Lesotho: 'the Kingdom of Heaven'

On the morning I left for Lesotho I was in my usual frantic and un-organised flurry of mess and confusion. Running late for the bus didn’t help the fact that I was already feeling stressed about this trip. I had to figure out a series of different buses, face another boarder crossing (I was still traumatised from Benin, Togo and Ghana’s borders), learn a new currency, and grapple with a new language. I think the safari tour and the relaxing week in Jo’Burg had softened me.

I made the bus on time, which was actually unfortunate because it meant that I didn’t miss the pre-departure prayer. The bus was only half full and I loved having the whole seat to myself until a white woman boarded the bus. She looked around at all the empty seats before choosing the one beside me… was it a coincidence that she picked a seat beside another white person?

She turned out to be a psychologist for the South African Police Service: she worked on the really nasty rape and murder cases. I told her that seeing as I am travelling alone I didn’t want all the gruesome details, but I did ask her if she thinks that crime in Johannesburg is really worse than everywhere else in the world. She said that she doesn’t work on common crimes like theft and assault so can’t comment on those but as far as murders go, in South Africa most cases are one off offenders and serial offenders are not common like in the US. I was hesitant to ask her too many questions that would clash with her workplace confidentiality agreements but it didn’t take her long to pull out her Blackberry and show me recent case notes. She was investigating serious crime in 14 year old boys and found that they all showed positive on tests for marijuana, alcohol and heroin.

Before getting off the bus she gave me two pieces of advice:

1)      “You can’t catch minibuses, they are not safe, they are all black people on there…” then she added, “…though I’ve never been on one”

2)      Get a taxi instead, though make sure it is a white driver, it will cost more to get a white driver, but black people are not safe”

Needless to say I never took her advice and I was never unsafe in a bus or a taxi.

I arrived in Lesotho: the “kingdom of heaven”. More specifically I headed straight for Malealea, a village of about 400 people that was surrounded by mountains. As soon as I checked my bags into a lodge I went out for a walk. I could feel how fresh the mountainous air was and all I could hear was the distant sound of cow-bells chiming.  Everyone I passed stopped to greet me, whether they called out and waved from a distant hill or stopped in front of me to attempt hello’s. One woman who shook my hand said with a huge smile: “we are poor here, so poor, but look around you… it is so beautiful that we are all happy.”

Lesotho looked more like West Africa than South Africa to me. Modest brick and mud houses, dirt roads, humble shepherds wrapped in blankets and tin, shanty shops. But it seemed clean and peaceful, possibly because it was significantly less populated. I was aware that over 35% of the population lived under the poverty line, but it seemed like people in Lesotho were less desperate than people in Togo and Ghana.

I continued my walk for a couple of hours up hill until I reached a hand-painted sign declaring ‘The Gates of Paradise’, aptly named I thought with 360 degree views of mountains as far as the eye could see. The now setting sun was throwing a purple/pink light across the sky and I stopped breathless (from the uphill walk and the beauty) and swore to myself I will not live in cities for much longer.

At the lodge I met a 58 year old British world-traveller named Charles. He had some fun travel stories which was good considering I couldn’t get a word in so at least he wasn’t boring. He had been in Lesotho a week already and had arranged for a local guy to cook him dinner at his house that night. I invited myself to his dinner and tagged along beside him in the dark night of a so far moonless sky. Usually I would find stumbling along dark foreign soils in small quiet villages at least a little bit creepy but here it was just harmonious. We arrived at the man’s house which was a modest stone hut, lit by a dim lantern that cast warm yellow shadows. It was sparsly furnished with the basics - a bed, a table, a couch and two extra chairs. He left us alone in there to go and collect our dinner from his mother and sister’s kitchen… typical African male, earning money from the hard work of his female family members.

Dinner was the Lesotho equivalent of fufu with two pieces of chicken and ‘vegetables’ which was remarkably similar to very salty frozen spinach. I really enjoyed it.

After a fairly silent meal I convinced both men to escort me to the local bar. It was a tin shed with a bar along one wall, protected by a serious looking steel cage, a pool table in the middle of the room and about twenty guys loitering around. The guys were all pretty young and only a few of them were clutching a 750ml bottle of beer, I felt safe by the lack of drunkenness. The traditional music was blaring through a modern sound system; the drum beat was reverberating through the ground. Watching the guys dancing was addictive, I couldn’t turn away. Wrapped in the traditional blankets that Basotho people are famous for, they would shake and bob their shoulders. Sometimes they would shake one shoulder and keep the other still, but always the shoulders were shaking and bobbing. There were two men in particular really getting into it, they would shuffle up and down the bar in opposite directions, always bobbing and shaking their shoulders, beneath the blankets, clutching on to their wooden stave. When they would cross in the middle they would stop standing face to face, slowly bow to each other, shaking their shoulders the whole time. Then they would continue on shuffling and bobbing and shaking their shoulders to the end of the bar, turn around, and shuffle and shake back to the middle of the bar to meet again. They always kept in time with the music, and somehow they managed to make a potentially awkward dance-move look sexy and soulful.

This bar and the lodge I was staying in were the only two places in the village with electricity, so this was the place for the locals to come and meet. I wondered where all the women went. It was not solemn and depressing like the Shebeen in Johannesburg, and it was not seedy like the bar in the slum in Accra. People were sober and full of energy. The smell of body odour was pungent, but not totally repulsive. It suited the rawness of the surroundings.