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SPEED WRITING Call for Satire: deadline March 15th! Let your talent speak for many. We urge you to write a satirical poem—poke fun at the leader of your choice to flaunt your freedom of speech and your own government’s respect for that human right! This isn’t about politics. It is about supporting the rights of all to write what they want - despite politics. On February 4th the satirist Hédi Ouled Baballah was arrested—behind bars, Baballah can’t continue to speak his mind. Please use your talent and add your voice to protest this infringement on the human right of free speech. More information can be found at www. protestpoems. org (don’t feel sorry for colleagues abroad. do something) All poems will be considered for inclusion in Babel Fruit.

Ed: The deadline has been moved back to the 18th of March. Please participate.
(Rethabile)

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Malcolm X
Malcolm Little
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Black History Month

Press Release: Statement by IMF Executive Directors at the Conclusion of their Visit to the Kingdom of Lesotho:

Statement by IMF Executive Directors at the Conclusion of their Visit to the Kingdom of Lesotho Press Release No. 08/27 February 20, 2008

A mission of Executive Directors of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) comprising Messrs. Age Bakker, Peter Gakunu, Huayong Ge, Aleksei V. Mozhin, and Ms. Miranda Xafa issued the following statement today in Maseru at the conclusion of a visit to Lesotho:

“We are grateful for the opportunity to visit Lesotho and we thank His Majesty the King Letsie III, The Right Honorable Prime Minister Mosisili, Deputy Prime Minister Lesao Lehohla, Minister Thahane, Governor Senaoana and other honorable members of the Government and Senior officials of the Kingdom of Lesotho for their very warm hospitality. Our visit has provided us with a rare opportunity to learn more about Lesotho from our interactions with the authorities, the public and private sectors, and Lesotho’s development partners. We discussed economic developments and the challenges Lesotho faces in its efforts to achieve high and sustainable growth necessary for a meaningful reduction in poverty. This will contribute significantly to our understanding in the IMF Executive Board, in assessing and discussing the development challenges of the country and the IMF’s policy advice.

“In our meetings with His Majesty the King and the Right Honorable Prime Minister we congratulated them for their commitment to economic development and poverty reduction. We had productive discussions on Lesotho’s economic prospects and development challenges.

“We commend Lesotho’s authorities for their prudent macroeconomic management which has contributed to ensuring economic stability has translated into robust growth, strong fiscal and external positions, single digit inflation, and substantial reduction in debt level. We praise their efforts to promote economic growth through favorable improvements in the investment climate. We agreed with the authorities that achieving the sustainable, broad based economic growth necessary for the improvement of the living conditions of the majority of the Basotho people, remains a challenge. Private sector development is key for achieving growth and reducing poverty.

“We acknowledge that numerous challenges remain on the long road toward effective poverty reduction and sustainable economic growth. The overdependence on Southern African Customs Union (SACU) revenues (over 60 percent) and a global reduction in tariffs as a result of trade liberalization entail risks of revenue slowdown over time. Since the fall of the multifiber agreement, difficulties have piled up, prompting the need to refocus the textile sector and more generally diversify the sources of growth and exports. The need for further financial sector development was discussed, with a view to provide sound outlets for domestic savings and greater funds for domestic investment. The provision of well-supervised financial services and the raising of financial literacy was seen as essential to maintaining financial stability. We agreed with the authorities that productivity-enhancing infrastructure, job creation, fighting HIV/AIDS, and poverty reduction remain top priorities. We believe that with the continuation of prudent policies and the support of development partners, these challenges are not insurmountable.

“We reaffirm the IMF’s commitment to continuing the excellent relationship with the Lesotho authorities.”

The Atlanticist : Africa needs tough love, not more aid poured down a rat hole:

There is not a single state on the African continent that would not today be better off administered under a colonial regime, as Hong Kong was by Britain. If the West genuinely cared about Africa and wanted to make a difference rather than more charity, it would send soldiers to overthrow corrupt and despotic regimes, and constitutional law experts and administrators to architect and operate governing legal and economic systems there patterned after our own.

Like it did in Iraq? I kind of followed this line of thought, clipping my mouth shut with clothes pegs at places, so I wouldn’t yell out obscenities in front of my children. And I went through without a single f-word. I think the writer does identify the problem most of the time:

The African continent is a patchwork quilt of artificially drawn and imposed borders, established, for the most part, by European colonial powers.

Apart from the wars being fought now in Africa, the ones that the colonial west interrupted (while the west itself was free to fight its own murderous wars and get them over with — effectively establishing its borders without African or other outside interference) — but I was saying, apart from these wars, frontiers on the African continent were established entirely by the colonial master and mistress. It is inaccurate therefore to say for the most part. Nevertheless, the writer identifies there a seed for conflict.

