Colony of Basutoland

A country that survived by asking to be colonised. Moshoeshoe I had built the Basotho kingdom in the 1820s and 1830s out of communities shattered by the upheavals of the Difaqane, gathering them on the flat-topped mountain of Thaba Bosiu and holding it against every attack. From the 1840s he faced Boer expansion from the Orange Free State, lost his best arable land in the wars of 1858 and 1865, and in 1868, with the kingdom close to destruction, obtained British protection at his own request. The appeal worked. It cost him the western lowlands, which stayed with the Free State and are farmed by South Africa still, but it preserved a Basotho state when every comparable polity in the region was absorbed. Rule passed briefly to the Cape Colony, whose attempt to disarm the Basotho produced the Gun War of 1880 and a defeat that returned the territory to direct imperial control in 1884. That accident of timing mattered enormously: because Basutoland answered to London rather than to Cape Town, it was not inside the Union of South Africa when the Union was formed in 1910. Transfer remained a live possibility for forty years and died with apartheid. What the protectorate did not provide was an economy. The highlands could not feed the population, and by the twentieth century the territory's principal export was men, walking to the Rand to dig gold. Independence came on 4 October 1966 as Lesotho, an enclave entirely surrounded by the state it had spent a century avoiding.

• Type: Polity
• Government: Colonial administration