StapleLesotho
Papa
Stiff maize meal porridge eaten at nearly every meal in Lesotho, served with moroho or meat. Cooked drier than in most neighbouring countries.
Serves 6 · 40 minutes
Basotho Mineworkers
Generations of Lesotho men who went down South African gold mines on eleven-month contracts, sang the difela poems of the journey, sent home the wages that were the country's largest source of income, and were retrenched in their tens of thousands when the gold ran thin.
Identity
Population: Over 120,000 employed at peak in the late 1980s; around 20,000 today
Location: Recruitment from every district of Lesotho; employment on the Witwatersrand, Free State and Rustenburg mines
Language: Sesotho, with Fanakalo, the mine pidgin, used underground
Language family: Niger-Congo → Bantu (S30, Sotho-Tswana); Fanakalo, a pidgin of Zulu, English and Afrikaans
Traditional governance: The recruiting organisation, the mine compound manager and the deferred pay system governed working life; the National Union of Mineworkers changed that after 1982.
Clans, Sections & Sub-groups (3)
Most African peoples are federations of named sub-groups (clans, sections, chiefdoms or sub-tribes), each with its own dialect, territory and traditions.
Contract miners
Men on eleven-month contracts with mandatory return, the standard arrangement for a century.
Retrenched miners
Those laid off from the 1990s, many with silicosis and no pension.
Miners' households
The women who ran Lesotho's farms and villages in their absence, which is most of the country.
Culture
Clothing: The Basotho blanket, worn as marker, protection and status, its patterns carrying meanings a wearer can read; the gumboot and helmet underground.
Food: Papa and moroho at home; compound rations of mealie meal underground, which were the subject of repeated strikes.
Ceremonies: Difela tsa ditsamaea-naha, the sung poetry of the migrant journey, composed and performed by miners themselves; gumboot dance, born in the compounds; homecoming at Christmas, which emptied the mines and filled Lesotho.
Marriage customs: Bohali bridewealth in cattle, funded by mine wages, which changed the age and terms of marriage across the country; long separations were the norm.
Initiation rites: Lebollo, the Sotho initiation school, still widely attended; and the first contract, which was the other initiation and the one that paid.
Food & Recipes
Every dish the Atlas publishes for Lesotho and South Africa, at national rather than community level — 17 in all: the staple a household eats daily, the dish the country names as its own, street food, what is cooked for a wedding or Eid, regional specialities and a drink. Quantities and method are given for every one, so these are recipes rather than descriptions, and each has a photograph from Wikimedia Commons. The Food page carries the whole continent, searchable by country and by ingredient.
Lesotho
7 dishes
National dishLesotho
Likhobe
Whole sorghum, maize and beans boiled together for hours into a thick mixture, the mountain kingdom's oldest and most characteristic dish.
Serves 6 · 3 hours, plus overnight soaking
Street foodLesotho
Makoenya
also Fat cakes
Fried dough balls sold at every taxi rank and school gate in Lesotho, eaten warm with tea or split and filled with polony.
Serves Makes 20 · 2 hours
Festival & feastLesotho
Nama ea Konyana
Mutton stewed slowly with onion and little else, served at feasts and after initiation ceremonies. Lesotho's sheep are its wealth and this is how they are honoured.
Serves 8 · 3 hours
Regional specialityLesotho
Moroho
Wild or cultivated greens fried with onion and tomato, eaten with papa at most meals. Gathered from the fields in summer and dried for the winter.
Serves 6 · 30 minutes
Regional specialityLesotho
Lesotho Chakalaka
also Vegetable relish
Carrots, peppers and beans cooked with curry powder into a spiced relish eaten with papa across the Lesotho highlands, adopted from the South African mines.
Serves 6 · 35 minutes
Drink & sweetLesotho
Motoho
Fermented sorghum porridge drunk thin, sour and cold, the Basotho breakfast and the drink taken to the fields. Non-alcoholic and mildly effervescent.
Serves 6 · 20 minutes, plus 2 days fermenting
South Africa
10 dishes
StapleSouth Africa
Pap and Chakalaka
Maize porridge with a spiced vegetable relish, eaten at braais and in townships across the country. Chakalaka was invented on the mines and has spread everywhere since.
Serves 6 · 50 minutes
StapleSouth Africa
Umngqusho
also Samp and beans, Isitambu
Cracked dried maize and sugar beans cooked slowly together with onion and butter, the Xhosa staple and, famously, Nelson Mandela's favourite food.
Serves 6 · 3 hours, plus overnight soaking
National dishSouth Africa
Bobotie
Spiced mince baked under a savoury custard with bay leaves standing in it, a Cape Malay dish and South Africa's most-cited national plate.
Serves 6 · 1 hour 30 minutes
National dishSouth Africa
Boerewors
also Farmer's sausage, Wors
Coarse beef sausage spiced with coriander, clove and vinegar, coiled in a spiral and grilled over coals. The South African braai is not a braai without it.