Monetary aid is poison. It does not encourage more responsible government. […] A deluge of aid will not fix what ails Africa.

Of course it doesn’t, and it won’t. Whoever said it did or will? But, again, the writer has identified part of the problem. Here’s the thing, as an African, I want the west out, not in, for several reasons. The writer mentions the first one. The second one is unfair trade practices from which Africa is getting thinner and its western trade partners fatter. The third one is that the west messed Africa up once, it’s time it stopped. Got on the bus home. Knowing that “legal and economic systems […] patterned after our own,” as the writer so shamelessly puts it, seem to the west to be the best because ours were uprooted and incapacitated by the same west.

Lack of access to Western markets for products in which African producers enjoy comparative advantage such as sugar, cotton and textiles is a huge problem. Western import restrictions and tariffs stymie wealth creation in Africa.

There again, the writer concurs with me. It is of course a huge problem. And the solution?  “American and European markets should be unilaterally opened to Africa goods, with protective regimes for Western producers being discarded.” Why not stop there, and also provide logical solutions for the other problems so nicely identified? Why talk of colonial regimes administered by America and Britain? We’re quite tired, as a people, of fighting the west off. We want to be left alone.

That’s all we’ve ever wanted, really, even as the west scrambled for chunks of our land. But guess what… instead of getting out, the west is getting in deeper: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7026197.stm I think somebody took your advice. The shame of it is that it’s a waste of money, and we’ll just have to fight and kick the west out again, albeit with an even more messed up continent.

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World Development Movement comment on Bali roadmap:

The EU [says] it will increase taxes on imports from African, Caribbean and Pacific countries on 1 January 2008 if agreements are not signed. At the same time, the EU has suggested that the existence (or not) of an Economic Partnership Agreement will influence EU decisions on which countries receive most aid.

This is an attempt by the EU to get even more market share from Africa and the Caribbean, at give-away tax rates, or as the author of the article puts it, “free trade agreements.”  This reminds me of a blog post in which I was trying to tell JK, a commenter, that the West is not about to leave Africa alone.

I hate being right like this, but there you have it JK. When Africa is reluctant to enter into “trade” with the West, there’s quite a bit of arm-twisting used: “The EU has suggested that the existence (or not) of an Economic Partnership Agreement will influence EU decisions on which countries receive most aid.”

clipped from methodius.blogspot.com In an ominous development, the USA has started establishing military bases in Africa. Why should they want to do that? Are they wanting to start wars here, as they have done in Europe and Asia?

‘President George W. Bush strongly urged lawmakers Wednesday to reject a resolution that describes the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Armenians early in the last century as genocide - a highly sensitive issue at a time of rising U.S.-Turkish tension over northern Iraq.

“We all deeply regret the tragic suffering of the Armenian people that began in 1915,” Bush said in a brief statement. “But this resolution is not the right response to these historic mass killings and its passage would do great harm to relations with a key ally in NATO, and to the war on terror.”’
[more…]

UPDATE:
The bill passed anyway. Aznavour will be happy.

the run
from qoaling to grootvlei

by lantern light we snuffed out
when sound leapt at us
(or seemed to leap
as it does when the wind heaves forth)
we left, travelling the terrain wintered with contempt,
ears tuned for the sound of foot, boot, the snap
of dog on our tail.

beasts are oblivious to this, to
things that knot us, questing always for acceptance
surviving the dark.

I believe in the only spirit, the faces
of people who’ve walked this way.

as for us, we
held our lantern and crossed the river into azania,
knowing the order of the cycle:
winter turns to spring,
dead leaves make russet apple cheeks,
kernels keep internal life.
© Rethabile Masilo

“President Bush, in a confrontation with Congress, on Wednesday vetoed a bipartisan bill that would have dramatically expanded children’s health insurance.”
[Read more…]

after lunch on saturdays
father would carry into the study
a stack of politics, and in wood
scent he’d sit and read till sleep
claimed him, or supper,
or that sparkle of sun sent
in rear windows,
blinding him out
to the awning of trees where
we hooked a hammock
and heaved him into the sisal
net, left him there resting
like a foetus. bringing him
maotoana* tea one day, there lay
on its back on the black earth
beneath him a note-book; row on
row of scribble glared at me,
some sort of theory on
the likelihood of a glad and
bounteous kingdom.
© Rethabile Masilo

* Rooibos tea in Sesotho

‘September 16, 2007 6:00 AM

The Lesotho Promise

MASERU, Lesotho — A 494-carat diamond, believed to be the 18th largest in the world, has been found at a mine in Lesotho, a government official said. The stone was a white diamond of exceptional quality, said Natural Resources Minister Monyane Moleleki. It has been sent to Antwerp, Belgium, for auction.

