Map loading...
This is the most naturally beautiful country in Southern Africa. Lesotho occupies an area of 30 355 km2. It is the most mountainous African country. It is completely surrounded by South Africa.
Summer days can be hot in the valleys, with temperatures up to 30 °C (degrees Celsius). But mostly the climate is cool, and night frosts can occur at almost any time of the year. In the higher ranges, winter weather can be very severe with night minima below 15 °C and occasional heavy snowfalls. Most rain falls in summer.
Several centuries prior to colonization, Lesotho was populated by Sesotho speaking clans who mingled with the aboriginal San (groups of whom survived intact in the mountain fastness of the Drakensburg late into the 19th century). Amidst the chaos of the Lifaqane Wars in the 1820's, a remarkable leader , Moshoeshoe I, built a then powerful kingdom which at its zenith in the early 1850's spanned the fertile plains of the Caledon River towards the Vaal River as well as present day Lesotho.
Later Moshoeshoe, after a long fight, found himself hard-pressed by the heavily armed Orange Free State commandos and accepted the loss of the Lesotho's best land on the whole west of Caledon as the price of British Protectorate from March 12 1868.
By the 1850's Lesotho had a single language, Sesotho, a unified army and a central court and government which allowed some measure of democratic consultation through the national pitso (assembly). By drawing in tribal fragments intact, Moshoeshoe established a federal structure, each group retaining its internal autonomy.
The chiefs cemented their domination by loaning cattle to the often propertyless newcomers coming from the areas enveloped by the tribal wars. After 1868, much of the chief's grazing land was lost, but they retained power both to allocate and evict from tribal land and to exact tribute labour and court fines and this is still going on in some areas of the rural Lesotho.
Nationalist politics began early in Lesotho. A progressive association was formed by traders and white collar employees as early as 1907, and the more populist league of the common man a decade or so later. By 1950 there was a wide range of trade unions, trade and professional associations, cooperatives and semi-political societies. In 1952 the Basutoland African Congress (BAC) later Congress Party (BCP), was founded under the leadership of Ntsu Mokhehle (already an experienced nationalist as ex-ANC youth league member and Pan-Africanist ) .
In the late 1950's a number of political parties were formed, in particular the MaremaTlou Party (MTP) in 1957 and generally royalist, and the Basotho National Party in 1958 under Chief Leabua Jonathan, in which the lower chiefs and headmen - who resisted centralised royal control and strongly opposed the BCP's radicalism - were later influential. All were committed to the broad goal of national independence.
Lesotho has few mineral resources, limited agricultural land and a harsh climate. It is totally landlocked by its powerful neighbour, South Africa, which dominates its weak economy. Nearly all locally-generated income comes from peasant agriculture, which accounts for about 21 percent of GDP. Only about 16 percent of the land is suitable for cultivation. Most of the remainder is used for grazing, but the land is deteriorating and already suffering from serious soil erosion.
Lesotho's foreign earnings come from mainly four sources: its agricultural exports of wool and mohair, tourist spending, export of clean water and textile as well as earnings of Basotho working in South Africa's gold mines. Briefly, according to the latest statistics, the country has a population of about 2.30 million people according to the 2000 estimate at per capita income of 570 Dollars. Crime is minimal compared with other neighbouring countries and most of the crimes are pick pocketing and housebreaking.
Source: | Public Eye Newspaper |
Article: | Being far away from Lesotho, and knowing the country only from the map, I wonder what it looks like. |
Date: | Friday 26 July 2002 |