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Leselinyana la Lesotho and Sotho Historiography

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 May 2014

Daniel P. Kunene
Daniel P. Kunene*
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin-Madison
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Extract

On 3 November 1863 the first issue of Leselinyana la Lesotho, datelined Morija, was published by the Revd. Adolphe Mabille of the Paris Evangelical Mission Society. Leselinyana continues to be published today. Its contents have been recently used by two biographers of Moshoeshoe and in the present paper I hope to suggest some other ways in which the materials in this publication can be of value to historians of the Sotho.

Mabille had arrived among the Sotho in 1860 and had already published several small pamphlets written by himself on a small primitive printing press. The first issue of Leselinyana comprised just a single sheet containing two pieces of writing -- an editorial signed “Leselinyana la Lesutho” in which, inter alia, the newspaper introduced itself in the first person to the Basotho. The other piece was the first of what came to be a series of articles with the general title “Mogaogeli oa Moetsalibe” (“The Sinner's Pardoner”). From the beginning Leselinyana emphasized articles of a religious and catechetical nature, clearly indicating its basic purpose as a vehicle for religious instruction and propaganda.

According to Gérard the publication of Leselinyana was interrupted only twice. The first hiatus was from 1865 to 1869 when the Boers of the Orange Free State invaded and temporarily occupied areas west of the Drakensberg mountains, evicting the French missionaries who had supported the Africans there. The second occurred during the so-called Gun War of 1880/81 when the Sotho successfully resisted efforts by the Cape government to disarm them and to open Sotho lands to white settlement. In the following discussion I will touch briefly on a few representative materials in Leselinyana which suggest the richness of the paper as a source for historians, not only of the Sotho themselves but of their relations with the whites of the area and with the missionaries.

Type
Research Article
Information
History in Africa , Volume 4 , 1977 , pp. 149 - 161
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1977

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References

Notes

1. This paper is based on research in microfilm copies of Leselinyana la Lesotho at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. These holdings cover the years 1883 to 1913, 1915 to 1935, and 1947 to 1965. A lending copy is held by the Center for Research Libraries, Chicago, Illinois.

2. See Sanders, Peter, Moshoeshoe, Chief of the Sotho (London, 1975)Google Scholar; Thompson, Leonard M., Survival in Two Worlds: Moshoeshoe of Lesotho, 1786-1870 (Oxford, 1975).Google Scholar

3. For Mabille see Ellenberger, V., A century of mission work in Basutoland, 1833-1933 (Morija, 1938), p. 126.Google Scholar

4. I retain the original orthography of titles and headings although this sometimes creates problems since the orthography was in a very fluid state in these early years of literacy.

5. Gérard, Albert, Four African Literatures (Berkeley, 1971), p. 103.Google Scholar Cf. Ellenberger, , A Century of Mission Work, pp. 160, 210ff.Google Scholar Gerard incorrectly attributes the Gun War to 1890.

6. Leselinyana, February, 1883.

7. Ibid., 1 March 1883.

8. Ibid.

9. Ibid., 1 January 1889.

10. Ibid.

11. Ibid., 1 December 1896.

12. Ibid., 1 September 1897.

13. Ibid., 1 September 1888.

14. Ibid. Ellenberger, , A Century of Mission Work, pp. 240–1Google Scholar, opined that the Catholic attitude on bohadi contributed to their increasingly successful proselytizing effort, especially among wives of chiefs.

15. Leselinyana, 15 April 1899. Rolland (as “G.R.”) continued his vilification of Mokone and his new church in ibid., 1 May 1899. For a later missionary view of Ethiopianism see Ellenberger, , A Century of Mission Work, pp. 303–4.Google Scholar

16. Leselinyana, 1 September 1886.

17. Ibid., 1 February 1892.

18. Ibid.

19. mosito comes from the verb sitwa (to transgress) and might be translated freely as “the one who transgressed.”

20. Leselinyana, 1 February 1892.

21. Ibid., 15 July 1892.

22. Ibid.

23. Ibid.

24. Ibid., 15 September 1893.

25. It is not unlikely that the author was James C. McGregor since the contents bear a marked similarity to his Basuto Traditions, first issued in Sesotho in 1904 and in English a year later.