The diamond was found at the Lets’eng Diamond Mine, situated high in Lesotho’s mountains. The Lesotho Promise, a 603-carat stone, was uncovered last year at the same mine and sold for $12.3 million. A 215-carat flawless diamond found in January 2007 brought $8.3 million.

The largest diamond ever found, the Cullinan, was the size of a bowling ball at 3,106 carats in the rough. That finished stone is set in Britain’s Imperial Sceptre as part of the Crown Jewels. Lesotho is a mountainous country in southern Africa ravaged by high unemployment, poverty and AIDS.’
[source]

Is it just me, or the first line of this article and the last one do not go together? We know that “Letseng, in the high plateau of the Maluti Mountains, was owned by De Beers between 1977 and 1982 and closed after a tax dispute with the Lesotho government. JCI reopened it in 2004 [source].” Gem Diamonds took over in July 2006.

Here’s a question: what, or how much, does the Mosotho in the street gain from the discovery of the 18th largest diamond in the world? How much does the average Mosotho gain from the discovery of the 15th largest diamond in the world, when that diamond is found in that Mosotho’s land? Remember that “the Letseng mine is 70 percent owned by Gem Diamond Mining Company of Africa Ltd and 30 percent by the Lesotho government [source].”

NB: More to come on this subject…

When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said ‘Let us pray.’ We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land.
~Desmond Mpilo Tutu

Zoe, my brother, says “On this day, the 4th of September, in 1981, our home was attacked in the middle of the night by armed soldiers. The target was our father, Benjamin Masilonyane Masilo, who escaped the shooting by the skin of his teeth. It is truly a miracle that he survived the attack. Motlatsi however, his three-year old grandson and our nephew, was not so lucky. He died, presumably in his sleep because he was still in his position on the bed, when the bullets ripped his stomach open.

Lest we forget, and so that such things may not continue to happen to other people, we need to tell this story and those of others similar to ours, over and over and over again.” I say amen to that. I’d hate for what happened to us to happen to someone else. That’s because I know first hand the horror of it, and how much it can destroy a life, lives, not of the killed only, but of the survivors as well. Lest we forget, our job, all of us, is to prevent this sort of thing from ever happening again. We must remind our leaders day and night, and we must be prepared to affront them with guts and integrity.

I refuse to wish anyone a happy 4th of September…

Approximately 80% of our air pollution stems from hydrocarbons released by vegetation, so let’s not go overboard in setting and enforcing tough emission standards from man-made sources.
~Ronald Reagan

tlhokomeliso
‘if needs be, it is an ideal
for which I am prepared to die.’
~ntate mandela

before the naming rites,
even before we were free to be free
from terror in our ranks,
before prison or death
became our constitutional rights,
a cry echoed among the elements
to shake the tenements
inside heaven and inside hell;
flesh came into my shell,
resided in me, heavy and light
according to the moment—
like a rumour, God and politics
entered me and sat on my heart;
so I must ask you to destroy me
because there’s a part of me that
still belongs to the sun, and will
not acquiesce; for the benefit of
your crew, destroy, before it’s too
late, the blood in me that is hers
and will not succumb — slay
this whole idea of a Motuba who
rides a sun-ray to illume our day.
© Rethabile Masilo

A free and independent media is essential to democracy. It is a fact. Harness the media, and you kill the whole idea of democracy (or you try). Especially in a country that has few outlets for public expression, like our beloved Lesotho. The government of Lesotho has just decided to withdraw its advertising relation with the newspaper The Public Eye, and some people are rightly wanting to know why.

The government of Lesotho is just about the only advertiser with The Public Eye and this action perhaps seeks to effectively shut down the paper through strangulation, but if the action does not seek to do so, the end result will still be death by strangulation. That immediately deprives the country of free and independent speech, it deprives some Basotho of their livelihood in a country that has a 45% unemployment rate (2002 figures), and it plunges Lesotho back into the abyss it is still struggling to get out of (where criticising the government resulted in a sure backlash).

Public Eye, an independent newspaper with the largest distribution and widest readership in the country, has recently lost its single biggest advertising client. That client is the Lesotho government, which provides 80% of Public Eye’s revenue.

Lesotho is so dependent on SA for commerce that there are few local businesses capable or desirous of taking out advertising space in a national publication. Public Eye thus has little prospect of attracting other business to offset its recent loss. It faces a significant reduction of operations and the people of Lesotho, in consequence, will have diminished access to independent news.
[source]

The newspaper has the largest readership in the country, so the motive does not lie there. According to the All Africa article quoted here, the government is reluctant “to support its recent decision;” it further says that if the motive, undisclosed, is to stifle the newspaper into silence or submission, then the action is illegal.