Serves 8 · 1 hour, plus overnight resting
Street foodSouth Africa
Bunny Chow
A quarter loaf of white bread hollowed out and filled with curry, invented in Durban's Indian community and eaten with the hands, no cutlery permitted.
Serves 4 · 2 hours
Festival & feastSouth Africa
Braai with Boerewors
Meat grilled over wood coals, with boerewors coiled in a spiral. A braai is a national institution with its own public holiday, and gas is not accepted.
Serves 8 · 2 hours
Festival & feastSouth Africa
Potjiekos
also Potjie, Three-legged pot stew
Meat and vegetables layered in a cast-iron pot over coals and left for hours without stirring, so each layer stays itself. The South African outdoor cooking ritual.
Serves 8 · 4 hours
Festival & feastSouth Africa
Koeksisters
also Koesister, Syrup plaits
Plaited dough fried and dropped straight into ice-cold syrup so the outside stays crisp and the inside floods with sugar. A South African argument between the Afrikaans plait and the Cape Malay spiced ball.
Serves Makes about 24 · 1 hour, plus chilling the syrup overnight
Regional specialitySouth Africa
Cape Malay Denningvleis
Lamb stewed with tamarind, allspice and onions until sour-sweet and dark, from the Cape Malay kitchen built by people brought to the Cape as slaves from Southeast Asia.
Serves 6 · 2 hours 30 minutes
Drink & sweetSouth Africa
Rooibos Tea
Red bush tea from the Cederberg, the only place on earth it grows, drunk without milk or as an espresso-style red cappuccino. Naturally caffeine-free.
Serves 4 · 15 minutes
Stories & Oral Literature
The Poetry of the JourneyOral tradition
Difela are sung narrative poems composed by migrant workers about recruitment, the train, the compound, the shaft and the return. They are not laments in any simple sense: they are boastful, funny, obscene and precise, and they constitute one of the richest bodies of twentieth-century oral poetry anywhere. Scholars have collected them since the 1970s and miners have gone on composing them.
Deferred Pay and SilicosisEconomic and legal account
A portion of every Mosotho miner's wage was withheld and paid out only in Lesotho, a mechanism that guaranteed remittances and guaranteed return. At peak, miners' earnings were the largest single component of Lesotho's national income. Then employment collapsed from the 1990s. In 2018 South African gold companies settled a class action over silicosis and tuberculosis for around 5 billion rand, and Basotho former miners are among the claimants, many of them tracing decades-old employment records to prove it.
Proverbs
“Matsoho a hlatsoana.”
“Hands wash each other.”
Mutual obligation, the compound's survival rule.
“The blanket goes down the shaft folded and comes up heavier.”
What the journey costs and what it earns.
“The mountain kingdom eats from a hole in another country.”
An economy built on migrant labour.
Mythology & Spiritual Beliefs
Creation: Modimo as creator; badimo, the ancestors, addressed before descending, since the shaft is understood as a place the living are not meant to be.
Beliefs: Christianity, overwhelmingly, with Zionist and Apostolic churches strong in the compounds; ancestor veneration; protective medicine taken before a shift, which the industry never acknowledged and every miner knew about.
Ancestors: Men who died underground and were buried in South Africa are a standing grievance; repatriation of remains has been sought for decades and achieved only partially.
Gods, Goddesses & Spirits
Modimo
The creator of Sotho cosmology
Badimo
The ancestors, addressed before descending underground
Protective medicine (litaola and sehlare)
Not deities, but the ritual protections carried into the shaft
Architecture
Traditional settlements: Single-sex compounds of concrete bunks on the Witwatersrand; the stone and thatch rondavels of home villages, built and extended with mine wages.
Building techniques: Compound construction by the mining houses, designed for control rather than habitation; at home, stone walling, thatch and, increasingly, corrugated iron and block bought with remittances.
Village layout: The compound as a closed rectangle with a single gate; the Lesotho village as a scatter of homesteads whose newest and largest houses belonged to miners.
Artifacts
Basotho blanket
Textile
Worn as identity, insulation and status, with patterns that carry meaning.
Difela recordings
Oral tradition
Migrant workers' sung poetry, collected since the 1970s.
Gumboot dance
Performance
Percussion made with wellington boots, invented in the mine compounds.
Deferred pay records
Archive
Employment documents now used as evidence in silicosis compensation claims.
Historical Timeline
1886
Gold is found on the Witwatersrand; recruitment of Basotho labour begins almost immediately.
1900s–1970s
Contract migration becomes the structure of Lesotho's economy; deferred pay guarantees remittance and return.
1982
The National Union of Mineworkers is founded, transforming compound conditions.
1990s–2010s
Employment collapses from over 120,000 to around 20,000 Basotho miners.
2018
A class action over silicosis and tuberculosis is settled for around 5 billion rand.
Sources & Further Reading
Open sources
- Britannica: Lesotho — economyEncyclopaedia Britannica
- South African History Online: migrant labourSouth African History Online
Premium & scholarly sources