Thomas Mofolo

Mosotho · 1876 to 1948

Born Thomas Mokopu Mofolo on December 22, 1876, at Ha Khojane in the British protectorate of Basutoland, the third child of Christian converts loyal to the colonial administration during the Basotho Gun War. He grew up trilingual, speaking Sesotho at home while learning Dutch and later English and isiXhosa, and passed through a sequence of mission schools, Masitise, the Morija Bible School, and the Thabeng teacher-training institute, before completing his certificate in 1898. That year he joined the Morija Sesuto Book Depot, the Paris Evangelical Missionary Society's printing house and the centre of Sesotho publishing, where he spent more than a decade reading manuscripts, proofreading, and taking dictation. Encouraged by missionary editors, he wrote Moeti oa Bochabela (The Traveller of the East), serialized in the mission newspaper Leselinyana la Lesotho from January 1907 and published as a book that same year, the first novel ever printed in an African language. Pitseng followed in 1910, another parable of Christian courtship and schooling. Around the same time he finished his third and most ambitious book, Chaka, a sweeping, morally unflinching retelling of the Zulu king's rise and fall, but the Book Depot's own missionary readers, unsettled by its unrepentant sorcery and violence, shelved the manuscript for fifteen years before finally printing it in 1925. The long delay embittered him, and he drifted from writing into a string of commercial ventures: labour recruiting for the Witwatersrand mines, trading, farming, most of which failed. In 1933 he lost a farm he had bought outright when the South African government seized it under the Natives Land Act. A stroke in 1941 broke his health for good. He died on September 8, 1948, in Teyateyaneng, Basutoland, at seventy-one, in poverty, having lived to see Chaka translated into English, French, and German but never to profit from it.