The Lesotho constitution, Chapter II-14, guarantees free speech when it states that “Every person shall be entitled to, and (except with his own consent) shall not be hindered in his enjoyment of, freedom of expression, including freedom to hold opinions without interference, freedom to receive ideas and information without interference, freedom to communicate ideas and information without interference (whether the communication be to the public generally or to any person or class of persons) and freedom from interference with his correspondence [source]”

In 2001 the Botswana High Court ruled that its government’s decision to cut advertising from two publications (that were critical of said government) was a violation of those publications’ right to free speech. It stands to reason. A government that cannot stand criticism, on the other hand, must toil to make sure there is no cause for it. Non-criticism by the populace and the media cannot be imposed… it is earned. Let it be so!

“Protesters blockaded the main road in the capital with stones and burning tyres
July 08, 2007, 08:00

Lesotho police say Maseru is calm after last night’s unrest. Protesters blockaded the main road in the capital with stones and burning tyres after soldiers re-arrested alleged mutinous security force members who had been released by the high court.

Pheello Mphana, a Lesotho police spokesperson, says while police were preparing to release the five men, soldiers surrounded the police station and demanded that the suspects be detained.

The men were handed over to police by the army last week after they were suspected of involvement in a series of attacks on ministers. Mphana says the protesters dispersed peacefully.”
[source]

My link in Lesotho says, “Hooray!!! Judge ‘Maseforo Mahase of the Lesotho High Court has ordered that Makotoko Lerotholi (a former soldier), the first man to be abducted by the masked men, be released to his family immediately.

Last evening Advocate Haae Phoofolo, a human rights lawyer based in Maseru, lodged an application before the High Court for an order demanding the immediate release of Lerotholi, pointing out that he was unlawfully arrested and has not been charged since. This came after the army had attempted to dump Lerotholi and Motlomelo, another abductee, into the hands of the police. The police agreed to take Motlomelo in (I’m not clear on the grounds yet), but refused to take Lerotholi into their custody citing the horrible condition of his health and self as their reason.

The respondents in the application were as follows: the Army Commander, the Minister of Defence (who happens to be the Prime Minister), the Commissioner of Police, the Superintendent at the Makoanyane Army Hospital and the Attorney General.

Visibly shaken and unstable, Lerotholi arrived at the High Court at around 21:00 hours led by members of the Lesotho Defence Force. He, through his lawyer, recited his story since the abduction at the entrance to Lakeside Hotel on the 22 of June 2007. He was taken by about ten heavily armed men, blindfolded and driven somewhere into the mountains. Along the way he was repeatedly gunbutted and kicked.

His abductors demanded that he tell the whereabouts of the armoury where the guns taken from ministers’ bodyguards was. His torture was systematically directed to the kidneys and genitals, and this has rendered his urinary system malfunctional.

The judge ordered that he be released immediately to his family and after condemning the whole saga, prayed to God that she never in her whole life presides over a similar case. We are continuously encouraged by such judgements and look at them as a good sign of sanity amidst the madness we live in.

The questions remain: why did the army deny any knowledge of the whereabouts of these men? Why did the government spokesman, Minister of Information and Broadcasting, deny any knowledge by the government of the whereabouts and condition of these men? If any wrong was done, why were the men not arrested by the police and charged, instead of being abducted by the army and tortured? Why? Why? Why?”

Monyane Moleleki

Thabo Thantsi, the abductee who was hospitalised at Makoanyane Army Hospital, has escaped and resurfaced somewhere in South Africa. He came on air on Harvest FM’s “Rise and Shine” morning show and gave a thorough detail of his ordeal at the hands of the army. He is a former soldier himself.

The details of his ordeal are gory and I shudder at the mere recollection. He says he was in the hands of the army and he has divulged the names of the officers who were interrogating him, demanding that he produce the guns taken from ministers’ bodyguards recently. He says another question was why he had resigned from the army (in 2003) and why he is now a bodyguard to Motsoahae Thabane, the ABC leader.

He has named the Minister of Natural Resources, Monyane Moleleki, as the mastermind behind these abductions. According to Thabo, his feet were chained and padlocked, his hands cuffed behind and to the chain around his feet. When his folks came to see him he was uncuffed and unchained and asked not to reveal his condition to them. He further reveals that many of the abducted men, some still actively employed in the army, are at the army hospital in varying conditions of torture.

From what he says he heard while his abductors were talking, the Minister has already paid up and the elite group has two weeks to finish off all members of the ABC who are perceived to be active and dangerous.

I tried to find the name Thabo Thantsi on the Internet, and actually found two links, his voter details (if it’s the same Thabo Thantsi): here, and mention of him in the Lesotho Forum: here. I looked up the minister allegedly involved, and found a Wikipedia mention, an article about the 2006 attack on him, a speech in Iran Daily (scroll down a bit), and a short interview.

