Lesotho and the broken borders of empire
The African Union’s predecessor accepted colonial borders, despite their injustices and contradictions. Many Africans never embraced that bargain and the faultline continues to shape politics.
Tšoloane Mohlomi in Maseru
In the 19th Century, huge swathes of land around what is now the country of Lesotho were incorporated into what is now South Africa. A small but vocal movement in Lesotho wants it back, to the dismay of mortified authorities in Maseru.
In the latest chapter of this territorial controversy, which has been simmering since 2022, Lesotho authorities have set their sights on a mysterious former South African army officer, who they believe is stoking the fires of hyperlocal geodiplomatic awkwardness.
Lieutenant Sylvester Mangolele – who was dismissed from the South African navy in 2018 – appeared in Maseru earlier this month. He claimed he had been sent by the Southern African Development Community (SADC) on a fact-finding mission into the imprisonment of Dr Tšepo Lipholo, a sitting Lesotho MP.
Lipholo’s party, the Basotho Covenant Movement (BCM), of which he is the sole MP, has been advocating to reclaim the “conquered land” from South Africa. The former officer said the BCM had invited him to Lesotho, adding that the way Lipholo had been treated was a “miscarriage of justice”.
SADC disavowed Mangolele, and he was arrested on suspicion of impersonation and breaching Lesotho’s internal security. However, he was convicted only of possessing cannabis, and fined 1,000 rands ($58). Police spokesperson Mpiti Mopeli said the impersonation charge was still being investigated.
A fight Maseru doesn’t want to pick
The land in question – which would include most of South Africa’s Free State and parts of Mpumalanga, the Northern Cape, coastal Kwa-Zulu Natal, and the Eastern Cape – was cleaved off Lesotho in 1866. This was after its founder, King Moshoeshoe I, lost a war to Afrikaner forces who had trekked into the then Orange Free State looking for better pasture.
If BCM’s cause were to succeed, Lesotho would go from being a 30,000km2 enclave surrounded by South Africa to a 240,000km² country with access to the sea. But few Maseru politicians want this fight. Lipholo’s 2023 and 2024 parliamentary motions calling for the land to be returned landed flat. Nonetheless, he has ramped up his crusade this year.
In January, the lawmaker went to the United Nations in New York to rally international support. Caught off guard, Lesotho’s government distanced itself from him. The foreign affairs minister said the government sympathised with Lipholo’s claim, but his methods were “potentially dangerous and could lead to conflict between our two nations”.
Local media claimed, without evidence, that Lipholo’s UN trip was sponsored by Israel, which is at odds with South Africa over its war in Gaza.
At home, Lipholo’s campaign continued. In a radio interview in June, he said King Letsie III and the Maseru government had turned Lesotho into South Africa’s “10th province”. That same month, he was arrested for “uttering seditious words”, inciting public violence, and harming the reputation of the royal family when he declared himself paramount chief of Basutoland – the country’s colonial name.
The charges against him were later escalated to treason, with Lesotho’s security agencies claiming in July Basotho youths were being trained in military-style camps in South Africa’s Free State province, allegedly to seize the disputed territory.
South African police commissioner Fannie Masemola denied the existence of these camps, but Mopeli, the Lesotho police spokesperson, insisted the claim was grounded in concrete intelligence. He told The Continent authorities “had a list of the youths who were about to be recruited, so we actually prevented a situation from occurring”.
Lipholo was remanded to prison, his bid for bail on medical grounds denied. This has fed BCM’s narrative that he is being persecuted because the Maseru government does not dare to stand up to South Africa.
Wider homeland nostalgia
BCM’s campaign is part of much wider tensions between modern African state borders and older patterns of settlement and authority. By one count, 177 African ethnic groups were arbitrarily split into discrete countries by colonial borders. Another count puts it at 230.
In 1964, the Organisation of African Unity, the predecessor of today’s African Union, resolved to respect colonial borders to avoid conflicts, for the stability of the newly independent African states. The resolution left many borders that sit uneasily with local identities and historical memory.
By one count, as many as 177 African ethnic groups were arbitrarily split into discrete countries by colonial borders. Another count puts it at 230.
In eastern Africa, these claims have sporadically destabilised parts of nearly every modern state in the region. Between 1963 and 1968, an armed insurgency by Somali-speaking people in northern Kenya waged what the Kenyan government called the Shifta War. The ambition to create a Greater Somalia state in the Horn of Africa also fuelled the 1977 to 1978 Ogaden War in Ethiopia. Kenya and Ethiopia violently suppressed the insurgencies, but cross-border militant activity remains a source of insecurity in both countries.
In West Africa, soon after independence Togo laid claim to the areas of eastern Ghana inhabited by Ewe-speaking people, who were split by the colonial border. Accra responded with a counter-claim over all of Togo before both sides stepped back.
Benin and Burkina Faso remain deadlocked over who will govern the 68km² Kaolou-Kourou commune on their border. About 5,000 people live there, largely abandoned by both states.
In North Africa, the Sahrawi people want a homeland that matches their precolonial self-identity. Their Polisario Front independence movement has been fighting Morocco for it for 50 years.
The untidy question of cultural reunification across colonial borders has also lent itself to justifying more cynical territorial ambitions. Kigali has defended incursions into the mineralrich eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo as solidarity actions with Congolese Tutsi communities, who share language and customs with Rwandans. Meanwhile, Nigeria and Cameroon fought a long diplomatic and low-level military struggle for the oil-rich Bakassi Peninsula, before the International Court of Justice awarded it to Cameroon in 2002.