The Sotho people, or Basotho, are a Bantu ethnic group of Southern Africa who speak Sesotho. They are native to modern Lesotho and South Africa. The Basotho have inhabited the region since around the fifth century CE and are closely related to other Bantu peoples of the region.
The modern Basotho identity emerged from the accomplished diplomacy of Moshoeshoe I who unified the disparate clans of Sotho–Tswana origin that had dispersed across southern Africa in the early 19th century. Most Basotho today live in Lesotho or South Africa, as the area of the Orange Free State was originally part of Moshoeshoe's nation (now Lesotho).
Ntsoana-Tsatsi is believed to be the place of origin of the Sotho/Basotho people. It is both a mythical and physical place. The mythical aspect of it, as described by Ellenberger (1988) is a place from where the first Sotho people emerged.
They are believed to have come from the ground at Ntsoana-Tsatsi, where there is a lot of water and reeds. The geographical location of this place is believed to be Vrede in the Free State Province of South Africa, according to accounts by informants. It still carries this name and some Sotho people are still found in the area.
Early history. Bantu-speaking peoples had settled in what is now South Africa by about 500 CE. Separation from the Tswana is assumed to have taken place by the 14th century. The first historical references to the Basotho date to the 19th century. By that time, a series of Basotho kingdoms covered the southern portion of the plateau (Free State Province and parts of Gauteng). Basotho society was highly decentralized, and organized on the basis of kraals, or extended clans, each of which was ruled by a chief. Fiefdoms were united into loose confederations.
19th century. In the 1820s, refugees from the Zulu expansion under Shaka came into contact with the Basotho people residing on the highveld. In 1823, pressure caused one group of Basotho, the Kololo, to migrate north. They moved past the Okavango Swamp and across the Zambezi into Barotseland, which is now part of Zambia. In 1845, the Kololo conquered Barotseland.
At about the same time, the Boers began to encroach upon Basotho territory. After the Cape Colony was ceded to Britain at the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars, farmers who opted to leave the former Dutch colony were called the voortrekkers ("pioneers") and moved inland where they eventually established independent polities.
At the time of these developments, Moshoeshoe I gained control of the Basotho kingdoms of the southern highveld. Universally praised as a skilled diplomat and strategist, he moulded the disparate refugee groups escaping the Difaqane into a cohesive nation. His leadership allowed his small nation to survive the obstacles that destroyed other indigenous South African kingdoms during the 19th century, such as the Zulu hegemony, the inward expansion of the voortrekkers and the plans of imperial Britain.
In 1822, Moshoeshoe established the capital at Butha-Buthe, an easily defensible mountain in the northern Drakensberg mountain range, thus laying the foundations of the eventual Kingdom of Lesotho. His capital was later moved to Thaba Bosiu.
To deal with the encroaching voortrekker groups, Moshoeshoe encouraged French missionary activity in his kingdom. Missionaries sent by the Paris Evangelical Missionary Society provided the King with foreign affairs counsel and helped to facilitate the purchase of modern weapons.
Aside from acting as state ministers, missionaries (primarily Casalis and Arbousset) played a vital role in delineating Sesotho orthography and printing Sesotho language materials between 1837 and 1855. The first Sesotho translation of the Bible appeared in 1878.
In 1868, after losing the western lowlands to the Boers during the Free State–Basotho Wars, Moshoeshoe successfully appealed to Queen Victoria to proclaim Lesotho (then known as Basutoland) a protectorate of Britain. Accordingly, the British administration was established in Maseru, the site of Lesotho's current capital. Local chieftains retained power over internal affairs, while Britain was responsible for foreign affairs and the defense of the protectorate.
In 1869, the British sponsored a process to demarcate the borders of Basutoland. While many clans had territory within Basutoland, large numbers of Sesotho speakers resided in areas allocated to the Orange Free State, the sovereign voortrekker republic that bordered the Basotho kingdom.
The Sotho language, seSotho, is a Bantu language closely related to seTswana. Sotho utilizes click consonants in some words, while sePedi and seTswana do not have clicks. Sotho is spoken in the Kingdom of Lesotho and in South Africa. It is concentrated in the Free State, Gauteng and Eastern Cape Provinces, with small groups of speakers in Namibia and Zambia.
Sotho is 1 of the 11 official languages recognized by the South African Constitution and 7.9% of the South African population uses it as their home language. It is a tonal language governed by the noun, which is split into various classes. It is known as an agglutinating language (a combination of simple word elements to express a specific meaning), with many suffixes and prefixes used in sentence construction causing sound changes.
It is rich in proverbs, idioms, and special forms of address reserved for elders and in-laws. Currently, Sotho has two spelling systems, one in use in Lesotho and another in South Africa. For example, in Lesotho a common greeting is Khotso, le phela joang? (literally, "Peace, how are you?"). In South Africa, the word joang (how) is written jwang, and khotso is written kgotso.
Sotho was one of the first African languages to become a written language and therefore Sotho literature is extensive. South Sotho is comprised of the Fokeng, Tlokwa, Kwena, Phetla, Phuti, and Pulana dialects or varieties and according to scholars the written form was originally based on the Tlokwa dialect. Today the written language is mostly based on the Kwena and Fokeng dialects, although there are variations. Sesotho was transmuted into writing by the missionaries Casalis and Arbousset of the Paris Evangelical Mission who arrived at Thaba Bosiu in 1833. One of the first novels in a South African language was Chaka, written in Sotho by Thomas Mofolo in the early years of the twentieth century. It is still read today and has been translated into a number of languages.
(source used 101lasttribes.com but please if you have nothing to do research this tribe)
An African Winter: Savannah Game Lodge, South Africa, 5 June 2013 (an ending)
Our stay at Savannah, though cold, is certainly leisurely. Regardless of the leisure factor, I still haven't been able to sleep past 8a -- probably a side effect of waking up at 5a for those Chobe game drives.
The game drive we were supposed to go on yesterday had been postponed to today, since the meteor dome had taken up a good portion of our day. Before the drive, I made one last-ditch effort to find myself a buff -- a sort of multifunctional/sports headwear -- that I'd first seen on one of our rafting guides in Zim. I asked him where he got it and he said Namibia. I went searching for a buff through Zim, Botswana and Namibia with no luck. But I mentioned it to Kobus and he pointed me in the right direction -- the local mall (ha). I figured I might find it at a more authentic location, but alas.
When we came back, we went on the drive and saw all the lodge's privately-owned animals: rhino, giraffe, wildebeest, buffalo, various antelope, etc. The lodge sits on 3,000 acres of land, so we were blessed to have seen everything. We also saw the hide and bones of a dead giraffe, who had been struck by lightening a month before. It was very sad.
Before heading back to the lodge, we saw a 40 year old abandoned village from the Basotho tribe. It was also a sad story -- the tribe had basically been run out of their village by white people. The lodge's owner, Bobby, decided to leave the remains of the village on his land so as not to forget the culture and history of the area.
We celebrated our last night at the lodge, and in Africa, with a bonfire. Then the young people -- me, my brother, Kobus and our other family friend/co-traveler -- headed out to a bar in Parys. Saying goodbye to Africa was bittersweet, a seriously unforgettable trip.