News from Lesotho is disturbing. Democracy and the rule of law are advancing backwards. Recently, a curfew was put up, after attacks were carried out on prominent politicians’ homes. That rings a bell. If you can link to this, or reproduce it on your blog, I would be most grateful. Or tell a friend over coffee. Or just read it and sympathise with us in spirit (or whatever deed). I know I sound desperate — I am. This needs to be talked about and shared. I have just received news from home that:

Thabo Thakalekoala of Seapoint in Maseru, a vocal and prominent freelancing investigative journalist, was arrested on Friday morning (22 June 2007) and charged with high treason. He is appearing in court today (25 June 2007) to be formally charged.

On the day of his arrest he had just read a letter over the air on his popular morning programme “Rise and Shine” on Harvest FM. The letter was supposedly given to him by a group of army men and requested to read it on his show. The soldiers vehemently denounced the rule of one Mosikili in Lesotho who they say is a foreigner and therefore is not elligible to hold such office. This comes after it was discovered that the PM holds a South African identity document (a fact he has publicly admitted), no wonder the rampant looting of state coffers by way of the 84% salary increments and the M4000.00 Kompressors and the M2000.00 Camrys.

We look back in sadness at the deaths of Mahlomola Motuba and Mike Pitso, two journalists who were killed for their brave and fearless reporting of unfairness and prejudice in the past regimes. We have been taken back decades in our learning curve, and are now starting from scratch to plant the seed of unity and true freedom. We take courage from the fact, however, that history has not been kind to dictators who parade themselves as democrats. ‘Nete ke tutulu ha e patehe, or “Truth is ‘unhideable’.” We call on the international media to take note of this heinous act by the Lesotho Government to gag transparency and free access to information, especially as state media is totally not accessible to anyone else but the ruling party.

Re sa lebeletse. Khotso.

Background information:
www.protectionline.org

UPDATE (26 June):
News from The People’s Choice FM: Written by Falla
People`s Choice FM Management, Mr. Motlatsi Majara & Mrs Kholu Qhobela paid a visit to the detained Media Insitute of Southern Africa regional Chairperson and Harvest FM freelancer, Mr. Thabo Thakalekoala yesterday.

The Main aim for the visit was to give support and courage to him as a brother, colleague and journalist at this trying time that he is going through.
Mr. Thakalekoala who is charged with high treason is in police custody and is expected to appear before Magistrate Court today, and on the hand the Regional Director of Media Institute is expected to be in the country today.

He is in the mean time refusing to eat anything (hunger strike), insisting on his liberty and justice.

Submitted by ‘Marafaele Mohloboli

---

Links:

• http://khotla.blogspot.com
• http://lesothoforum

I was fifteen, but I remember the events of 16 June 1976 like it was last week. Black kids rose against the Apartheid state in South Africa, and refused Afrikaans as a medium of instruction in schools. They stamped their collective foot and said “No!” And their cry shook the world. Police opened fire and the first kid to go down was Hector Pieterson. I know you’ve seen the now famous picture of his limp body in the hands of Mbuyisa Makhubo, his sister running alongside them.

“I saw that he was bad, but I thought that he was just wounded, you know,” remembers Hector’s sister, Antoinette Sithole. [source]

There were to be many victims that day. Hector’s photo was plastered on the conscience of the world (though few did anything about it), but there weren’t enough photographers to shoot take pictures of the other victims. Hastings Ndlovu was another such victim, and it is said he may have even died before Hector. Here’s the story of his death.

Klein was dumbstruck as to how a school child, in the middle of the morning, was being admitted to Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital with gunshot wounds, and questions raced through his mind.

“Children with bullet wounds?” he wondered. “But how? And by whom? A robbery? By school kids? In the middle of the day? Where would the guns come from? Black South Africans are prohibited from owning guns.”

The answer came: “They were shot by the police.”

Klein says a quick survey in the casualty ward revealed that all except one child were shot above the waist: in other words, the police had shot to kill. Then his old high school friend and a neurosurgeon, Dr Risik Gopal, arrived and checked Hastings’ condition.

Gopal confirmed what Klein had suspected: no one could survive such an injury. And indeed, a “short time later, Hastings was dead”, having been in a coma from the moment he was shot, Klein says.

Klein worked in Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital for several years, and had been warned that it would be a “baptism in blood” - particularly on Friday nights. But after years of handling “grisly injuries” from assaults using a range of weapons, he thought “nothing could penetrate the emotional barriers I had learned to erect”.

Not that day.

The sight of “uniformed children riddled with bullets”, accompanied by their “terminal breaths”, left Klein feeling helpless and hopeless, and he could only watch in despair as life ebbed from the “fragile frame” of Ndlovu.

The white hospital administrator walked into the ward and Klein told him to expect trouble that night in Soweto. The administrator replied: “Oh, no, by tonight everything will have blown over.”

