IQO 



NA TURE 



[April 14, 1910 



THE BASUTO.' 



SIR GODFREY LAGDEN has given us, in these 

 two volumes under review, a valuable history of 

 the rise of the Basuto nation in the Switzerland of 

 South Africa, under the leadership of a great man — 

 Moshesh. 



The Basuto, under the sway of this remarkable 

 personage, were for the most part com}X)unded of 

 clans of the so-called Bechuana peoples, yet the root 

 of their present national name — Suto (the Ba- is 

 merely the plural prefix) — seems to have been derived 

 from the same tribe or district of north-eastern Zulu- 

 land (Ama-sutu, Usutu) as that which gave rise to 

 the present royal dynasty of the Zulu people, to which 

 Cechwayo belonged. No doubt it sent 

 other enterprising adventurers farther 

 west. By one of these was founded the 

 Ba-suto clan from which Moshesh arose, 

 in the circumstances cited by Sir Godfrey 

 Lagden on p. 19. Moshesh was not 

 directly descended from the stock of some 

 bygone Zulu adventurer, whose tribal 

 name — Suto or Sutu — had been adopted 

 by these Bechuana people, but from a 

 distant relative of the same racial 

 origin whose ancestors had remained in 

 the Amahlubi country to the south. The 

 grandfather of Moshesh, however, had 

 been adopted as a son and successor by 

 Sekake, a Bakwena chief (apparently de- 

 scended on one side from the original 

 Umu-sutu). This adopted son was called 

 Pete. He was succeeded by his own son, 

 Mokachane, who was the father of 

 Moshesh (this name as it stands means 

 "a woman's garment" in the Se-suto 

 language, but Sir Godfrey states that 

 it is more probably an abbreviation of 

 " Mosheshwe," which he interprets as 

 "shaver" or "leveller"). The birth of 

 Moshesh must have taken place about 

 1792, at Monkhoaneng, in Northern 

 Basutoland. 



About 1815, Chaka obtained complete 

 control over the Zulu Kafirs of Zululand 

 and Eastern Natal, and commenced that 

 series of bloodv wars in which, at the 

 lowest possible estimate, a million Bantu 

 negroes perished : wars which started a 

 series of convulsions amongst the negroes 

 of South Africa, that only came to an 

 end by the death of Lobengula in 1894, 

 the capture of Gungunyane by the Portu- 

 guese in 1895, and the complete subjuga- 

 tion (by force and by diplomacy) of the 

 Angoni Zulus of Western Nyasaland by 

 Sir Alfred Sharpe in 1906 



taking Thaba Bosigo and establishing a secondary 

 Zulu power in Basutoland (about 1832), but he could 

 only have done this by surrounding the mountain and 

 gradually starving out the Basuto clan. This pur- 

 pose, even if he entertained it, was thwarted by 

 the action of the emigrant Boers, who, by means 

 of their firearms and system of laager camps 

 (a defence of linked wagons), defeated Moselekatsi 

 and drove him perrhanently beyond the Limpopo 

 River. 



Thus it was mainly the action of the white man 

 which enabled the Basuto clan of the Southern Bechu- 

 ana to expand into the Basuto nation. The emigrant 

 Boers, after soundly thrashing Moselekatsi, saved 

 from complete extermination the Bechuana peoples 



Photo, by T. Lindsay Fairciough\ 



Fig. I. — Fortified Cave at Lebise Masupha's Berea. 



From "The Basutos.' 



Wave after wave of Kafir or Zulu inva- 

 sion of Basutoland took place after 1820, and, but for ' between the Kalahari Desert and Lake Ngami on the 

 the mountainous character of Basutoland and the ' north and the Drakensberg Mountains on the south. 



valour and genius for warfare of the Boers, not even 

 Moshesh could have saved the remnant of the southern 

 Bechuana peoples who gathered round him. But he 

 found in Thaba Bosigo — the " Mountain of Night," 

 under the shadow of Mount Machache, in north- 

 western Basutoland — a stronghold from which no 

 force — black or white — ever availed to dislodge him. 

 The Zulu conqueror, Moselekatsi, might, perhaps, 

 have succeeded (in spite of one severe repulse) in 



The emigrant farmers themselves occupied, in the 

 first instance, the less mountainous elevated plateaus 

 to the north of the Caledon River. 



But although Moshesh and his Basuto received the 

 first missionaries (1833) gladly, and practically at no 

 time put any opposition in the way of the spread of 

 Christianity and education, they strongly objected to 

 the Boers as settlers in what is now the Orange Free 



State. They wished to learn the wisdom of the white 

 man, and, above all, to acquire his firearms and his 

 T ^ !."^''t^»"/^^ ' the Mountaineers and their Country." By Sir Godfrey \ horses (earlv in the 19th centurv they had begun that 



Lagden. K^.M^G. 2 vols. Vol. i., pp. xvi+338 ; vol. u., pp. xu+339-€9o. | ,.ff_,:^l f^;. ,u„ u^.-.! „,u;^l, V.^. ^L,.UcA \^ i\.^ r^. 

 (London : Hutchinson and Co., 1909.) Fnce24f.net. 



NO. 21 1 1, VOL. 83] 



affection for the horse which has resulted in the re- 



