THOMAS (MOKOPU) MOFOLO (1947)

Generally regarded as the first important African novelist of the 20th century and foremost among Bantu writers for three novels written in his native Sesotho language.

Educated as a Christian in mission schools he obtained a teacher´s certificate in 1898 and worked for several years as a clerk and proofreader at the missionary Book Depot in Morija.

His employers encouraged him to write and his first novel Moeti oa Bochabela (The Traveller to the East) was serialized in the Sesotho paper Leselinyana in 1906 and published in book form a year later. The story is a Christian parable about a youth who repelled by the ways of his fellow tribesmen sets off on a journey in search of God who he feels must also be disgusted by man´s corruption. Ptseng (At the Pot-the name of the town) appearing first in 1910 in serialized form is largely an autobiographical account of the childhood, education and courtship of a 20th-century Mosotho (singular of Basotho, the people of Lesotho).

Both novels show the conflict in Mofolo´s writing between a Christian attitude condemning pre-missionary Africa as cannibalistic and clothed in darkness and his own common sense which sees clearly the ill effects of the missionaries on tribal life.

His third novel Chaka (1925 Chaka, a Historical Romance) is a Sesotho classic. Conceiving the idea very early in 1909 Mofolo had bicycled through Natal gathering material for his novel about the great 19th-century Zulu chief Chaka (Shaka) who united tribesmen and made himself master over a vast area of South and Central Africa. Mofolo traces sympathetically Chaka´s development from his rejection for his illegitimate birth by his father´s tribe through his revengeful desire to make a pact with sorcerers in exchange for power.
At first rejected by the missionaries in 1911-12 because they saw it as too much of a glorification of paganism the book was finally published 13 years later. Chaka which makes no attempt to deny the leader´s violence and megalomania has been praised both for his accurate contribution to the history of the Zulu people and for Mofolo´s psychologically convincing depiction of the tragic fall of a too ambitions ruler who becomes prey to homicidal tendencies.

After World War I he became involved in politics and from 1922 he was a businessman and a farmer until deprived of his farm by colour-bar laws. He died in poverty.

Although he wrote little in the last 30 years of his life, he has retained his reputation as Lesotho´s greatest writer.