Klein, a coloured doctor who under apartheid ethos had no authority to shout at a white person, couldn’t contain himself. He yelled: “In Soweto, you do not shoot children and get away with it. There is going to be shit!” He walked away with tears in his eyes.

Klein had to break the news of Ndlovu’s death to the boy’s friends and relatives, a difficult task not made easier by repeating the news to other relatives of dead children. “I remember the looks of disbelief, the anguish, the tears. And I remember my own grief welling up afresh each time I delivered the grim news.”

Gopal, now the chief neurosurgeon at the hospital, said they stood at the window and watched police shooting children. Some of the staff members saw their own children being brought in with gunshot wounds. “There was a lot of emotion on the day. It was just chaos,” he says.

By late afternoon the government had prohibited blacks from assembling in groups larger than three. Workers, when they disembarked from trains and taxis, got together before walking home, wondering what was happening, unaware of the ruling.

Police opened fire on them, expecting them to know about the prohibition, and they arrived at hospital asking innocently why the police were shooting at them.

Others arrived at hospital with strange wounds, says Klein: small entrance holes in their upper bodies, with larger exit wounds lower down. One man said: “We were sitting in our kitchen, having dinner, when bullets came in through the roof and hit us.” Police were firing from helicopters overhead. [source]

The purpose of this post is of course to remember these children’s sacrifice. I remember the personal friends I made after refugees started flowing into Lesotho from all over South Africa. I remember how we would gather round and sing freedom songs in the evenings, how knowing them made us better politicians at that young age (I was fifteen). I remember how we’d listen to Radio Freedom being broadcast from Tanzania by the African National Congress. I remember how the sound sucked because the Apartheid government was doing its best to kill the signal.

I remember.

The other purpose of this post is to warn us about being inactive in the face of grave injustices. After 1976 and what it brought to South Africa, you’d think the world would do something. You’d be wrong. You think the world might do something for Darfur today? Wrong again. Mention a calamity in the world and ask yourself if the world might intervene, and you’d be wrong to think it might. But America did intervene in Iraq (not in Darfur). Find the error. Did America intervene in South Africa with

1. the mere existence of Apartheid
2. laws such as The Immorality Act of 1950, which stated that no one could make love to anyone outside of his or her race
3. Nelson Mandela and many other leaders in prison
4. the Sharpeville Massacre of 1960
5. the Soweto uprisings of 1976
6. the fact that more than 3 million blacks were forcibly removed from their homes and resettled in black ‘homelands‘.
7. the gruesome killing of Steve Biko in 1977
8. the killing of Ruth First, wife of Joe Slovo, by means of a parcel bomb
9. and many other injustices carried out against a whole people because of the activity of melanocytes in their skin

So, how did the world react? How did the big Occidental powers react? This is part of what happened: “[Chester] Crocker attracted the attention of the Reagan transition team with an article he wrote in the winter 1980/81 edition of the Foreign Affairs journal. In the article, Crocker was highly critical of the outgoing Carter administration for its apparent hostility to the white minority government in South Africa, by acquiescing in the United Nations Security Council’s imposition of a mandatory arms embargo (UNSCR 418/77) and the UN’s demand for the end of South Africa’s illegal occupation of Namibia (UNSCR 435/78). [source]” That’s what happened. The Reagan administration went on to apply and implement its policy of Constructive Engagement.

Let us remember this day with a particular thought for those who died; let us remember it also with a particular thought at preventing it from happening in the future now. So, whatchu gon’ do?

Nkosi, sikelel’i Afrika

“Mankind protects and feeds the panda, but exposes and starves Darfur.”
~~ Rethabile Masilo.

I said that here.

Mosotho horseman

Lesotho’s national anthem’s first verse says Lesotho, fatše la bo-ntatà rona, or Lesotho, land of our fathers. The music was composed by Ferdinand-Samuel Laur (1791-1854) and the lyrics were written by François Coillard (1834-1904), two Frenchmen. The freshly independent Lesotho adopted the tune as its national anthem in 1967, a year after gaining independence from Britain. You can listen to the anthem on the government website.

The two French fellows who penned it did a pretty good job. I quite like the way it sounds. The mothers, though–there are no mothers? We’ll let that slide. Sometime in the future, though, we’re gonna have to tinker with that line so as to include our mothers, who actually do the donkey’s work but always get the lesser of everything. The issue is the same in almost every document written before, and even during, the twentieth century, partly because the majority of human beings believe God is a man.

Is Lesotho the land of our fathers? We know that our fore-parents came from up north somewhere. My very own ancestors, Bakhatla or Bakgatla, came from Botswana. I’ve always heard talk of Ntsoana-Tsatsi, a place where the Basotho supposedly came from.

