of Bakoena Ba Mokoteli \u2014 which forms the totemic core of Basotho aristocracy, and existed way before these invasions.
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\nCasalis and his colleagues became Moshoeshoe\u2019s external voice, writing his communications, and despite their patriotism as Frenchmen, they regarded the British in the Cape as their allies.
\nThe reason is simple. France had zero interests in southern Africa by now, so this decision to sidle up to the Brits in Cape Town was not a contradiction.
\nBy 1844 treaties with Adam Kok and Moshoeshoe were concluded, with the eye-catching line in both agreements where each undertook to be \u201cthe faithful Friend and Ally of the colony\u2026\u201d
\nThis was not regarded as a valid claim by the trekboers. Nor Moshoeshoe\u2019s implacable enemy, Sekonyela of the Batlokwa people among others.