“Ntsoana-Tsatsi” sounds like “From the Sun”, so it could mean the East or the North-East. When I was in Nairobi, Kenya, I met a guy from Zambia: Mukelabai XXXXXXX. What was funny was the fact that he would stare at my brothers and me when we spoke. We became friends and stayed in contact for many years after that, for Mukelabai was a Lozi and could understand almost everything we were saying.

The Balozi from Zambia, it turns out, decided to go down South, and eventually formed a big chunk of what is today the Basotho nation. At least that’s what one school of thought says. Mukelabai sings the Lesotho national anthem like it was the Zambian national anthem. Why? Because of François Coillard. The anthem author had adventures all over southern Africa, especially in Barotseland, and must have written the tune in Silozi / Sesotho. The group that stayed around Zambia still sings it, as well as the one that trekked south! So who are we? Do we own this land enough to call it Fatše la bo-ntatà rona?

What about the bushmen (Baroa in Sesotho, Basarwa in Setswana) we found there? Isn’t it the land of their fathers more than it is the land of ours? I think we ended up blending with Baroa, which would give all of us together some right to the land and justify some of that first verse, Lesotho, fatše la bo-ntat’a rona. Apparently

one important site of early settlement was Nts’oana-Tsatsi near present-day Vrede in the northern Free State. Archaeological investigations have revealed that this area was settled as early as 1350, probably by the Bafokeng clan. These were the pioneers of the Sotho groups who settled much of the Free State and Lesotho. They lived closely with the Baroa as well as with the ancestors of the Baphuthi, who were the first Iron Age peoples to settle by the Caledon River Valley. The northern half of the Free State is the true heartland of Sotho settlement. Lesotho, as we know it today, was the southern frontier of this civilization although the upper portion of the Caledon River Valley was very rich and fertile

The above excerpt also identifies Ntsoana-Tsatsi, which is where my mum had always taught me was the origin of the Basotho people. A myth by many standards. But judging by the age of the Basotho nation, I guess we do come from the North-East or the East somehow, and I guess we do have legitimate claim to this land and can go ahead and call it Lefatše la bo-ntat’a rona. The next verse is Har’a mafatše le letle ke lona, or Among worlds it is the most beautiful.

What does one say about one’s country but that it is the most gorgeous of all? I certainly am not going to say that it is the ugliest. Yet, looking at that second verse of the national anthem’s first stanza:

Lesotho, fatše la bo ntat’a rona
Hara mafatše le letle ke lona

I have often wondered what we mean to say. You and I have already agreed that yes, we can lay claim to the land and call it Land of our fathers, the first verse. Which gives us the right to make another claim: Among worlds it is the most beautiful, the second verse. We’re lying through our teeth. We’re lying to ourselves and we’re lying to the world, because we do not believe what we’re singing. How do I know? If we believed what we were singing and really thought our country was the most beautiful in the world, then

We’d do a lot towards keeping it that way.We would be selfless, and go out of our way to help unfortunate Basotho. We would plant trees all over the place, instead of uprooting them. We would not have burned down Maseru, the capital city, because we’d lost an election. We would not be running away and draining Lesotho of its grey-matter. We would not suffer from IPS, Inverted Pyramid Syndrome, but back and support everything local. We would not have killed other Basotho for political gain. We would not throw paper and other rubbish in the street but in the rubbish bin.

That’s how I know. And I hereby ask you, when you hear yourself chanting that second verse of the first stanza, to wonder what it is you are doing for Lesotho that gives you a right to proclaim its beauty before the world. As much as we have agreed that we can safely say the land is ours, I disagree as to its purpoted absolute beauty. Beauty, like love, must be maintained through deliberate action.

“I’m washing my car because I want it to look beautiful.” When you’re done washing it, then you drive it to town to boast, because at that instant you do believe it is beautiful, because you’ve done something to gain the right to believe that it is beautiful. Why should it be different when it concerns a country? You shine your shoes regularly, you whiten your “liteki” (sneakers) and iron your shirt to a crease. When you go out at night wearing those clothes you feel handsome, you feel that you can conquer love, you try to conquer love. Why should it be different when it concerns a country?

We’re lying to ourselves and to the world. One of our common goals must be to ensure that Lesotho remains or becomes the most beautiful we can make it. Beauty rarely comes with the package. How? Look at the list above and start making that 2nd verse of the 1st stanza true.

Lesotho, fatše la bo-ntat’a rona,
Har’a mafatše le letle ke lona,
Ke moo re hlahileng.

Verse 3 is pretty straightforward. We’ve already talked about verse 1, Lesotho, fatše la bo-ntat’a rona, and verse 2, Har’a mafatše le letle ke lona. This is therefore verse 3, Ke moo re hlahileng, or It is the place of our birth.

Why shouldn’t it be? I was personally born there, at Scott Hospital in Morija. My parents were born there, in the Quthing district on the southern tip. It is, it seems, the place of our birth. But we are supposed to have come from up north or north-east, if you recall. Ntsoana-Tsatsi, to be exact, and we found Baroa (Bushmen) inhabiting the area that is present-day Lesotho. In Sesotho, “boroa” means south, so that Afrika-Boroa is South Africa. Baroa means People of the South. They were there when we arrived! We were going down south and they were there people of the south.

We were born there but of course one of the prior generations must have got “naturalised.” Oh, it happens all the time. New-comers integrate their new societies frequently, and usually even become more nationalist than the folks that were already there. When the new-comers butcher the already established people, though, and grab their land, naturalisation it is not. New-comers to the American continent hacked and decimated the people they found there. I am told we lived and inter-married with the Bushmen so that we became one: Basotho. Ke moo re hlahileng.

Lesotho, fatše la bo-ntat’a rona,
Har’a mafatše le letle ke lona,
Ke moo re hlahileng,
Ke moo re holileng.

Verse 4 is in a way a continuation of verse 3. Ke moo re holileng, or It is where we grew up. I personally grew up and became a responsible and conscious human being outside Lesotho. But I don’t suppose that’s what the lyrics relate to, since they are more figurative than Cartesian. I believe that a non-negligible minority of Basotho teenagers either left of their own desire or were driven out¹. Either way they, just like me, grew up outside Lesotho. So what does the verse mean, then?

As far as I’m concerned, it is true that the most visible part of my growing up happened in exile, which means my voice deepened, I grew a beard, I almost doubled the size of my shoes, I got sloshed for the first time, and I became a hopeless fan of woman. But almost every seed was planted, and the seed-bed itself remained, in Lesotho. That’s where I first met hope, felt the joy of belonging, faced desperation, knew fear, and touched compassion.

Perhaps things like these happen in other places, too. But my own seed-bed was no doubt Lesotho, so in essence that’s where I grew up².

Mum and I were driving north up Kingsway, toward home, having packed the Datsun pickup van with stock for the family shop. I glanced at the clock. Maseru was unusually deserted for six p.m. Perhaps there was a curfew that we hadn’t heard about. Or perhaps it was due to the unfriendly looking clouds, stationed across the skyline as far as I could see.

–*It’s going to rain…,* I must have thought aloud.
–*What?*
–*Ah, it looks like it’s going to rain,* I said.
–*Don’t worry. We’ll have finished unloading with the first drops.*
–*I sure hope so.*

We drove past the bakery on the left and the new shopping centre on the right. There was hardly anybody even there! We zoomed past the hardware store where a woman was sitting in front on the pavement with small mounds of potatoes for sale, and headed for Mafafa and the Cathedral roundabout. And Mum jumped on the brakes and brought the rickety Datsun to a noisy stop, and me out of my dreamy stupor. She was looking at me, or rather through me at something I could not comprehend. It was my turn to say what. So I did.

–*What?*

She stopped looking at whatever it was in me or behind me, dipped her hand into her purse and gave me a zoka, a five-cent coin.

–*Get me some potatoes with this.*
For some reason I just took the money and got the potatoes, two mounds, without bringing it to her attention that we had several sacks of the stuff in the van. I did ask her a day or two later, because I was genuinely intrigued. And her answer placed me a step further on my way to becoming a responsible and conscious adult, without actually growing an inch³.

So, yes, in my case, and I suspect in many other cases, I did grow up in Lesotho, although I physically grew up elsewhere. And I suspect this of any place that has such a mixture of seed-bed and seed.

¹ There is no more driving out of Basotho. That nasty bit of our history petered out with the first democratically elected government.
² I’m not suggesting any correlation between this verse and how Basotho children are brought up or grow up. I just happen to believe that I actually grew up in Lesotho, although puberty came afterwards.
³ It is a true story, if you were wondering.

Lesotho, fatše la bo-ntat’a rona,
Har’a mafatše le letle ke lona,
Ke moo re hlahileng,
Ke moo re holileng,
Rea le rata.

Verse 5, Rea le rata, is not yet true. It translates into We love her, or She is dear to us.

1. Lesotho, land of our fathers,
2. Among worlds you are the most beautiful,
3. In you we were born,
4. In you we grew up,
5. You are dear to us.

Anything or anyone that man loves becomes an object of obsession. A car, a pair of shoes, a lover, the self. The latter are pampered and taken care of in unimaginable ways, but Lesotho isn’t on that list and Lesotho isn’t pampered in any way by any man, woman, girl or boy that I know. If you pamper Lesotho the way you pamper things you love, let me know. I’ll pin a medal of honour on your chest.

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Entirely within the letter of the law, Lesotho’s dominant parties have managed to massively manipulate a